YouTube OTT: Putting Your Ads Where Customers Are Watching

Nowadays, fewer people are watching broadcast television and paying for cable services. Hulu, Roku, Amazon, Netflix, and other streaming services offer new ways to watch, and new ways to advertise.

One of the largest platforms available, and one with extensive popularity and brand awareness, is YouTube. YouTube offers a more modern advertising strategy to put your ads in front of consumers with OTT placement.

OTT stands for Over-the-Top, the name comes from the boxes that used to be placed on top of your TV or VCR. While the digital age has moved us beyond the boxes, the functionality still exists built into the TV itself or included through digital installs and the name has stuck.

For YouTube OTT, these are video advertisements that appear on videos you watch on the platform. Often, they run pre-roll, before the video plays, or pop up mid-video. Many of these ads are skippable after a short period of time, sending consumers back to the content they were watching. 

The key to making the most effective impact with OTT ads is making your logo visible within that short window that a consumer is unable to skip the video. 

“After 5 seconds you can skip that video, and a lot of people do. Because they’re interested in the content, they’re watching their video and this other video pops up disrupting it,” Andreas Beck, CEO of Beyond Spots & Dots, said.

Though the consumer may be more interested in getting back to their video, having your logo appear early still builds brand awareness with your audience.

An added benefit of YouTube OTT is significantly lower costs than broadcast marketing. The cost-per-view metric on YouTube OTT can be extremely efficient compared to larger cost-per-view on broadcast and cable.

“It’s so cost-effective,” Melanie Querry, President and Founder of Beyond Spots & Dots, said. “It’s a property owned by Google and gives you the benefit of leveraging that Google platform to generate additional exposure.”

While ads run on broadcast and cable television reach broad audiences all at once, YouTube OTT helps you narrow down your target audience in a more effective manner. Digital audiences can be targeted based on demographics and psychographics, and geographic targeting can be narrowed down by zip code rather than the broad regions available through broadcast.