Even a 10-Minute Ad Works: YouTube TrueView

In the traditionally commercial world, you will never be recommended to produce a 10-minute commercial. Customers naturally find commercials annoying and disturbing, they even quit a channel if the pre-roll commercial is too long.

However, according to Italian publication Prima Comunicazione Online, the online ad “Logico #1” by European ice-cream brand Cornetto Algida (Italy) ranked highest as the most successful YouTube ad campaign in Italy of 2014.

Next year, 2014 Cannes Branded Entertainment Lion winners, Lorie Jo Trainor Buckingham and James Copeman designed a nearly 11-minute-long YouTube commercial "Two Sides" for Cornetto again and it also successfully helped to increase sales, leads, and online conversations.
it revolves around a high school couple and their romance builds up towards the upcoming prom night. The factor that sets this ad apart from others is that you can switch between the perspectives of the male and female character and experience their inner thoughts and external dialogues. To do so, the creators made a binaural recording with two microphones that almost create a real life sensation, which is fully experienced with the use of headphones.

A long video certainly tests the patience of viewers but Cornetto’s main target group is high schoolers, who can easily identify themselves with this kind of story. The video ends with a message in a very Del Boy manner – “In love, if you dare you win!”
The secret to success is that when you choose to watch it, it is no longer a commercial advertisement but a fascinating and relevant story. And 10 minutes aren't too much for an interesting story.
That's why YouTube advertising is so promising compared to other digital paid media such as Facebook and Instagram: YOU CAN CHOOSE. You’ve probably experienced this: you go to watch a video and suddenly here’s a commercial. You have to watch for five seconds, and then you can hit “Skip Ad”. They call it a YouTube in-stream ad.
Actually, there are three types of YouTube advertising:

All of them are required True View, which means advertisers only pay money when people choose to watch your ads after a 5-second preview. It's not only good for the satisfactions of viewers but also for advertisers. The price is only $0.04 per true view. That means the advertiser only need to pay $40 for 1000 views. The most common format is the in-stream advertising, and that is what Cornetto uses.

The invention of TrueView gives customers the sense of control, spares advertisers budgets for useless advertising, and helps data tracking. As Youtube Adwords say itself:

It's a win-win: Viewers see videos they're curious about, and you get more views from an audience you know is interested. Because you choose what you want to pay for a view, you get the right audience at the right price. Unlike cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing, you won't need to pay every time your ad is shown. In fact, compared to Facebook's situation that "click-through rates on internet ads are just 0.01%, and that 4 out of 5 users (80%) have never even bought a product because of a Facebook ad", YouTube's True View really works.

Advertisers paid an estimated $4 billion for YouTube ads in 2012, up 60 percent from 2011, according to RBC Capital Markets stock analyst Mark Mahaney and Businessweek. In 2013, it was speculated to be closer to $5 billion. In short, a lot of money is being paid out on the theory of YouTube’s success in providing returns on investment.
Besides, after the use of TrueView mode, viewers who quit the video because of commercials decreases to 40%, and the view rate rises to 15%-45%!
Of course, TrueView ads only started becoming an applied standard in April 2014, so maybe there still are bugs that need to be fixed and improvements to be made. Whatever the case, as far as social media goes, so far, YouTube looks to be an advertiser's best bet.