People on YouTube watch your ads with their finger on the Skip Ad button
There is a copywriter named Gary Halbert who has since left us that had a theory about letters people got in the mail. He said that people sort their mail over a waste basket. Anything that looked like advertising went into the B pile (in the garbage) and anything that looked like a personal letter, a bill, or something that the person wanted to see went into the A pile.
This is the famous A pile/B pile theory behind direct mail. One of the many strokes of genius given to us by a man I never met but learned a lot from posthumously.
I was reminded of the A pile/B pile theory the other day when my toddler was watching Paw Patrol toy videos on YouTube. In fact it is a perfect metaphor for the A pile/B pile theory.
For those of you who don’t know, there are videos of people playing with the toys of your child’s favourite characters on YouTube. My son calls them fake Paw Patrol. What he doesn’t know but I do, is that these are really clever advertisements. When he is watching the videos, ads will come up in the stream and his finger hovers over the Skip Ad button so he doesn’t have to waste a second watching an advertisement and get straight back to what he is watching.
The videos of the toys are A pile mail. The ads that pop up are B pile.
The key for you (if you are selling a product) is to find a way to make content that people enjoy watching or reading and loop that back in to your product.
There are patterns, find them and modulate them to your market.
