Anyone familiar with YouTube Advertising will know that to road block the homepage of YouTube with an ad for the day you won’t be getting much change out of £25k. That’s a lot of money you may be saying, but when you look at the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world with over two billion videos being watched daily, that’s not quite that bad after all.
So disappointing it is to see the homepage being road blocked by Betfair today with quite honestly the most awful interactive advertising campaign I have ever had the misfortune of coming across.
So where have Betfair gone wrong?
Well first of all you have to confirm your date of birth before they even begin advertising. Which is understandable as they’re advertising gambling right? Wrong! Why would they waste time targeting under 18’s in the first place when they could specifically target all of the over 18’s on YouTube. So I decided to try this theory out and see if the date of birth confirmation would disappear when logged into a verified 18+ account. Our survey says: UH-UHHHHH! However this could still have been strictly enforced by YouTube so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, although if it were me I would’ve fought tooth and nail otherwise.
Moving swiftly on, the advert is just plain boring, long pauses in the flash animation, no real activity going on. There is nothing to keep an attention span of someone who can concentrate, let alone the monkeys on YouTube (myself included). And for what is the point of advertising on a social network if your campaign isn’t social. Betfair see if you can get in touch with the guys at Tip-ex who know how to do it right!
So what have we learnt from this? Well if you are planning on spending a fortune on an advertising campaign don’t get a bloke with a face like a slapped arse to be the main focal point.
