Dive Brief:
- Google AdWords released a new six-second video ad format called Bumper.
- The format is designed for mobile users and is an unskippable pre-roll video ad for users.
- In a blog post, Google described the format as “little haikus of video ads.”
Dive Insight:
The Bumper format length means marketers will have a new size of video creative to produce in order to take advantage of Bumper campaigns, but as Google explained in the blog post, the format lends itself to be part of a larger video campaign on YouTube that includes the longer-form, and skippable, TrueView pre-roll ads, or a Google Preferred campaign.
Google testing found that Bumper ads performed well in top-of-the-funnel activities such as recall, awareness and consideration.
An early test case was Atlantic Records launching Rudimental’s second album. In the post Fiona Byers, senior marketing manager of Atlantic Records/Warner Music Group, said, “TrueView and Bumpers were a really important part of the recent Rudimental campaign to tell the story of the band’s second album. Through cost-efficient bumpers we could really showcase the plethora of legendary guests featured on the record.”
Viewability has been an ongoing issue for marketers, especially as shorter attention spans make it so that marketers have to catch viewers the second a video ad starts playing if they want to get their message across. For her part, Byers added that the two formats worked more effectively in conjunction than alone, although the post did not offer any results metrics for the test campaign.