Week 5: Display Advertising and YouTube

Week 5 Lecture: Display Advertising and YouTube

Discussion

1 Introduction

⏱ 10 min

Week overview, Week 4 copybook handover, and the placement brief preview

Acquisition

2 Theory and Application

⏱ 30 min

Attention economy, mere exposure, media richness, audience targeting, bid strategies, contextual targeting, display and YouTube formats, video structure, creative fatigue

Practice

3 Guided Worked Example

⏱ 15 min

Applying audience, bid, and format decisions to the Villa College Certificate campaign

Assessment

4 Attendance and Exit Check

⏱ 5 min

Attendance, Moodle concept check

Module Arc

Weeks 1–2

Foundations and Planning

→

Weeks 3–5

Content and Media

→

Weeks 6–8

Acquisition Channels

→

Weeks 9–12

Relationships and Measurement

→

Weeks 13–15

Governance and AI

We close the Content and Media block in Week 5. Your visual assets and copy are ready. This week places them in front of an audience at the correct format, the correct frequency, and the correct moment in the viewing context.

Today’s Agenda

Lecture: nine theory and practice sections

The attention economy: why display advertising competes for scarce attention
Mere exposure effect: how frequency builds familiarity, and where fatigue begins
Media richness theory: matching format to the complexity of the message
Audience targeting: in-market, affinity, custom, and remarketing
Bid strategies: CPM, CPC, CPA, and tROAS
Contextual targeting: topics, keywords, and exclusions
Display ad formats: IAB standards, viewability, and reach-frequency planning
YouTube ad formats and video structure: the five-second rule
Creative fatigue: identification and management

Tutorial preview

You will build a placement and targeting decision record:

Define your audience mechanism and bid strategy, each with a rationale
Pick your display and YouTube formats, list assets, and write hook, branding, and CTA notes
Select topics and keywords, choose managed placements, and add key exclusions
Peer share, decision record check, and upload

Learning Objectives (1 of 2)

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

Apply the mere exposure effect to explain how frequency decisions interact with audience attitude formation.
Use attention economy principles to explain why viewability, placement context, and creative salience affect advertising effectiveness.
Apply media richness theory to select between display and video formats for different campaign objectives and audience processing states.
Distinguish in-market, affinity, custom, and remarketing audiences, and select the audience mechanism that fits a given hierarchy stage.
Distinguish CPM, CPC, CPA, and tROAS bid strategies, and select the bid strategy that fits a given campaign objective.

Learning Objectives (2 of 2)

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

Apply topic, keyword, and placement targeting, including negative keywords and placement exclusions, to keep a campaign within a defined content context.
Describe the skip behaviour and structural constraints of skippable in-stream, non-skippable in-stream, bumper, in-feed, and Shorts video ad formats.
Define and apply reach, frequency, viewability, and creative fatigue in a campaign planning context.
Design a placement brief that specifies the audience, bid strategy, format, placement, frequency cap, viewability standard, and outcome metric.
Apply the evidence framework to placement decisions: classify audience, bid, and format choices as evidence-based, inferred, or assumed.

Objective 10 completes the evidence chain from Weeks 1 to 5. Placement decisions are predictions about audience behaviour. Each prediction needs documentation, a stated rationale, and consistency with the canvas, the visual asset specification, and the copybook.

The Attention Economy

Every second a user spends with any one piece of content is a second withheld from another. The value of a media placement depends on its ability to earn and hold attention in competition with everything else in the same context.

Herbert Simon, 1971. Attention is the scarce resource; every placement competes for a share of it.

Mere Exposure Effect (Zajonc, 1968)

Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for that stimulus, even without conscious recognition of the repetition. In advertising, this effect underlies the rationale for frequency.

The effect has a limit: it plateaus, then reverses, as frequency climbs.

The Mere Exposure Response Curve

Reach, Frequency, and the Frequency Cap

Reach is the number of unique individuals who see the ad at least once.
Frequency is the average number of times each individual sees the ad within a defined period.
Frequency cap is the maximum number of times any individual receives the ad within a defined period.

