Video Advertising in the Right Place… at the Wrong Time?

Dr. John’s 1973 hit “Right Place, Wrong Time” is not only a great song, but it’s also a cautionary tale about video advertising strategy.

“I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong time
I’d have said the right thing
But must have used the wrong line…”

Let’s break it down:

The Right Place

If you know who your audience is and where they interact with your brand, you’re in the right place. This can take some time to figure out and will require an investment in research and analytics. While it’s widely accepted that data should inform distribution strategies, it should also be considered when planning creative. If both strategy and creative are working in tandem, you’ll maximize the effectiveness of your campaign and elevate your return on investment (ROI).

The Wrong Time

There’s a time and place for everything. When considering a customer acquisition funnel you have awareness up top, consideration in the middle, and decision at the bottom. If you’re hitting your audience with bottom-funnel messaging (e.g. discounts, bundling, buy-one-get-one-free) before you’ve built brand equity and awareness, you may get a sale in the short term but jeopardize customer lifetime value (LTV). On the flip side, if there’s an urgency to get people to add to their cart and make the sale (e.g. during the holiday season), you don’t want to be floating aspirational brand videos by them without a clear call-to-action (CTA) to purchase.

The Right Thing

You’re in the right place at the right time. Now you need the right thing. You may have heard that we make decisions based on emotion, then justify with logic. That’s why we try to, “capture hearts and minds”, not the other way around. This is most important at the earliest brand building stages (i.e. top-funnel awareness). Creating mood, aspiration, and intent is at the core of effective video content. The medium creates opportunities to utilize a range of elements that convey emotion including visuals, color, sound, and story. When done well, video has the ability to pull emotions out of us that we don’t even know are there.

The Wrong Line

If you’ve got everything lined up at this point, you’re going to want to be on-brand and on-message across all customer touchpoints. As campaigns continue to spread out across platforms it can be easy to lose alignment as you try to customize content for each channel. This is why it’s crucial for every brand to have a North Star or purpose that can be revisited when things start to veer off track. This brand purpose or “why” is different than a brand’s social good or charitable purpose. It’s about knowing why your brand matters to your audience and articulating that through your marketing and advertising over and over again.

If you’re in the right place but it’s the wrong time, you got the right thing, but the wrong line, you’re gonna need a little brain salad surgery. In other words, aim for alignment across these 4 pillars to give your video ad campaign the best chance for success.

You are now free to get your groove on.