Tell us this: What can you do (right now) in six seconds? Maybe you took 6 seconds to read and process this question. Or maybe 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, lots of brands took to making big impact with these 6-second ads or Youtube Bumper ads, as they are also 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 various top Bumper ads that you can check out for inspiration.
Here are some of the best Bumber 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 do tell a story within six seconds, make an impact, and boost their brand lift, it decided to tell a story completely differently.
Duracell decided to make their product the “hero”, and then celebrate it.
Samsung #GalaxyS8Plus
With the cut throat competition out there for smart phones, Samsung had its work cut out for it. Samsung Galaxy S8 -- with its infinity plus feature -- had a video featuring what it can do with the infinity display (with the feature 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 Bumber 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 exactly what Hefty Party Cups did with their six second Youtube Bumper ad.
IHOP | Strawberry & Cream Pancakes
Food, when you showcase it well enough, 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 exactly that with their Youtube Bumper Ad showing all that fun (along with a kid in a pool frolicking away).
With the ad, AirBnB goes on to bring 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 wanted 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 line up.
You have to give it to the creative folks at Mercedes to match an ad format (like the Youtube Bumper Ad format) with exactly the right thing to say for their matching supercar lineup.
You don’t have to always limit your creativity to Youtube Bumper Ads.
You can also use these ideas as inspiration to create absolutely any kind of a video ad (Facebook or Instagram, anyone?).
Why Bumper Ads Work For Branding
Bumper ads are interesting. We do so much video and video advertising for our clients.
Between Facebook video ads, YouTube video ads, and video sales letters; video is by far the best advertising strategy for moving your business forward online.
Bumper ads are interesting 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 really incite any action.
- You can't even ask someone a question - really...
But what you can do is use the six second to brand your business and create an emotion.
Bumpers ads are fantastic for making sure that customers and prospects remember you. That's really the point of them, after all. Whether they are thinking of you as the company that they intend to make a purchase with, or they've already done business with you and you're just reminding them to do more business with you; bumper ads can work.
We have a couple manufacturing clients and their biggest problem is that the people they've done business with in the past don't remember them the NEXT time they're ready to place an order.
So, they're always on the lookout for marketing automation strategies and drip email marketing reminder systems that help their customers remember that they already found the solution for their problem... They just 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 a little bit of branding, and stir an emotion.
That emotion is really the thing that bonds the brand to the audience. There is a great book called Decoded, which talks about the emotional response that customers have to brands. It's all about tying the brand, and the brand values to the emotional response that it wants its customers to have.
That's really what a bumper ad does. Is it flashes the logo, ties it to an emotional response, and then exits all in six seconds or less.
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