Weird, pointlessly long video ads - can anyone explain them?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve seen online ad campaigns that, after a click or two, want you to sit through a long-winded, talky video promising secrets of weight loss / finding love / making money and other staples of hooks-for-gullible-fish advertising.

These videos use stalling tactics to try and keep you watching the video for as long as possible, and there are no video controls so you can’t pause or FF.

Question: what is the point of this? It’s not like a premium-rate phone line, where duration = more revenue. Here’s one example about getting firm abs:

http://www.truthaboutabs.com/men-get-lean-abs.html

Characteristics of the videos I’m referring to:

  • no person, just a voice and some animated / sketched cartoons

  • the lure that ‘this video will only be up for a short time’

  • delaying and stalling tactics, promise of golden info then ‘but before I get to all that…’ and padding with tangential details and anecdotal fluff

  • no video controls provided, so you can’t pause or FF

Points:

  • there’s no benefit to the advertiser in keeping you there so long

  • the promised info IS eventually given, if you wait long enough, so it’s not a bait-and-switch (but of course the info turns out to be not especially helpful or enlightening)

  • they do not all lead to a pitch for something else you have to buy, and even if some do the terribly long-winded soul-sapping approach would actually put most people OFF buying anything (because 95% will switch off before they get that far)

I just don’t get the commercial benefits of creating tedious videos like this.

2

It’s an adage in retailing that the longer they can keep you in the store the more you will buy or the more likely you will be to buy something.

I’m sure it also works for ads. The longer they keep you watching, the more you have invested in that time and therefore the more likely you will be to make that investment worthwhile by buying something. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And it simply doesn’t matter if 95% of people are turned off. They care about the 5% who aren’t. That’s true for all advertising. If you see what you consider to be a terrible ad, but you’re not part of the target audience for that ad, they don’t care that you hate it. All that matters is that enough of the right people do to make a profit.

3

‘Keeping people in the store’ is not the same as ‘keep people watching something that is intrinsically boring, tedious and off-putting’. I’ll trade your ‘adage in retailing’ with an adage in advertising ‘Never use 100 words where 10 will do’.

And there IS no product to buy at the end. Not on all of them. Some that I’ve seen (and bothered to watch out of curiosity) do eventually cough up the promised information, albeit it’s never anything all that special.

4

You misunderstand the purpose of advertising. As much as advertising is SeeWantBuy (although in reality it’s shorter than that these days), it’s both a trope and a truth that no single ad sells anything. There are very few ads that, on one viewing or even a few viewings, will make a person jump up and run buy the product. Repetition - endless repetition, within ads, within time blocks and over long periods of time - is what makes advertising effective. For big items, like cars, it’s a shaping of perception, so that when it comes time for Joe Consumer to consider a car, the field is limited to a few brands, models - or just one. For small items, it’s also perception, so that the appearance of the product before them (usually on the grocery shelf) becomes SeeWantBuy, without further consideration.

So ads that seem pointless because they aren’t blatantly screaming BUY THIS PRODUCT are likely just as effective - or even moreso - than obvious ones. Moreso because people tend to watch them, for novelty, out of boredom, just because they’re easier to wait through for the next segment of less-commercial programming, or whatever. Watching a minute or two of soothing, entertaining images intended to embed COKE or LEXUS or ROLEX or BUDWEISER in your brain is money well spent by the advertiser, even if you don’t shamble out into the streets, zombie-like, in search of the product.

You will, sooner or later, and they know it.

Those who smugly say they aren’t affected or driven by ads, or that because they see an ad for _____ and didn’t run out and buy it, the ad was wasted on them… really don’t get what it’s all about. In the larger sense, all ads are selling all products - it’s a collective effort to make people want to buy something, anything, and Ford’s ads benefit Budweiser as much as Swiffer’s ads benefit Ford.

Advertising stopped being about “Hey, nice lady, come to the store and buy this product because it’s just wonderful” around 1958.

5

Which is a relatively new concept. If you browse the major magazines from about 1930 to the present, in 10-year leaps (5 is better if you have time), what you’ll see is a steady progression in the reduction of copy. 1930s: ads were nearly all words with some nice representative pictures. 1940s - are an anomaly because of the war. 1950s, 60s, 70s - steady reduction of the text ad to picture ads with smaller and smaller blocks of copy. By the late '90s, ads are a picture and no more than 20-30 words, and you see that many now only when there is something that needs explaining.

