Dive Brief:
- Oreo’s “Ping Pong Trick Shots 3 | Dude Perfect” led the list of top YouTube ads for April per a Google report. The long-form ad runs 7 minutes and 16 seconds.
- YouTube tracks the top ads each month using an algorithm that factors in organic and paid views, watch time and audience retention.
- The ad was published April 3, 2017, and has 44,559,205 views and counting. The second most popular ad was “Samsung Official TVC: Ostrich” which published March 29 and to date has 23,859,007 views for comparison. Samsung also took the number three slot with its ad introducing the Galaxy S8 and S8+.
Dive Insight:
The ad, built around the Oreo Dunk Challenge campaign that launched earlier this year with a strong digital focus, in sponsored content for featuring a series of tricks by Dude Perferct incorporating Oreos. The first one in the video depicts an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine triggered by a ping pong ball causing a row of Oreo cookies to tumble into one another, leading to a series of reactions culminating in a giant Oreo rolling across the finish line.
Oreo’s leading spot points to an interesting evolution in video marketing — it is extremely long at seven minutes and 16 seconds, and although the brand could certainly chop it up into more TV-friendly 15-, 30- or 60-second spots, viewers don't seem to mind the length most likely because of the fun nature of the content.
Like many brands, Oreo has been active in embracing digital marketing channels and strategies, and at a time when linear TV ratings continue to fall and cord-cutting continues to rise advertisers are beginning to take a new overarching strategy for video advertising. Instead of separating TV and digital, marketers are taking the approach that video ad strategies take all potential channels into account when allocating budgets and creative time and resources.
Google’s YouTube ad report puts hard numbers on why marketers value the video platform for advertising as well as the potential reach of digital video advertisement. And, as the Google algorithm for its list indicates, unlike with linear TV spots YouTube and other digital video ad platforms offer marketers organic views of their creative content along with the paid views.
The Oreo spot was created by Weber Shandwick and the media agency was Carat USA.
