How To Create Engaging Video Ads
Are you struggling with content creation for your business? Do you feel like every ad you put out there is just getting ignored?
Content creation for business is hard because the average person is exposed to between 4000 and 10,000 ads every single day.
How many of them do you remember? And how many times did you click skip or scroll right past?
These are 3 story telling hacks that you can use to ensure viewers never skip your video when trying to market your business online:
The HOOK
Pattern Interrupts
The ‘Human Factor’
What is a hook?
If you’re like me, then as soon as you realise it’s an ad, you’re going to scroll right past. You have about a two second window before the viewer sees that ‘sponsored’ label and moves on. If you’re marketing on Youtube, you’ve got five.
That’s all the time you get for free, so make it count. These first few seconds are the hook. They need to be reeled in by an unanswered question.
Let’s look at an example. Watch the first ten seconds of this video.
For this ad we had Rory running around the street offering people to try Proper Crisps.
It drops us in the middle of something thats already happening, and it immediately creates an unanswered question: how do they taste?
If we started this video by telling you how they tasted, it wouldn’t be believable. By asking real people on the street, it creates an unknown outcome.
The first few seconds are so important. Sometimes we’ll shoot several completely different hooks for a video, so that the marketing team can run a few different ads and find the one with the best retention rate.
What is a pattern interrupt?
Up next we have the pattern interrupt. Videos become very predictable. As soon you’ve subconsciously recognised a few classic story tropes, you know where it’s going, your brain switches off and you click skip.
You have to break your story pattern before that can happen.
We do this in the proper crisps ad by switching between different formats. You’ll notice the format switching several times at 0:27, 0:59, and again at 1:07.
Make it human.
It’s tempting to go all in on ‘selling’. Straight to the benefits - it’s got unique flavours, it’s hand cooked and locally sourced.
You know how amazing your product is, but the strangers you’re talking to do not care.
They’ve just clicked on an insane YouTube thumbnail, and you’re the only thing standing in their way.
They don’t care about products or faceless companies, but they do care about people.
Make it relatable and always include humans in your opening shot.
For Proper Crisps, we wrote sections to convey the product benefits, and broke them up with the most human thing we could think of. Interviews with real people on the street.
If we took out that human element, the video would just become an infomercial.
Except: infomercials on TV can’t be skipped. Ads on the internet can.
As a Melbourne-based video production company, these are the three rules we always follow to ensure that our video marketing never gets lost into the void of the internet.