Awareness prioritises reach. Knowledge and Liking need repeated exposure to build familiarity. Conviction and Purchase favour a low, high-specificity frequency.

Media Richness Theory (Daft and Lengel, 1986)

Communication media differ in their capacity to convey information. Richer media convey multiple cues simultaneously, support rapid feedback, and allow personalisation. The richest medium suits the most complex or emotionally nuanced message.

From Lean to Rich Media

Format selection follows the richness the communication objective requires, ahead of the format’s engagement reputation or the team’s production familiarity.

Audience Targeting on Display and YouTube

A placement brief predicts who sees the ad, beside where it appears. Google’s display and YouTube inventory offers four audience-targeting mechanisms, each built from a different signal and suited to a different hierarchy stage.

In-market audiences signal active research. Affinity audiences signal a stable interest. Custom audiences follow your own definition. Remarketing audiences follow a real visit.

Four Audience Targeting Mechanisms

Bid Strategies

The bid strategy determines what the campaign pays for and, indirectly, what behaviour the platform’s delivery algorithm optimises toward.

CPM pays for exposure. CPC pays for clicks. CPA pays for a completed action. tROAS lets the algorithm bid to a revenue target.

Four Bid Strategies

Contextual Targeting: Topics, Keywords, and Exclusions

Audience and bid strategy determine who the campaign targets and what it pays for. Contextual targeting determines where the ad is permitted to appear.

Topic and keyword targeting place the ad in a relevant content category. Negative keywords and placement exclusions keep it away from the wrong one.

Negative Keywords and Placement Exclusions

A negative keyword list excludes the ad from content that matches an unwanted term
Example: a certificate-programme campaign excludes “free,” “scholarship only,” and “job vacancy”
A placement exclusion list removes specific sites, apps, or channels for brand-safety risk or a weak engagement history
Reviewing the placement report after week one and adding exclusions counts as standard practice

Specify at least three negative keywords and a placement report review rule before launch.

Display Ad Formats: IAB Standards and Constraints

Standard display advertising formats are defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The creative constraints of display advertising form a discipline that forces clarity about the primary message.

A 300 x 250 pixel rectangle carries a single idea. It must communicate one thing.

IAB Standard Display Formats

Format	Size (pixels)	Typical placement	File size limit	Creative constraint
Medium rectangle	300 x 250	In-content, sidebar	150 KB	One claim, one visual, one CTA
Leaderboard	728 x 90	Above page content	150 KB	Brand mark, one claim, minimal text
Wide skyscraper	160 x 600	Sidebar, vertical space	150 KB	Vertical layout, short claim, CTA at bottom
Mobile banner	320 x 50	Mobile web, in-app	40 KB	Brand mark and CTA only; no body copy
Large mobile banner	320 x 100	Mobile web, in-app	40 KB	One short claim plus CTA
Half page	300 x 600	Premium in-content	150 KB	Most narrative space in display; still one claim

Viewability standard (MRC): an ad qualifies as viewable when at least 50% of its pixels stay visible on screen for at least 1 second (display) or 2 seconds (video). Name a minimum viewability threshold in your placement brief.

Reach and Frequency: The Planning Matrix

Reach counts unique individuals. Frequency counts average repeated exposure. The correct balance follows the hierarchy stage.

The Reach-Frequency Matrix

Four quadrants, each naming a strategic configuration and its implication.

Top right, high reach and high frequency, is where most budgets aim and the most costly quadrant. It suits Knowledge-to-Liking campaigns needing both breadth and repetition. Awareness campaigns find top left sufficient and more cost-efficient.

Bottom right, low reach and high frequency, is the fatigue risk zone: a narrow audience sees the same creative many times while few new people enter the campaign. This configuration rarely gets planned on purpose; it emerges when a campaign runs too long against a small audience beside creative rotation.

Bottom left, low reach and low frequency, wastes budget: the audience stays too small and the exposure too rare for awareness or familiarity to develop.

[Timing: 1.5 minutes]

Video Ad Formats: YouTube

YouTube serves video advertising in five distinct formats. Each carries a different skip behaviour and a different demand on the viewer’s attention.

