by Oresti Patricios (@orestaki) It’s a short one this week. Very short. Only 5 seconds long, in fact.
YouTube has, for a quite a while now, been selling ads which are placed before highly popular clips. It’s been a way for the video sharing site to collaborate with contributors to ‘monetise’ clips that get a high viewership.
As you may have noticed, there is a 5-second period which has to play before you can click a button to skip to the clip you originally wanted to see – and for most people this is a reflex action. Sometimes, very occasionally, there’s an ad that grabs you enough to watch all the way through. I can think of one or two occasions recently when I actually voluntarily postponed watching a YouTube clip in order to view an ad. But what if you could cram your entire message into that 5-second gap?
5 seconds is the new 30 seconds
That’s exactly what JWT Cape Town decided to do when briefed by Ford as part of a campaign to promote road safety. Every year, especially over the holiday season, a high number of South Africans are involved in road accidents. In the 2013 Christmas period, there were 1 147 serious accidents, with 1 376 fatalities. I has been proven that many deaths and injuries can be prevented by wearing a seat belt, and yet so many people don’t bother to buckle up.
The ad is very simple. It’s a close-up shot of a seatbelt buckle, as it is being fastened. The copy that follows is: ‘A few seconds you just can’t skip.’ This is followed briefly by the Ford logo; the five seconds is up, and the YouTube ‘Skip’ button appears.
JWT Cape Town’s creative director was Jonathan Lang and the Art Director was Stephen Roth. The copy (short, sweet and smart as it was) 
was by Stuart Mccreadie.
Supplementing TV
As more and more people migrate to online services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix for their entertainment—not necessarily replacing their TV watching, but supplementing it—the more advertisers are going to have to come up with clever ways of grabbing their audience’s attention. That critical first five seconds is going to become even more critical.
In the YouTube scenario, if we want our viewers not to click that ‘Skip’ button, we need to engage with them quickly and forcefully. It’s no good just playing the current TV ad as it is – we need to rethink our whole approach. We are communicating with an increasingly more distracted marketplace, so we need to engage with them through entertainment (humour or drama) or information that is valuable and of interest to them (ie. The much-vaunted ‘content marketing’ approach).
So thank you, Ford and JWT, for a well-conceived ad that might actually change behaviour and make the roads a safer place to be.
Ad of the Week, published on MarkLives every Wednesday, is penned by Oresti Patricios (@orestaki), the CEO of Ornico, a Brand Intelligence® firm that focuses on media, reputation and brand research.
If you are involved in making advertising
that is smart, funny and/or engaging,
please let Oresti know about it at info@ornicogroup.co.za.
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