Where do these weird template based Ads on YouTube come from?
In the last months, when watching YouTube on my phone for example while cooking I noticed that the advertisements I was shown contained a high amount of advertisements not from the usual big companies but from some local businesses that all were basically some kind of PowerPoint presentation with a bit more animation and some background music.
On one hand it is kinda cool that YouTube is actually cheap enough for local businesses to advertise there and get some online visibility and even helps them to produce a simple video to put on the platform, but on second thought the worth of that investment is questionable even if it is cheap enough to be viable to smaller companies.
Those auto-generated spots don’t really have any selling power. They all look the same so one brand doesn’t really stick out from all the other ones using the same templates.
The blame for this isn’t entirely on YouTube. They could just require the businesses to create their own videos and upload them. This however would discourage most small businesses to advertise on a video platform as video production is usually expensive and / or time consuming and would lose YouTube the money of the small businesses. By creating some kind of slide show for them that then is played before videos YouTube can at least pretend to have a good offer, even if it 100% knows that the efficiency of those ad clips will be atrocious. So the blame isn’t entirely off YouTube either.
When looking into this a bit more the first thing you get in your google search results is actually from google themselves. You can set up ads in a relatively straightforward way with no technical expertise whatsoever. When clicking through the form provided to set up an ad campaign, google showed me the option to generate ads with AI and to make some template based ad. AI generated ads also aren’t the best thing that I as a customer would necessarily click on, but google right out of the box provides you as the advertiser with a better solution than the thing I’m constantly shown.
Also we must come to the question on why some of these ads are shown to me even if I am in no way part of a relevant target audience for them and sometimes those businesses are from far away. I first thought that YouTube must be running out of advertisers and has to resort to showing everyone those small business ads if they are relevant to them or not.
However, after doing some research (watching a YouTube video) it turns out that you as an advertiser can actively prohibit YouTube from showing your ad to just anyone and that you can fine-tune your audience in a really granular way. In the end me being shown these ads just comes down to the social media guy (or the owner, if the business is so small that no such role as a social media guy exists) being lazy or just overwhelmed with computers. The latter scenario is kinda sad because, even if the tech-illiterate boomer is a funny meme, those are guys that maybe struggle to run their small business and without better knowledge just burn money on the internet with little to no effect.
So if you know someone with a small business, make sure they don’t waste money on pointless auto generated ads on YouTube. I don’t think they accomplish anything. Have a nice day! Bye!