Overlays Break Advertising Barriers
Today, YouTube added a new feature to the advertising portion of their website. The addition of “Call-To-Action-Overlay” allows subscribers the ability to have a translucent pop-up ad appear at the bottom of the video linking to a third-party website.
The only catch: subscribers have to enter their video into YouTube’s Promoted Videos program. The new feature is free, per se, but subscribers are required to pay the advertising fee.
Before, sponsors had to include the website in the description of the video inconveniently off screen. As a result, many ignored these links and, thus, they were ineffective in driving significant traffic to the sponsors website.
Now, the options are endless for politicians, singers, musicians, video bloggers, interest groups, etc to dramatically increase flow to their website. The group “charity: water” was one of YouTube’s first beta tests for the project. They were able to raise $10,000 in one day for their cause of bringing clean water to developing countries.
TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid puts it best,
Brands can link their commercials back to the products they’re selling. Publishers (like us) can link back to relevant articles. And politicians can link back to their campaign homepages or petitions. But there’s almost certainly some other kind of creative use for the new ads waiting to be tapped, just as YouTube’s annotations were used to create choose-your-own-adventure video journeys.
With YouTube making a significant mark on the 2008 election cycle, the options are endless for politicians, interest groups, and parties wanting to create avenues to their websites. Ad overlays capture the emotion felt from a video, streamline the connection between parties, and translate into dollars, advocacy, or support. A few politicians are already doing this. Senator Patrick Leahy is using an ad overlay in a video calling for investigations into the Bush administration linked to a website with a petition. Taking down this barrier has cracked the political advertising floodgates. Put your rain coat on.