Format selection predicts the audience’s attention and their readiness to be directed.

Five YouTube Ad Formats

Skippable in-stream stands as the most commonly used format: it allows genuine creative flexibility, because only the audience who found the hook compelling stays past five seconds. The charging model aligns with your interests: you pay for attention, beside paying for impressions.

Non-skippable in-stream guarantees exposure while imposing attention; audiences respond with lower engagement and higher irritation. Reserve it for short, high-salience messages at the Awareness stage, where brand recall is the goal, beside argument evaluation.

Bumper ads carry reach and frequency at low cost: one brand, one claim, six seconds, no more.

In-feed (Discovery) ads reach a self-selected, already-curious audience who opts in by clicking the thumbnail, suiting Knowledge-stage audiences actively searching.

Shorts ads live natively in the vertical, full-screen feed and assume sound-on viewing and fast-cut editing distinct from horizontal in-stream video.

[Timing: 2 minutes]

The Five-Second Rule

Skippable in-stream ads let the viewer skip after five seconds
The campaign pays once a viewer watches past thirty seconds or clicks
The opening five seconds must earn the remaining watch time
A viewer who skips at five seconds still carries an impression forward, positive or negative

Design the first five seconds to answer: is this for someone like me, in my situation, with my concern?

Video Hierarchy: Hook, Content, Call to Action

Every video ad carries three functional zones, regardless of its total length. The hook earns attention. The content delivers the argument. The call to action directs the next step.

All three zones stay present and consistent with the copybook.

Video Structure by Format Length

Length	Hierarchy stage	Structural elements	Primary metric
6 seconds (bumper)	Awareness	Brand mark + one claim + visual hook; brand visible by second 2	Reach and brand recall
15 seconds	Knowledge to Liking	Problem (0-3s) + solution/claim (3-9s) + evidence cue (9-12s) + CTA (12-15s)	View-through rate and click-through rate
30 seconds	Preference to Conviction	Emotional hook (0-5s) + problem (5-10s) + solution (10-20s) + proof (20-26s) + CTA (26-30s)	Completed view rate and engagement rate
60+ seconds	Conviction to Purchase	Narrative arc: character, problem, transformation, evidence, testimonial, CTA; carries early drop-off risk	Conversion rate and cost per acquisition

Video Formats Across the Hierarchy

Creative Fatigue: Identification and Management

Creative fatigue occurs when repeated exposure to the same creative asset produces declining response rates. Fatigue signals an exhausted creative, separate from audience rejection of the offering itself.

Planning for fatigue ahead of launch is the professional standard.

Three Approaches to Managing Creative Fatigue

Approach 1: Creative rotation

Produce two or three versions of the primary asset. Each makes the same strategic claim while varying the hook, the visual arrangement, or the format length. Rotate them throughout the campaign on a defined schedule.

Approach 2: Frequency capping

Set a maximum number of exposures per individual per week. A cap of three per week means no individual audience member sees the same creative more than three times in seven days.

Approach 3: Scheduled creative refresh

Plan a new primary creative for a defined point in the campaign schedule, such as the halfway point or the transition between hierarchy stages. Schedule creative production before the campaign launches, well ahead of any fatigue showing in the data.

Fatigue indicators to monitor:

Click-through rate declining across successive weeks at constant impression volume
Video skip rate rising for TrueView ads that previously held strong view-through rates
Cost per click rising without a corresponding change in bid strategy
Engagement rate falling on social video placements without a change in audience targeting
Platform frequency data showing the average individual sitting above the effective frequency ceiling for the hierarchy stage

Mid-campaign review trigger: build a mid-campaign check into the placement brief. Define in advance what level of fatigue indicator triggers the creative rotation or refresh, ahead of waiting until the campaign already underperforms.

Evaluation Metrics: CTR, VTR, Conversions, and Assisted Conversions

A primary metric and two diagnostic metrics, named before launch, keep a mid-campaign result readable against a standard rather than argued about afterward.

Four metrics, four different questions.

