Whether or not Google’s $1.7B purchase of YouTube turns out to be a brilliant move or a hosing to rival Time Warner’s acquisition of AOL will largely hinge on the results you get from searching the term: “now what?”
Obviously, Google isn’t likely to enjoy much more success than anyone else has had getting people to pay for YouTube’s content since most of the content people seem willing to pay for involves live sports, betting on sports or sports best enjoyed indoors by two or more people eager to mimic the posture of a pretzel twist.
Nope, old Google is going to have to wring some advertising dough out of YouTube and having discovered the limited appeal of pre-roll ads (as in “none”), they’ve come up with something different I recently read about: Across the bottom of the screen on certain YouTube videos viewers will see a semi-transparent banner, which will remain on the screen for ten seconds or so. If the viewer is sufficiently intrigued, he or she can click on this banner and then see all the secrets of the universe revealed–at least those that are of any import to the brand manager who sprung for the cost of this ad. If not, it will go away and the video will resume playing.
The key word here is “intrigued.” Because what do you suppose is going to drive users to set aside their immediate desire to watch the video? The visual and the words shown in the banner, I have to assume. And the visual, by virtue of being semi-transparent–a quality not normally prized except perhaps in lingerie advertising–is going to have a tough battle. Which means the words will be at center stage.
Did you hear that? “Words?” “Center stage?” (Be still my heart.) But seriously, the intriguing nature of the words in these banners and their uncanny ability to seduce the viewer into momentarily diverting him or herself from the video he or she originally set out to watch may be the only thing standing between the faces of all those self-proclaimed XXXL in the IQ department folks at Google and a $1.7B omelet.
So those words had better be good. Really, really good. The kind of words only really, really good advertising copywriters have been known to come up with on a regular basis. Which should create a ton of opportunities since at last count there were only about 11 writers of this caliber employed in the entire online advertising industry. (And 4 of them have been sternly instructed that they can write any headline they like as long as it’s 30 characters or less.)
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