ESSAYS
MARTIN GREENBANK, HEAD OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT AT CHANNEL 4
which psychologists refer to as system 1: it’s instinctive, emotional and puts us in a more responsive frame of mind. System 2, by contrast, is slower, deliberative and more logical. And if you’re an advertiser the most effective and lasting viewer response comes from making a deep emotional impact with the ad.
“When an ad leaps out at you on social media and starts shouting ‘Hey! Do you want to skip me? Look at all this other stuff down the side there,’ your cognitive load increases. Your eyes are darting all over the place. As soon as you flip out of that lean-back state you’re much less able to take in emotional messages. You enter a state of cognitive dissonance. It’s like trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. You can’t do both.” YouTube’s player, explains
Greenbank, wasn’t designed to house huge numbers of ads or to keep us watching intently in the same way that we watch TV. “It was designed to host short-form clips. The original challenge was to flip people from watching one short clip to the next in order to keep them on the site for as long as possible. That’s why the sidebar and the menu are there. But when we watched people using YouTube in a real-life setting we found that most people weren’t full-screening and they almost always skip ads when they can.” Broadcaster VoD players, by
contrast, mimic the experience we have of sitting in front of a TV set at home. “The design of the players on Channel 4, ITV and Sky means that when you choose to watch a bit of content on your tablet or smartphone, in almost all cases it appears full
screen. When the programme hits a break, the ads are also full screen. You’re not given the option to do anything other than watch the ad or literally cast your eyes away from the device you’re watching on.”
AVOIDING AD AVOIDANCE Another significant factor facing video
advertisers on social platforms is ad avoidance. As Greenbank points out, if viewers are given the option to avoid video ads on social media, they will. In fact, he says, in the 40 hours of Channel 4’s study there wasn’t a single instance where viewers watched more than five seconds of an ad on YouTube, when given the option to skip.
“If you ask most people
most effective viewer response comes from making a deep emotional
The
impact with an ad
if they watch the ads on broadcaster VoD, they’ll say no. We were trying to find out how much time they really spent watching the ads and how much time they spent watching content. When we played the results back to respondents, they were amazed at how much of the ads they did watch on a broadcaster player. We were expecting that when the ads came on people would look round the room. But they didn’t. One
of our respondents had a laptop balanced on her knee and her baby held against her chest. Even she didn’t stop watching when the ads came on! “In fact there’s an interesting stat
that you can derive from comScore data, which gives you a measure of how much ad avoidance is going on.
“Let’s take YouTube as an example and ask what’s the minutage of ads consumed versus the minutage of content? Even though there’s an ad prior to almost every single bit of content on YouTube, the ratio is about 400 minutes of content viewing to one minute of ads. When you
look at broadcaster players the ratio is ten minutes of content to one minute of ads. That’s because no skipping is allowed. That shows you the scale of ad avoidance that YouTube has to deal with. Over the last 18 months more ads have become forced plays, which don’t give you the option to skip. But even that isn’t necessarily solving the problem for them because of the player’s design and the sidebar with all those options for other things to do. That problem doesn’t exist on broadcaster players.” Lastly there’s the issue of how to
measure not just the quantity but the quality of video views. Greenbank is Board Director of BARB (Broadcast Audience Research Board), where he represents Channel 4’s interests and helps in the development of the UK’s TV measurement system. As he points out, BARB’s most recent TV player report deliberately doesn’t use ‘views’ as a metric because “it’s disingenuous. Instead they’re using a metric called the ‘average programme stream’ which is very much like the way you measure the average audience of a TV programme on a TV set. That’s because it’s not just about how many requests to view you get. It’s how many people stay and engage with the content that’s important.”
channel4.com
Martin Greenbank is among the speakers at the Figaro Digital
Marketing Conference on 26 November 2015.
44 issue 26 november 2015
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