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Wait, Wait, Don’t Skip: Capturing Attention with Creative

Featured Events | Nov 19, 2021 |

By Josephine Larbi, BS ’21, MS ’22

On September 29th, the Gabelli School marketing area held a virtual event “Wait, Wait, Don’t Skip: Capturing Attention With Creative” as part of the Industry Speaker Series. The event featured Esty Gorman, creative effectiveness lead at Google.

Prior to her seven years at Google, Gorman was the director of strategy at Iris in New York City where she worked with Adidas and other renowned brands. A Colgate University graduate, Gorman spoke with students about the power of YouTube and the significance of focusing on the consumer insights in order to be as effective as possible in her field of work.

The Creative Team

“A client has a message they want to get out – it needs to be as effective as possible”

Esty explained that you are trying to create an experience for viewers as they are interacting with the media. The better viewer experience that you create, the better it is for client results, and the better likelihood for retention. Esty currently focuses on the YouTube brand section of the Google company. As lead of her creative team – while also having her own YouTube channel – she has learned that experience is a huge part of truly understanding not only the client but determining the type of material they should put out, the process in which they do it, and how to successfully brand themselves. At Google, they go by a saying, which states, “the best media strategy is a great ad.”

Esty describes this as a process of experimenting because there is no way to fully understand or know how well an ad will do until you try it. The way clients can best indicate how well an ad might do is looking into YouTube analytics. This is the data acquired from digging into YouTube user information that allows analysts to see retention curves, what people are actually watching and what they are skipping.

While experimenting, clients often see that the ads they anticipate will do the best actually are contrary to the findings. She elaborates on this by providing a visual example of a Trident gum ad, showing how what one may assume is the best ad for this product was not what was shown, in terms of viewer analytics.

Become an Expert

“I can’t tell a client what to do if I can’t do it myself.”

In being more effective at her job, Esty’s personal YouTube channel featuring her daughter has taught her both the ins and outs of this experience.

“Because of that experience I was able to understand a lot about what is happening with viewership, and that helped me understand what I can then teach to clients. By digging into the data, I know… I was able to see what was happening. I know what scenes in my ads are actually resonating or not, so you can see that pink line – that’s where people are watching this in ad format versus not. You can see that when my husband’s voice gets really loud, that’s when people skip. Maybe they are on their phone or in public, I have no idea but something is happening there,” Gorman said.

“I can tell clients that same information. I can tell them what’s resonating; I can tell them what’s not. I also know who likes my content so I can tailor videos directly to them in the future. Most importantly, I know what my client feels like when they are putting their creative out there. The only class that teaches you how someone does something is by putting yourself in their shoes; so the message is ‘learn by doing.’”

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