Thursday, 8 September 2011

I’m glad you hate YouTube ads

Remember the good old days when YouTube was advertising-free? No 30 second ads before film clips, no pop-up ads tempting us to ‘meet singles into cycling’. YouTube has always been free to use, but now we pay for it with snippets of our time and attention. In other words, we’re subjected to advertising.

‘Getting something for free when you watch an ad’ isn’t a new concept.

Telco’s started offering free international calls years ago – the hitch being advertising messages ran sporadically over your conversations. Next came free video calls from your web browser and, while the connection was being made, an ad ran. Then Skype completely changed the program: free video calls, minus the subjection to advertising. Needless to say, Skype came out trumps.

So where’s it written in stone we have to watch video content through YouTube? When you think about it, YouTube just provides a platform to upload and view videos. So if a similar platform existed without advertising, would you use it? Yeah it would take a while to catch on, but nothing’s as permanent as it seems in the digital world.

People have never liked being sold to, and they never will. For us advertisers, it’s a good thing. It forces us to constantly innovate, and create advertising people will want to engage with. Because if we ever accept the tried and true approaches as formulas, we’ll get left behind.

Andy McInerney

Creative

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Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Compass

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