Eat24, the food delivery app, has figured out how to get people to watch YouTube pre-roll ads. The secret? Tell them not to. In a recent campaign, the app literally told viewers to “Skip This Ad,” — and Jedi mind tricked them into watching. Here’s Eat24’s rationalization:
“In all likelihood, most viewers would pre-position their cursor over the ‘Skip Ad’ button, ready to blast away our commercial ASAP. And who could blame them?”
But the reverse psychology approach seems to have struck a nerve, as they explained in a blog post about the experiment.
The video has more than 581,000 views on YouTube …
… and saw a 75 percent increase in app downloads the weeks the campaign was running. More than 90 percent of viewers actually completed watching the ad, which had a staggeringly high click-through rate of 7.1 percent.
It’s not the first time a brand was clever about their preroll placement. Last year Volkswagen had a similar gimmick in its Beetle campaign. The car, the ad said, “automatically shifts gears and skips ads for you.”
Nor is it the first time Eat24, which has been known to place display ads on porn sites, has itself dabbled in unorthodox advertising. But the cutesy approach appears to have had a real impact. While Eat24 had to pay for each of those “Skip This Ad” views, it claims it resulted in “thousands more orders from new customers.”
More in Marketing
Hyve Group buys the Possible conference, and will add a meeting element to it in the future
Hyve Group, which owns such events as ShopTalk and FinTech Meetup, has agreed to purchase Beyond Ordinary Events, the organizing body behind Possible.
Agencies and marketers point to TikTok in the running to win ‘first real social Olympics’
The video platform is a crucial part of paid social plans this summer, say advertisers and agency execs.
Where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand on big tech issues
The next U.S. president is going to have a tough job of reining in social media companies’ dominance and power enough to satisfy lawmakers and users, while still encouraging free speech, privacy and innovation.