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Matt Houseal

Dr. Charles Jobs

MK-325-01 Advertising & Promotional Communication

December 4, 2015

YouTube TrueView: “Decide to Care” Campaign

Target Market Segment

The target market I have selected strongly reflects the DeSales’ student population in terms of location, race, age, sex, religion, etc. The TrueView advertisement will be broadcasted to Southeastern Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey, two regions with the highest concentrations of DSU students. East/Southeast PA will include the following counties: Bucks, Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery, Chester, Franklin, Adams, Cumberland, York, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lebanon, Berks, Bucks, Lehigh, and Northampton. By choosing this area, we will be reaching the largest audience as 8 of the 10 most populous counties in PA are in Southeastern PA. Northern NJ will include the following counties: Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Passaic, Sussex, and Warren. This ad will target all races in these areas because DeSales is always looking to diversify its student population of 81.6% Caucasian, 11.5% Hispanic, and 6.9% other minority individuals. In the ad, races will be portrayed equally to attract a rich demographic.

The advertisement will appeal to both males and females, since DeSales is currently 57% female and 43% male. Male and female students portrayed in the ad will be equally distributed, with a heavier focus on male athletics due to our recent athletic expansion, now in an attempt to strengthen the male population. The intended age group for the commercial will be between 17-30, with high school students in the college search process, young adults looking to transfer, and non-traditional students looking to participate in the ACCESS or MBA programs. The ad will also target the age range of 40-65, the age spectrum of the majority of college student parents and many ACCESS/MBA program participants. It is important to not only target the students that are looking at colleges, but also the decision makers and bill payers who have a high degree of external influence in this process. Out of the adult population, households which make more than $75,000 annually will be targeted as DeSales tuition may by unaffordable for some. In the 2015-2016 school year, resident tuition is $48,178 and commuter tuition is $37,888. Since DeSales is a Catholic institution offering a Salesian education, we want to reach the Catholic demographic as most students come from a prior religious education at private high schools.

This advertisement will reach the target market segment through a YouTube TrueView in-stream video, in which the ad can be skipped after 5 seconds. By using this service, we can specify our viewing demographic in terms of age, gender, and parental status before video release. We can also identify them through their searched interests, where we can filter through

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different provided categories, such as: education, college athletics, religion, etc. to make ourselves as visible as possible. We can also use more exact keyword searches, such as: Catholicism, DeSales, college, division three college sports, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc.

Format

Our TrueView ad will run pre-roll. This means that the commercial will be shown before the content and the user will then have 5 seconds to choose to opt out of viewing the ad. I believe the first restaurant scene will be alluring and unique enough that it will entice our audience to watch the full ad to see what product or service is being offered. Mid-roll ads are usually found in longer videos, which would limit our viewing audience regarding the length of videos they watch. Instead, pre-roll ads catch the viewer off-guard and have the opportunity to draw them in.

One form of pre-roll advertising can be seen in the in-stream ads we will be utilizing. As previously mentioned, the user can choose to skip the advertisement after 5 seconds of watching. This seems to be the most appropriate format for a scripted 30 second video, as opposed to in-display or in-search advertisements. In these two settings, the way you are charged remains relatively the same, you pay for views or interactions, but the video format would leave the most effective impression through 5 seconds of visual stimulation.

The Script

Our “Decide to Care” script will reflect a 30 second video commercial. The first scene will be at a staged restaurant set in the DeSales University Center between a young, teenage couple. After being asked what she would like to order, the young woman gives an odd response, causing the two gentlemen to share a confusing look. The second scene, shot in Billera, shows a fictional, college basketball team in a huddle with their coach looking at a scoreboard showing the other team’s 20 point lead at halftime. When the point guard asks the coach for instruction and gets an alarming reply, the team looks puzzlingly at each other. In the third scene, a man in his late 20’s is found popping the question to his girlfriend, and finds her astonishing response to be neither yes nor no. This leads to the phrase, “When you have a choice, decide to care”.

