Is Youtube making people hate ads – even more?
Advertising is suffering a likeability crisis, and many put it down to the decline of humour in ads. While the decline is real — a Kantar study found a constant decline in funny commercials over the past 25 years — some observers believe the level of Youtube advertising is also to blame.
Youtube's ad load appears to be increasing
Richard Shotton, author of behavioural science books The Choice Factory and Hacking The Human Mind published an article this week about advertising’s “likeability crisis.” In it, he posits that over the last 20 years advertising has become less likeable.
He uses three data sets to illustrate his point, including a long-term study by the UK’s Advertising Association that shows the British public’s attitude towards advertising has soured since the early 1990s, from 50% favourability in 1994 to just 25% in 2018.
In 2022, just one-third of advertising shown in North America was light-hearted, with only 10% considered “funny”. This is according to the aforementioned Kantar study. That same year, just 10% of Cannes Lions Grand Prix and Gold winners were humorous ads.
The following year, Andrew Robertson, CEO of BBDO, gave a Cannes keynote lamenting the lack of humour in advertising. “If brands are truly looking to make the world a better place, we could do a lot worse than make people laugh.”
This year, Cannes introduced a new category for funny ads, that use “wit and satire to provide amusement and create memorable, laughter-inducing connections with audiences.”
So, there’s an acknowledgement that advertisers need to bring the laughs back.
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But according to Rob Farmer, chief marketing officer at Australian Pork, simply blaming a lack of humour is missing a key element of advertising’s likeability crisis.
Within linear broadcasting, viewers have historically been served 12 to 14 minutes of advertising per hour globally. In Australia, the amount is capped by the commercial TV industry’s code of practice at 13 minutes per hour between 6pm and midnight. These ads are the trade off for the free entertainment, as well as informing the cadence of TV itself — network shows have been structured to take advantage of the dramatic pause an ad break offers. Advertising is baked into the entire concept of free commercial TV.
The dynamic changed with streaming services that offered up “TV” for a price: you paid money, but you no longer had to deal with advertisements. This was seen as a purer viewing experience, and advertising was marketed as an intrusion. The ad-supported streaming tiers devalued advertising further, by allowing users to pay more to remove ads.
According to Farmer, Youtube has further eroded the reputation of advertising with its an increasing advertising load, as well as the graceless way it places them into videos.
“The ramping up that’s gone on in the last few years has reached what I think is quite ridiculous levels,” he tells Mumbrella. He calls it “the classic frog in boiling water, because it’s not really clearly communicated, either to advertisers or certainly not to viewers.”
As an advertiser, he buys six, 15 and 30-second unskippable ads on Youtube, and concedes “it’s a really useful tool.”
“But it’s the frequency of them, and the placement of them that I’m concerned about being self-destructive, ultimately, and not helpful to advertisers.
“It’s for no fault of the content of the ad, but because simply of the ad load.”
Rob Farmer believes Youtube need to pull back on the constant ads.
According to Google’s statistics, Youtube has 125 million paying subscribers, off a base of around 2.5 billion users (subscribers don’t see ads). Farmer points out this is a small proportion of the user base who are willing to pay for Youtube – around 5%.
Farmer believes that ramping up ad-load is designed to drive up this paid subscriber base.
“Deep in its proposition is it’s free, and you get that there’s ads around it, and that’s the deal. But the approach of YouTube is so aggressive, to try to bludgeon people to pay, that it’s just a strange user experience – that they’re doing that to 95%. They obviously think that the habit is deep enough to sustain this, they’re not gonna scare everybody away, but I think it’s misguided.
“I think currently the ramping up is too greedy, and it’s gotta be a bit more measured.”
Unfortunately, it is working in the short term. Youtube Premium subscribers have increased by 25 million within the last 18 months, which Farmer believes emboldens them to continuing ramping up the advertising load. But, he can see it backfiring soon.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it does accelerate you into things like Tiktok and other short form on demand video formats. And it’s just a great opportunity for competitors to have a better user experience.”
Things are unlikely to get any better for the ad-adverse viewer. At Youtube’s recent ‘Brandcast’ upfront, it introduced the unskippable 60-second ad, which Google Australia’s Youtube boss, Caroline Oates, said would allow advertisers “the time to tell a richer story”.
Youtube is also introducing AI-driven technology that allows brands to serve ads at emotional “peak points” in videos. As Oates explained, this technology “ taps into the behavioural science principle that we remember the emotional peak of an experience. It uses micro signals to deliver your ads precisely when your audience is most receptive to it.”
While Farmer suggests these increased ads are a play to push frustrated users into being paying users, an even more cynical take is that there’s no deeper motive than simply ringing out every dollar from advertisers. If the product suffers, so be it.
At its upfront earlier this month, SBS touted its own low ad-load as a key selling point. “SBS has no more than five minutes per hour, giving audiences a better viewing experience and brands a clearer voice,” said Keiran Beasley, the networks’ national sales manager, pointing to other networks with more than triple the ad load.
Farmer is keen to stress that it’s not just Youtube at fault, but a number of elements at play.
“I guess it’s a complicated picture, ” he says. “But the mechanics of the inventory being as greedy as they are is definitely an aggravating factor on the same scale.”
Youtube has been contacted for comment.
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