Call it reverse psychology. We call it genius. Eat24, the online food delivery app, convinced users to watch pre-roll YouTube ads by telling them not to. In their latest campaign, Eat24 told viewers to “Skip This Ad” with an arrow pointing to the “Skip Ad” button.
“In all likelihood, most viewers would pre-position their cursor of the the ‘Skip Ad’ button, ready to blast away our commercial ASAP,” Eat24 said in a statement. “And who could blame them?”
The video ad itself has more than 581,000 views on YouTube. Eat24 saw a 75% increase in app downloads when the ad was running. More than 90% of viewers actually watched the entire ad and the click through rate was a staggering 7.1%.
Pre-roll ads on YouTube are tough. Sure, people are forced to watch the first 15 seconds, so you have a captive audience. But, they can skip the ad after 15 minutes, hurting your ratings and rendering your ad all but useless. It’s a prime opportunity to get people to watch your content, but it’s also a lot of pressure to create attention grabbing, interesting content.
In today’s world of high-octane stunts (think Red Bull content), canned jokes, and dramatic epic-style ads, what seems to stand out is the quippy, sarcastic, honest content. Eat24 isn’t the first brand to get very creative with their pre-roll ads. Volkswagen creatd a similar tongue-in-cheek campaign last year for their Beetle, which they said “automatically shifts gears and skips ads for you.”
Eat24 is known for unorthodox ads. They’ve advertised on porn sites, for example. But, this campaign seems to have made a really big impact. Eat24 paid per views, so had to pay for each of the full views of the ad. But, they claim that it resulted in thousands more orders from brand new customers, making the whole campaign well worth it.
The moral of the story? Consumers are savvy, and they’ll ignore (skip) ads that are predictable. Break out of the mold and take a chance, and you just might have the best performing ad campaign you’ve ever created!
