Get Your Head Out of the Sand! Why You Need Video Advertising

Businesses are like ostriches. When scary or risky things are going on around them, instead of taking action, they’ll stick their heads in the sand in order to ride out the storm.

Unfortunately, this is the worst possible decision to make. Why? Because where there are risks there are rewards.

Nowhere is this more true than in advertising. Most businesses are very slow to start using a new advertising medium. For example, it took almost 7 years before even half of Fortune 500 companies had a Facebook page. As a result, those businesses lost a major opportunity to smaller, more aggressive businesses that were willing to take the plunge on a new marketing channel.

Today, businesses are facing a new opportunity with the same potential risks and rewards: video advertising. For you (and for every other business out there), the question is, do the benefits of video advertising outweigh the risks?

To answer that question, let’s take a look at the facts:

Concerns with Video Advertising

Video marketing isn’t scary, it’s critical to the growth of your company. But before we get into how essential video ads really are, let’s address some concerns.

Here is a list of the most common reasons I hear about why companies are hesitant to take their advertising to the next level using video ads:

1. There’s no guarantee of a return on ad spend.
2. What if the public hates our video ad?
3. What if we look stupid because of the video?
4. They take too long to make.
5. They cost too much to make.

Let’s take a look at each of these concerns:

1) There’s no guarantee of a return on investment

You’re right, there is no guarantee of a return-on-investment with video advertising. There’s also no guarantee of a return-on-investment, with text or image ads, and you are already doing those.

Video advertising may be a bit of an unknown right now, but that’s why we’re looking at the data in this article. The potential upside of your other advertising channels made them worth the investment, even though they were an unknown. Why is video advertising any different?

2) What if the public hates our video ad?

Unfortunately, you can’t protect yourself from public outrage by avoiding video advertising. Just ask Bic, who received massive criticism for this image ad:

Let’s face it, any time you run any kind of ad, you risk sending a message you didn’t intend. If you’re too afraid of public backlash to run video ads, you should probably avoid advertising altogether.

3) What if we look stupid because of the video?

Again, take a look at the above section. People love to mock businesses and advertisements, but that doesn’t mean that advertising isn’t a good idea. If your current image or text ads aren’t making you look stupid, odds are that running a video campaign won’t make you look stupid, either.

4) Video ads take too long to make

Contrary to popular belief, videos only take as long to make as they need to. Trust me, the people making your ad want to make sure that they are doing a good quality job on your project, but they also have other clients that need their time as well. Much like you and your business.

5) They cost too much to make

Now we’re getting to the heart of most people’s concerns. Creating a video ad costs a lot more than creating a text or an image ad, which makes it feel like a bigger upfront risk for your business.

However, if that upfront risk produces much better results than a text or image ad, wouldn’t the investment be worth it?

To help answer that question, we’ve been running tests with video ads for quite a while now. In our tests, changing from image ads to video ads cuts cost-per-conversion by around 93% (while improving lead quality).

So, if you have a $10,000 budget per month and your cost-per-conversion is $340 with an image ad, you can either get:

• 29.4 low quality leads per month using image ads, or
• 400 high quality leads per month using video advertising.

Which would you rather have?

Of course, this estimate doesn’t account for the actual cost of making that video, which is where most businesses get hung up on video advertising.

Mitigating the Cost of Video Advertising

With a traditional film studio, you have to pay $40,000 up front for a video that’s only 3 minutes or less. At a price point like that, you really have to believe in video before you give it a try.

However, at Disruptive Advertising, we’re disrupting the video advertising industry.

Disruptive Advertising is now offering a subscription-based model for creating video ads. For a monthly fee as low as $1,000 per month, we will make you video ads customized to the needs of your business. Your budget will determine what kind of ads we can make and how often we can make them for you.

“But I can’t afford an additional $1,000 a month for videos.” If that’s truly the case, we have an option for you. You can pay us by redirecting a small portion of your current ad spend.

Let’s return to the example from above. If you’re spending $10,000/mo on advertising and paying $340 per conversion with image ads, you could take $1,000 from your existing budget and invest it in video advertising.

As a result, you’ll go from spending $10,000/mo on advertising and producing 29.4 low-quality conversions, to spending $9,000/mo on advertising and $1,000/mo on filming. But, you’ll be getting 360 high-quality conversions a month for that same $10,000/mo in total marketing spend.

29 vs 360 conversions? For the same ad spend?

All of a sudden, the question just changed from “can I afford to do video advertising?” to “can I afford not to do video advertising?”

No matter how you run the numbers, with this subscription model, you make more money using video ads. Using our subscription model, you can get all the benefits of video advertising…without breaking the bank.

Added Benefit of Working With Disruptive Advertising

Ever seen a fight between a director and a client about ad strategy? I have, and it’s not pretty. Most film makers speak the language of “art”, while most clients speak the language of “business.”

The advantage of having Disruptive make your video ads is the fact that we speak “art” and “business” fluently. In addition to understanding both worlds, we collaborate directly with your account manager to understand your strategies so that we can build consistent messaging with the rest of your campaigns.

While other companies might be able to talk to your director of marketing over Skype or email, we have all of the resources that we need in-house to make these videos with the account manager’s help. This ensures that your video ads are perfectly aligned with your marketing message (and helps speed up the process, too!).

Our video department believes in what Wieden & Kennedy calls “advertainment,” the fine line that needs to be balanced between the worlds of advertising and entertainment. We have all the same humor and creativity of a regular film studio, but with a keen understanding of how to use that humor and creativity to build your business.

Conclusion

If you are truly looking to make your business grow, video ads are absolutely, positively, 100% the route that you should be taking. Even if your cost per lead only performed half as well as our clients video ads did, you would still be making substantial profit margins.

If you have questions about how you can work with our video team, let me know here or in the comments below. You can also call us and talk to our sales team at any time.