As YouTube celebrates its 10th birthday this year they launched a special site where you can vote for your favourite ad of the decade.

But wait, wait, stay here before you get distracted with some clever ads!

Do YouTube ads work?

You might have heard that you can make and run ads for your own business, no matter how small. Just produce the ad, create a YouTube account and you can get some exposure. But wait again, do those YouTube ads work or you just going the waist time and money? Well, that depends how well they are done.

According to YouTube, in 2014 “four of the top ten most-watched videos on YouTube were ads”. Wow!

Big companies and also small businesses are using YouTube to do story-telling around their brands and products. It’s content marketing at its best when done right.

Here is an example of what I think is a great ad. It’s from GoDaddy, a website hosting company:

As you can see, it is a clever ad yet quite simple, and the line “Wooow, there’s a big coconuuut!” is very funny and memorable.

Producing your YouTube ad video

Should you decide to produce an ad for YouTube then do make sure that the first 5 seconds of your video is amazingly attractive, so people are not waiting impatiently for the “Skip this video” button.

One great  feature to keep in mind before your production begins is that YouTube lets you target specific ad/video to a specific user, meaning, that if you create three 15-second videos that connect the dots then you can show the second video only to people that already watched the first one, and the third video to those that… you get the idea.

Also, YouTube stats will let you see where the viewers stopped watching your video so you can fix that part if you discover something that was said or done that perhaps didn’t resonate.

For more insight on YouTube ads you can contact us… or just go to the top of this article to click the link to vote for your favourite ad of the decade. I won’t get offended as long as you come back 😉