Accompanied by “feel good” guitar music, a compilation of photos of DeSales students, faculty, and campus will be shown while an announcer gives information about the school. In the first three scenarios, someone was faced with a decision at a different stage in their life. Whether big or small, it was imperative that each individual had the responsibility to consciously reflect and genuinely care about their choice. Choosing where to spend the next 4 to 5 years of your life is typically the biggest decision a young adult is faced with. This process involves caring, and as much as they care about their final choice, we care about their academic, social, and religious future with us. “When you have a choice, decide to care. Think DeSales”.

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Call to Action

CTA’s or Call-to-Action Overlays are provided in YouTube TrueView in-stream ads and urge our audience to take an interest in DeSales at the beginning of the video. Through the CTA overlay, we can request that users go a step further. He or she is prompted to learn more about DeSales, follow us on Twitter @DeSales, or set up a campus tour. If the commercial has its intended effect, the viewer will start researching DeSales or connect with us on social media. We can quantify our success by the increased number of campus visits and the number of new followers on social media. DeSales, a member of Twitter since 2008, currently has 2,709 followers. If that number reaches 3,000 followers in one year and the number of tours increases by a similar 10%, this marketing campaign can be considered a working success.

If our TrueView advertising is showing positive results and brings in a substantial number of new visitors and new Twitter followers, we can eventually expand our marketing to both in-stream and in-display formats. After reaching our audience through videos, we can also have a larger presence on sidebars and YouTube partner sites. This would once again only be successful if our profits increase over the course of one year, hopefully giving our budget room for future expansion.

Measurement of Success

TrueView video ads are priced by bidding through Cost-Per-View, or CPV. When working with AdWords, a Google service, we pay for video views, Call to Actions, and other interactions. With the in-stream formatting, we pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of our video or engages with our video, whichever comes first. We set a maximum bid, or the most we’ll be charged for an impression, and watch our ad move up in rank to reach more viewers. Regional CPV bids range from $0.10-$0.30. In this strategy, DeSales will pay $0.22 as a max bid in order to reach 36,360 viewers. This will maximize our viewing capabilities while supporting our video with an above average rank for a fighting chance. This was calculated considering a $10,000 budget, with $2,000 spent on production, and $295.95 spent on music: 36,360 x 0.22 = 7,700.20. To have in-stream, 30 second ad exposure to over 36,000 people in our sought-after demographic would be well worth the bidding price. Also, at any time we can adjust our bid to reflect recent Internet traffic, and new promotional or seasonal campaigns.

Content Generation

We will contract with local ASR Media Productions, a video productions agency headquartered in Bethlehem, PA to shoot our advertisement. ASR Media has experience working with college commercial production through past Cedar Crest College projects. DeSales University’s ad will be a high quality video with distinguishable clarity in both sight and sound. Our school is a respectable institution, and the quality of our advertisement should reflect the quality of our character. We will allocate $2,000 of our $10,000 budget to professional production and editing. Thankfully, we will save money by using only DeSales students and

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faculty in the production, and by shooting the first three “confusing looks” scenes on-campus instead of at public venues.

Though the first three scenes consist of simply dialogue in terms of audio, the collection of DeSales pictures is accompanied by “Black Sunglasses” by “Mdeman”. This music has a relaxed, positive theme with acoustic guitar, piano, and light percussion. Its television advertising license, for national commercial broadcast, can be purchased for $295.95 on AudioMicro.com, a legal stock audio library of discounted musical compilations. This music will softly play in the background for the last 18 seconds of the 30 second advertisement, accompanying the script, read by a male, DeSales student with a deep voice.

Our budget is as follows:

$7,700 spent on YouTube TrueView advertising with a vacillating bid around $0.22 $2,000 spent on high-quality video production through ASR Media Productions$299.95 towards the “Black Sunglasses” television advertising license from AudioMicro $9,999.95 total