Tell us this: What can you do (right now) in six seconds? Maybe you took 6 seconds to read and process this question. Or perhaps you have time to look up left or tight, scratch your chin, and you are back to read this.
But a lot can happen in 6 seconds. Take Six-second video ads, for example. In 2017, many brands made a big impact with these 6-second or YouTube bumper ads, as they are known.
What's a Bumper Ad, You Ask? According to the folks at Google,
“A bumper ad is a six-second video format ideal for driving brand reach and frequency. They are available through AdWords as an add-on to traditional campaigns and sold on a CPM basis. Bumper ads can both extend the reach of an existing campaign and complement broader messaging.”
Think of Bumper ads as fun and "snackable." They are short on form but long on impact. They help with brand lift, and they don't take up much in terms of viewing time.
Youtube Bumper Ads are all about dominating at the top of your sales funnel.
ThinkWithGoogle has an entire collection of various top Bumper ads that you can check out for inspiration.
Here are some of the best Bumper ad examples to get your creative juices flowing.
Duracell (Slamtone)
With only six seconds to make a difference, Duracell had to rethink story-telling with the severe time constraints. It wasn't about cutting a longer video short.
They couldn't just get away with trimming and shortening video length. Since Duracell had to tell a story within six seconds, make an impact, and boost its brand lift, it decided to tell a story differently.
Duracell decided to make their product the "hero" and celebrate it.
Samsung #GalaxyS8Plus
With the cutthroat competition for smartphones, Samsung had its work cut out. Samsung Galaxy S8 -- with its infinity plus feature -- had a video featuring what it can do with the infinity display (with the part being shown twice within the six-second time frame) along with the call to action "Pre-book Now."
Making the product the hero again, Samsung decided to showcase the product creatively, trying to maximize the impact it can have -- all in six seconds.
Hefty Party Cups
When you have six seconds for a Bumper ad, and you want to make viewers think either about parties or the cups you'd need to host the party, you don't need to do anything more than show a party (with the cups making a presence) for six seconds flat out.
That's precisely what Hefty Party Cups did with their six-second YouTube bumper ad.
IHOP | Strawberry & Cream Pancakes
When you showcase it well enough, food can make us all hungry. When you are hungry, you will bolt. That's for sure.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a YouTube bumper video Ad worth? It's priceless.
For IHOP, their strawberry and cream Pancake ads did pack in a punch with a short video showcasing their Strawberry Pancake (a hot cup of coffee to boot)
AirBnB | Live There With Your Family
Nothing makes you smile more than the thought of jet-setting away to an exotic location (family in town).
AirBnB capitalizes on that with their YouTube bumper Ad showing all that fun (along with a kid in a pool frolicking away).
With the ad, AirBnB brings in a single point home: You could be hosted (by an AirBnB host) in a foreign land, but you can have all the fun you want to have.
Mercedes
When you have a super fast car to showcase in six seconds, it's a match made in heaven -- at least it is for Mercedes with their fantastic ad for their Mercedes AMG GT S lineup.
You have to give it to the creative folks at Mercedes to match an ad format (like the YouTube bumper Ad format) with precisely the right thing to say for their matching supercar lineup.
You don't always have to limit your creativity to Youtube Bumper Ads.
You can also use these ideas as inspiration to create absolutely any kind of video ad (Facebook or Instagram, anyone?).
Why Bumper Ads Work For Branding
Bumper ads are engaging. We do so much video and video advertising for our clients.
Between Facebook and YouTube video ads and video sales letters, video is the best advertising strategy for moving your business online.
Bumper ads are engaging, though, because bumper ads are six seconds long. In six seconds, there's very little you can do.
- You can't make a pitch.
- You can't incite any action.
- You can't even ask someone a question - really...
But you can use the six seconds to brand your business and create an emotion.
Bumpers ads are fantastic for making sure that customers and prospects remember you. That's the point of them, after all. Whether they think of you as the company they intend to purchase with or already doing business with you, and you're just reminding them to do more business with you, bumper ads can work.
We have a couple of manufacturing clients whose most significant problem is that the people they've done business with don't remember them the NEXT time they're ready to place an order.
So, they're always looking for marketing automation strategies and drip email marketing reminder systems that help their customers remember that they have already found the solution to their problem... They need to reach back out.
So, bumper ads are great tools for this. When somebody is watching a video online, the bump ad is the short video that precedes the video they intend to watch.
In that six-second ad, you can pop up the logo, do some branding, and stir an emotion.
That emotion is the thing that bonds the brand to the audience. There is a great book called Decoded, which talks about customers' emotional responses to brands. It's all about tying the brand and values to the emotional response it wants its customers to have.
That's really what a bumper ad does. It flashes the logo, ties it to an emotional response, and then exits in six seconds or less.
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