Four Evaluation Metrics

Metric	Hierarchy Stage	What It Answers
Viewability	Any stage (a precondition)	Was the impression physically seen, at the IAB threshold
Click-through rate (CTR)	Knowledge to Preference	Did the creative and targeting earn a click to the landing page
View-through rate (VTR)	Awareness to Knowledge	Did the video hold attention to a defined completion point
Conversions	Conviction to Purchase	Did the placement produce the defined business outcome directly
Assisted conversions	Any stage (cross-channel)	Did the placement contribute to a conversion completed elsewhere

Theory-to-decision bridge: name one primary metric and two diagnostic metrics for each placement, matched to its hierarchy stage, and check assisted conversions before cutting a placement on direct conversions alone.

CTR answers whether the creative and targeting combination earns enough interest to move a viewer off the platform. It fits Knowledge-to-Preference display placements aimed at qualified traffic.

VTR answers whether a video holds attention long enough to deliver its claim, commonly measured at 25, 50, 75, and 100 per cent completion. It fits awareness-building video where a completed view stands in for message delivery.

Conversions answer whether the placement produces the actual business outcome, the right primary metric once a campaign reaches the Conviction-to-Purchase stage.

Assisted conversions matter because a placement with a low direct conversion rate can still be doing real work earlier in the funnel. Cutting a placement on direct conversions alone risks removing something that assists conversions attributed to search or direct traffic later in the same journey.

[Timing: 2 minutes]

Worked Examples: Three Campaign Categories

The same decision sequence, audience, bid, format, frequency, metric, applies regardless of category. Hold your own campaign next to whichever sits closest.

Certificate programme

Knowledge-to-Preference, central

In-market audience, CPC
15s skippable in-stream + retargeted display (CPA)
Cap 3/week, 70% viewability
Primary metric: CTR

Community marathon

Awareness, peripheral

Affinity audience, CPM
6s bumper + in-feed static
Cap 2/week, 50% viewability
Primary metric: VTR

Guesthouse

Preference, central

Custom audience, CPA
Display + 30s in-stream
Cap 3/week, 70% viewability
Primary metric: CTR

Applying the Evidence Framework to Placement Decisions

Placement decisions predict audience behaviour: that this audience, in this context, at this frequency, responds to this creative with the desired action. Each prediction rests on evidence, an inference, or an assumption.

“Our audience mainly uses YouTube” stands as an assumption unless traceable to a documented source.

Evidence Framework Applied to Placement Decisions

Table 1

Decision	Evidence basis	Assumption flag
Audience mechanism	Hierarchy stage matched to the mechanism whose signal strength fits that stage	Selected by default setting, separate from the hierarchy stage
Bid strategy	Campaign objective and conversion history matched to the strategy built for that objective	Left at platform default, separate from the campaign objective
Topics, keywords, exclusions	Prior placement report data; category-relevant negative keyword lists	No exclusion review process defined before launch
Format selection	Hierarchy stage and ELM route; media richness theory applied to the objective	Selected from team familiarity, separate from the message’s richness need
Platform and placement type	Documented platform audience data; platform-reported viewability benchmarks	Selected for the largest registered user base, absent segment-specific data
Reach and frequency targets	Target segment size estimate; hierarchy stage model	Set from budget alone, absent a documented reach model
Frequency cap	Published fatigue-threshold research; budget and duration constraints	Set from convention, absent a documented fatigue threshold
Viewability standard	IAB standard (50% pixels visible for 1 second); platform benchmark data	Left unspecified; any placement accepted regardless of viewability rate

Exit Ticket

Before you move into the tutorial, answer these three questions in writing:

What decision does your evidence support? (Name one placement decision in your brief, traceable to a documented source: a platform specification, a cited study, or a canvas entry.)
What remains uncertain? (Name one assumption in your placement brief, a predicted effective frequency, a viewability rate estimate, or a reach target, that remains unconfirmed by your own campaign data. State what would confirm or revise it.)
What ethical risk did you identify? (Name one situation in your placement plan where frequency, targeting, or format choice could cross from persuasion into imposition, and how your placement brief prevents it.)