Now: ads are a picture and a brand or maker logo. We are so completely conditioned to the telescoped form of SeeWantBuy that advertisers no long need make a pitch, merely show us the product. Which brings us back to the OP: a minute of eyeball capture with the product and brand somewhere is just as effective as Billy Mays screaming for a minute.

6

That’s not an adage; it’s simply wrong. Some advertising styles call for lots of words, and have throughout advertising history from David Ogilvie to the J. Peterman catalog and imitators.

I’ve never seen one, but my WAG is that these are cheap to make and getting people to watch is essentially free online. And I took you at your word that “the promised info IS eventually given, if you wait long enough.”

7

I watched one once…now when the guy starts talking and writing, I immediately close the window.

8

I clicked on one of the ones for that language school and watched some substantial part of it. It was vaguely entertaining – enough to keep me watching for several minutes, but I eventually got bored with it before it got to anything really interesting (and I don’t know that it ever does). Now I don’t even know the name of that language school, so I guess that’s an advertising fail.

9

You seem to know a lot about myriad subjects. A very world-wise man, one might say. You have a fan right here, AB. :o But im just in the background, taking notes. Just thought I’d take a moment and give ya a tip o’ my hat.

10

Well, there’s often a naive assumption that just because advertisers do something, there must be some secret, magical, perfectly-planned reason that will eventually be successful, and make people buy more of the product.

The fact is a lot of advertising fails (or only works marginally) – just like everything else in life.

11

Just a suspicion I have. I have no idea if this is based on fact.

Online ads pay money to the sites that host them. But suppose they only pay a full rate when somebody watches the complete ad. Like say they have to pay fifty cents for every person who watches the full ad but only pay five cents for every person who clicks the ad off.

Such a system might give advertisers an incentive to post long boring ads. The first few seconds will get the name of the product out in the public mind. Then the long boring ad that follows causes people to click the ad off and saves on the cost of the ad.

12

I just watched most of another one. It’s SO annoying that if someone comes in, interrupting, you can’t rewind to hear what you missed. If you are truly interested in the content you have to start all over. No thanks. Now I’m just bored. And gone. No sale.

13

There has been an ad campaign on our TVs for years that features an annoying man singing badly and loud. I am sure that a poll would say thet 99%of viewers hate it. The advertiser doesn’t care - they win because we remember it.

There was another campaign featuring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins - he always tipped his drink over her. I believe it won an award too. It was a total failure, because although everyone was familiar with the ad, most people thought it was for a rival product. - YouTube

14

IANA psychologist but I have instructed from time to time. One adage of teaching is that the more routes you have on delivering the content, the more likely that it sticks. What you’re “watching” is essentially a lecture, but a lecture on a black screen YouTube entry would be dull, dull, dull, while scrolling text like a Teleprompter wouldn’t be much better. A time-lapse hand drawing on a whiteboard has the dual purpose of being at least mildly interesting plus showing the content of the lecture through symbols.

15

Long YouTube advertisement is counterproductive to the company trying to sell you something.
I started watching one or two of these never ending videos and the only thing I bought from them was NOTHING!!!
These advertisers think their sooooooo smart, the only thing that happens is that 95% (like someone else’s response which agreed with this type of advertising) yes they get 5% who watch the whole thing, but in that 5% how many actually buy their stuff?!
It’s an insult to potential buyers to drag it on for so long, and that’s why 95% like me turn it off.
This is like what happened to me when I wanted to close a cellphone account, I called them and pressed the number corresponding to closing accounts…well they kept me waiting a half an hour, then the person answered and told me it wasn’t their department so they transfered me for another half an hour, and then again. I called back the next day, same results, so I got fed up and called the government agency who solved my issue. No one wanted to close my account because it would go under their record as closing accounts so they pass it on…so I WILL NEVER BUY any cellular products from this provider again! Upper management think they are so smart with these tactics where at the end people get fed up, insulted and just move on and/or buy their competitor’s products.
If you want to sell stuff, show what it is, what it does, why we need it, and how much it costs…PERIOD!