How this video ad campaign outperformed a Google search campaign by more than 500%

In just 30 days, with exactly the same budget, our Spelling Bee video ad campaign outperformed paid search by 514% in clicks and a mind-blowing 5,000% increase in ad impressions.

Cost Per Click

$8.35 Lower CPC

Clicks

514% More Clicks

Impressions

50x More Impressions

The Project: creating an original, clever video ad campaign for self-promotion and paid advertising to boost brand awareness

When you are creating a series of videos for your own video production agency, the sky really is the limit. So where do you begin?

We wanted to make a splash in the advertising world and also challenge our prospects to think a little differently by using our mantra to “Create intent, not content” as the guiding light behind this spelling bee campaign. We also knew that we wanted to use humor, but not go too crazy, while keeping these at standard runtimes for YouTube or CTV/OTT advertising.

The Solution

One thing we’ve been guilty of during our many years of producing videos for clients is that we didn’t practice what we preach. Like many advertising agencies and marketing companies, we weren’t doing our own marketing. It was too easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day of the business creating amazing videos for our clients, but not ourselves. It was time to break the mold.

We challenged ourselves to write and produce 4 different commercials within this spelling bee concept that work individually, but also offer a payoff if you watch them all sequentially from start to finish for a cohesive story.

We worked with a pool of amazing, young talent and a great crew to bring these ads to life.

514% more clicks than paid search

The Results

Our team was absolutely thrilled with the final results of this campaign and the test comparing Google’s paid search vs YouTube ads.

Using the exact same amount of money over a 30-day period from April 1 to April 30, we found that the video ads performed much better than the paid search in delivering traffic to our website. Paid search cost $8.35 more than the YouTube ads per click. The YouTube ads resulted in 514% more clicks than paid search and nearly 5,000% more (50x) impressions over the course of the month.

Aside from advertising, we sent this campaign directly out to some of our peers and received excellent feedback about the refreshing concept of creating with intent and not creating videos just for the sake of having videos. This also lead to the development of a new partnership with a large digital marketing agency to provide consistent video work for their current clients as well as the inclusion on all new business pitches.

If you’d like to watch all of the videos from this ad campaign and learn more about the project, click here.

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