Hero: Bukalapak’s campaign “Medok Pendekar Jari Sakti” (Medok, The Warrior with Magic Fingers) has become one of the most popular ads on YouTube, attracting 1
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Hero: Bukalapak’s campaign “Medok Pendekar Jari Sakti” (Medok, The Warrior with Magic Fingers) has become one of the most popular ads on YouTube, attracting 1.1 million views. (Courtesy of YouTube)
The first five seconds of an online ad ultimately determine whether it is a good commercial.
Tech behemoth Google reveals that online advertisers have only five seconds to lure their targets. The crucial first five seconds is the amount of time that a viewer is able to watch an ad on YouTube, Google’s subsidiary, before being given the option to skip it.
Google Indonesia head of marketing Veronica Utami said that the five-second rule in online advertising worked within a society that tended to have a reduced attention span. Hence, online ads must present something eye-catching within the first five seconds.
Google Indonesia has cited memorability, engagement and entertaining content as three factors that determine the success of online advertising. The statement was made during the launch of the company’s recent report on the 10 most popular Indonesian ads shown on its YouTube service.
The report also stated that one of the most crucial factors of a good online ad was “ad recall”, or the memorability of a campaign to the viewer, as well as the level of engagement and storytelling that existed to keep the viewers interested, Veronica said.
“This new approach has driven and pushed companies and agencies to make advertisements that are more conceptual rather than putting out ‘hard sell’ campaigns. It shows how much good content impacts the strength of a brand to a viewer,” Veronica explained recently.
In addition to that, the report also pointed out another interesting fact: The most successful ads were those that gave viewers the option to skip. Around 79 percent of Indonesian YouTube users have a positive outlook toward brands that allow viewers to skip their advertisements.
According to Google’s latest report, the 10 most popular Indonesian ads in the first half of 2016 were campaigns from Oreo, PaddlePop, Indomie, Edho Zell, Bukalapak, Bank Danamon, Sariayu, Smartfren, Telkomsel and Nescafe.
Oreo’s 30-second campaign “Open Up With Oreo Indonesia” attracted 2.4 million viewers, while Bukalapak’s ambitious six-episode campaign “Medok Pendekar Jari Sakti” (The Warrior with Magic Fingers) drew 1.1 million.
Sharing its success, Bukalapak’s brand manager Oci Ambrosia said that the first episode of Medok, which was initially a part of their #PahlawanPelapak campaign, ran for seven minutes, but it garnered acclaim from its viewers who wanted to see more of the characters.
Oci underlined that the authenticity of the characters and concept were the key behind the success of Bukalapak’s campaign. The ad itself tells a story of a character named Medok, who provides peaceful solutions to conflicts, while also brandishing the Bukalapak name.
“The benefit of this ad for us is that it increases our brand awareness and engagement by 10 percent and also increases our traffic too. People really want to follow the adventures of this mild-mannered hero character that we created,” she said.
Meanwhile, Veronica elaborated that advertisers on Google Indonesia were mostly consumer product companies and those with e-commerce platforms
She also said that advertising was the backbone of Google’s operations worldwide.
Veronica explained that almost 100 percent of Google’s earnings came from ads, regardless of where the company operated. Another source of earning came from app purchases on the Google Play app store, she added.
In the first quarter of 2016, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that its advertising revenue had increased by 16 percent to $18 billion, up from $15.5 billion in the previous year. Alphabet’s total revenue for the quarter grew by 17 percent on a year-on-year basis, to reach US$20.3 billion.
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