Three Ways a Television Ad or Ads Aren't Like YouTube

Three Ways a Television Ad or Ads Aren’t Like YouTube

Television ad time is expensive, so you must make every second count.

That seems like a truism, but it’s backed by the numbers. If your ad is slightly too long, you’ll lose your audience and you won’t get them back. If the punchline is slightly off, you don’t get a second chance. The shots need to be perfectly aligned, your products need to be highlighted every possible frame, and everything needs to look like a slightly better version of reality. 

While the actual content (the script, the premise, the correlation between the product and the audience) matters, video production is a huge element of making your audience stay with you. Unlike online, professional production quality is the bare minimum expectation. It’s not like YouTube, where poor production quality and skewed images are part of the joke. Here are two more ways YouTubing experience can lead you astray if your company needs a television ad:

The shot changes need to change pace.

YouTube videos have a lot of cuts. Glitchy frame changes, removing the spaces between sentences, and fast zoom-ins are part of the YouTube aesthetic. But that’s not going to work on television. Not only is it a format that doesn’t translate to the tone and format and television, but you’re also going to be marketing to a different audience.

Be careful with the absurd.

If you take a snippet of someone else’s video and insert a poorly edited image over someone’s head, the Internet will accept that. It’s how to quickly communicate an idea without investing too much time on aesthetics and dipping everything with an edge of parody keeps almost everything on the right side of copyright.

But you can’t cobble images together online, whether the mishmash is really on the set or you want to add in effects later.

Television ad production isn’t necessarily better or worse than online advertising, and it’s not necessarily easier or harder. But what it takes is an entirely different skill set than what works online. Go to Advanced Media Integration for professional video editing services.