Judges for the first YouTube Ads Awards have an exciting yet unenviable task. Imagine sifting through what could be dozens of entries and picking the top ads for each of the 17 categories.
To get the jury’s favor, here are judges MullenLowe President and CCO Leigh Reyes, McCann Worldgroup Philippines Executive Creative Director Joe Dy, YouTube creator Mikey Bustos, Unilever Philippines Head of Media Dennis Perez, TV5/News 5 anchor and musician Lourd de Veyra, and Cebu Pacific Air VP – Marketing & Distribution Candice Iyog thoughts on 10 things they will look for in an entry.
The story
“Filipinos love a great story,” said Leigh Reyes, President & CCO of MullenLowe Philippines and chair of the jury for the YouTube Ads Awards. “We love the ones that make us cry, make us want to see what happens next.”
It seems like a simple and basic criteria, but also the most important one. As expressed by Dennis Perez, Unilever Philippines’ Head of Media, “the job of a marketeer remains the same, and that is to tell stories.” But to serve that plot to viewers, the next important factor would be…
The storytelling
“It is easy to get lost in the technology… and forget about the art of storytelling,” said Candice Iyog, Vice President – Marketing and Distribution, Cebu Pacific Air.
For Joe Dy, Executive Creative Director of McCann Worldgroup Philippines, he is on a lookout for the surprise factor.
“I kind of tend to second guess where the story is headed by default. So when you see a piece of content you kind of think ‘ah I think I know where they’re headed with this, I know where they’re going with this’ and then bam… I didn’t expect that,” said Dy. “And that makes it more rewarding.”
And the ads’ length it not a reason to fall short in storytelling. For Reyes, “you need to know how to write the 5-second mic drops and the 4-minute novellas.”
The human touch
Aside from fantastic storytelling, Iyog is also on a lookout for entries with human connection, shared humanity, and Inclusiveness.
(YouTube is) a platform that tends to be used a lot for politics, sometimes it is really just hardsell,” she said. “It’s refreshing to sometimes be able to to see stories that are about people and purpose.”
An ad should give you temporary amnesia
“A YouTube ad should be so good that it makes me forget that it is actually intruding into my viewing pleasure,” said TV host and musician Lourd de Veyra. It should draw the viewer in that it makes them skip clicking the skip ad button.
Makes you click the share button
For YouTuber Mikey Bustos, shareability is his primary criterion.
“Youtube is just completely saturated with content and before it used to be easy to entertain people and to cause people to share,” said Bustos. “Now audience is picky with what to share.”
“Attention is something that is difficult to capture nowadays because people are split,” said Iyog. Holding a viewer’s attention is now a must.
The feels
“At the core of every piece of material that connects with the person is an emotional reaction,” said Dy. “No matter what means you use to access the content, it’s how you connect to it that really elicits engagement and a reaction.”
Creativeness with the format
For Dy, a YouTube ad should not be an “edit up or edit down” of a television commercial, and should ads should be content themselves.
To serve a TV ad clone, for de Veyra, “is the biggest insult you can ever do to digital natives because they operate on different senses of aesthetics.
Instead, and creatives should be on a lookout for the unique and then “go crazy in a way,” said Perez. “The challenge is how do we maximize the platform in such a way that we don’t fall into a formula.”
The audience in mind
“I’m looking for a complete and intrinsic understanding of who their audience is,” said Bustos. The audience, after all, should find an ad.
“We really need to go back to the people who watches these and really find what is really relevant to them,” said Perez. “Even if it is advertising, you should actually give something back to them.”
The experience
“People don’t go to Youtube to watch ads, they watch content,” noted Dy. “So you have to engage them in a different level and make it more of an experience as well.”
For YouTube ads, the extent of enhancing viewer experience has expanded, with support to formats that were never possible before.
Lasting impression
“Creative storytelling is not just about how unique the plot is or how nice the twists are but it is all about making sure that people stay and stick to the story and complete it as much as possible,” said Perez. “At the end of the day, we create ads for people to remember our brands.”
If your brand or agency have ads that will get the jury excited, it’s time for you to enter them in the YouTube Ads Awards! Don’t forget: submission is FREE, you can enter as much as you want, and entering is EASY. Just log on to http://g.co/YTAdsAwardsPH! Hurry because deadline of submission is on February 22.
