Google Advertising

Right message, right medium, right audience: Paramount Vantage uses video ads to open An Inconvenient Truth.

Paramount Vantage, the specialty film division of Viacom, used video ads on the Google Network of content sites for the launch of An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary film from former Vice President Al Gore. The 100-minute film illustrates the damage global warming has caused and communicates the need to reverse its effects.

Through the use of video ads, Paramount Vantage was able to run a targeted online campaign that complemented its offline marketing efforts and drove viewers to the box office.

Marketing objectives

Build awareness of the film
Drive viewers to the theaters, particularly on opening weekend

Online objectives

Complement overall marketing strategy with awareness-building
Reach specific audience segments who:
love independent film
are politically conscious
are environmentally conscious

Approach
Using site targeting (a feature of AdWords that enables advertisers to select sites from the Google Network on which to advertise), the Paramount Vantage team developed three campaigns that reached three audience segments: independent film lovers, the politically-conscious and the environmentally-conscious. In total, the studio was able to select hundreds of different sites encompassing these segments.

Paramount Vantage chose to run video ads as the main creative format to leverage the movie trailer, which the studio believed to be their strongest creative asset. They hoped to get the influencers within the targeted segments to respond to the trailer by seeing the film early and creating positive buzz.

According to Andrew Lin, Paramount Vantage's VP of Interactive Marketing, Google's targeted video ads provided many benefits over other forms of on- and offline media:

Scale-based buy. "It would be impossible to contract with all the sites [we wanted] for ad placement. Through one buy with Google, we were able to be everywhere we wanted to be."
Relevance. "What better way to reach these target segments?" Lin asks. "I could not ask for better placement. We were able to choose where the video trailer played, and it was on sites that were highly relevant to our target audiences." He also believes that "Pull marketing – getting people to click to play relevant content – is much more effective than push marketing or auto-play ads."
Cost effective. "Targeted video ads performed better than untargeted homepage placements," states Lin. "Site targeting was more cost-effective than advertising on bigger sites and portals for a much, much lower cost," states Lin.

"Consumers want choice," Lin concludes. "Prior to this product, there was no way to reach a targeted audience on this scale with video ads."

Results
The impact of Paramount Vantage's marketing campaign exceeded the team's goals:

Exit surveys showed that of opening weekend attendees, 33 percent heard about the movie online.
The movie broke the all-time per screen record for any documentary movie in history, and broke the all-time per-screen record for any movie opening on Memorial Day weekend.
It grossed 30 to 50 percent higher per screen than the average film.

Google Video Ads
Video is one of the four ad formats (Flash, text, image are the others) supported by the Google content network. Video ads are user-initiated – requiring the user to hit play before the ads begin to play. Advertisers can run video ads on either a CPC or CPM basis across the content network.

About Google Content Network
The Google Network of content sites is the largest advertising network on the web, reaching 69% of all Internet users. content targeting puts your ad on relevant pages across the thousands of sites in the Network. For more information visit: http://adwords.google.com/select/afc.html.

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“Through one buy with Google, we were able to be everywhere we wanted to be.”

Andrew Lin
Paramount Vantage
VP of Interactive Marketing

“Prior to this product, there was no way to reach a targeted audience on this scale with video ads.”