OLV Advertising: Why Most Brands Get It Wrong

OLV advertising, or online video advertising, is the practice of running video ads across digital platforms including YouTube, connected TV, social media, and programmatic networks. Done well, it builds brand awareness at scale while maintaining the targeting precision that TV never offered. Done poorly, it burns budget on pre-roll that gets skipped in three seconds and delivers nothing.

The gap between those two outcomes is almost entirely strategic. And most brands are sitting closer to the second than they want to admit.

I spent years watching performance marketing get the lion’s share of budget because it produced numbers that looked clean on a dashboard. Video, particularly online video, always had to fight harder to justify its place. That tension is worth examining honestly, because OLV is neither the silver bullet its advocates claim nor the vanity spend its critics dismiss. It is a genuinely powerful channel when it is planned with the same commercial rigour you would apply to anything else in your go-to-market mix.

If you are working through how OLV fits into a broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider planning context that makes channel decisions like this one more defensible.

What OLV Advertising Actually Is (and Is Not)

OLV covers a wide range of formats. In-stream ads that play before, during, or after video content. Out-stream ads that appear within editorial content, often without sound. Bumper ads of six seconds or less. Rewarded video in gaming environments. Shoppable video on social platforms. Connected TV pre-roll delivered through programmatic pipes.

They share a medium but behave very differently in practice. A six-second bumper on YouTube and a 30-second unskippable CTV unit are not the same planning problem. Treating them as interchangeable is one of the most common mistakes I see in media plans, particularly from teams that have inherited a strategy rather than built one from scratch.

What OLV is not, despite how it is often sold, is a direct response channel. You can attach a CTA. You can run retargeting video sequences. You can use it to push people toward a landing page. But if your primary objective is cost-per-acquisition at volume, there are more efficient tools. OLV earns its budget by doing something those tools cannot: reaching people who were not already looking for you.

That distinction matters more than most performance-first organisations want to acknowledge. Go-to-market is getting harder partly because brands have spent years optimising for the bottom of the funnel while the top has been left to atrophy. OLV is one of the few digital channels that can genuinely address that problem at scale.

The First Three Seconds Are the Only Seconds You Own

Early in my agency career, I sat through a creative briefing where the client’s marketing team spent forty-five minutes debating the final five seconds of a thirty-second pre-roll ad. The brand reveal, the tagline, the end frame. Nobody in the room was talking about the first three seconds, which is the only part of the ad that a significant portion of the audience would actually see before hitting skip.

That is not a creative problem. It is a strategic misunderstanding of how the format works.

Skippable pre-roll on YouTube gives viewers the option to skip after five seconds. Out-stream ads often autoplay silently and get scrolled past in two. The implication is not that you should cram your entire message into three seconds. It is that your creative strategy has to be built around earning the next few seconds, and then the next, rather than assuming you have thirty seconds to make your case.

The brands that do this well open with something unexpected, visually arresting, or emotionally immediate. They do not open with a logo. They do not open with a product shot. They open with something that makes a viewer pause before reaching for the skip button. That is a craft problem, yes, but it starts with a strategic brief that acknowledges the viewing context honestly.

When I was running a larger team and we were managing significant video budgets across multiple clients, we started requiring that every OLV brief include a specific answer to the question: why would someone not skip this? Not “because it is interesting” or “because the creative is strong.” A specific answer grounded in audience psychology and the context in which the ad would appear. It improved creative output measurably.

Why OLV Targeting Is Frequently Miscalibrated

OLV platforms offer sophisticated targeting. Demographic, behavioural, contextual, intent-based, custom audience lists, lookalike modelling. The options are genuinely impressive. They are also frequently misused in ways that undermine the core purpose of video advertising.

The most common error is running OLV campaigns heavily weighted toward existing customers or recent site visitors. This happens because retargeting audiences are easy to build, performance metrics look better against warm audiences, and the path of least resistance in campaign setup defaults toward people who already know you.

But if someone already knows your brand, a video ad is not introducing them to anything. You are spending video CPMs to remind people who were probably going to come back anyway. I have seen this pattern in organisations doing what they call brand campaigns that are, in practice, retargeting campaigns with longer creative. The numbers look reasonable. The actual brand-building effect is minimal.

Growth, real growth, comes from reaching people who have not yet considered you. There is an analogy I come back to often: a customer who tries on a piece of clothing in a shop is far more likely to buy it than one who walks past the rack. The physical act of engagement changes the probability of purchase. OLV, at its best, is the digital equivalent of getting someone to try something on. But that only works on people who have not already tried it. Saturating your existing audience with video impressions is not brand building. It is expensive reassurance.

This connects to a broader point about market penetration strategy: sustainable growth comes from expanding your customer base, not just deepening relationships with people who are already buying. OLV targeting should reflect that ambition, which means being genuinely disciplined about suppressing existing customers and pushing reach into genuinely new audience pools.

The Measurement Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

I judged the Effie Awards for several years. One of the things that experience clarified for me is how rare it is for brands to measure the full effect of their marketing activity honestly. The entries that stood out were not the ones with the most impressive numbers. They were the ones that had thought carefully about what they were actually claiming to have caused, versus what had simply happened around the same time.

OLV measurement has a version of this problem that is particularly acute. View-through attribution, the practice of crediting a conversion to a video ad that was viewed but not clicked, is widespread and almost entirely misleading. If someone watches a pre-roll ad for your software product, then converts through a Google search three days later, most attribution models will give some credit to the video. Whether that credit is deserved depends on whether the video actually influenced the decision, which is almost impossible to determine from the data alone.

Last-touch models are worse. They credit whatever touchpoint preceded the conversion, which in most cases means search or direct traffic, and leave video with nothing. Both models are wrong in different directions.

The honest approach is to use OLV measurement as an approximation rather than a precise accounting. Brand lift studies, which measure awareness, recall, and consideration changes in exposed versus unexposed audiences, are more useful for video than conversion tracking. Incrementality testing, where you suppress OLV exposure for a holdout group and measure the difference in downstream behaviour, is more rigorous still. Neither is perfect. Both are more honest than view-through attribution.

Before committing significant budget to OLV, it is worth running a proper digital marketing due diligence process across your existing measurement infrastructure. If your attribution model cannot distinguish between correlation and causation in your current channels, adding OLV will compound the confusion rather than resolve it.

Platform Differences That Actually Matter in Planning

YouTube, Meta, TikTok, programmatic CTV, and endemic video placements are all technically OLV. They are not interchangeable in how they behave, what creative works on them, or what objectives they are suited to.

YouTube is the closest thing to traditional broadcast in digital video. Long-form content, high-intent search behaviour, and a user base that is actively watching rather than passively scrolling. It rewards longer creative that earns attention. It also has the most mature brand lift measurement infrastructure of any digital video platform.

Meta video, including Instagram Reels and Facebook in-feed, is a scroll environment. Sound is often off. Attention is fractional. Creative needs to be designed for that context, which usually means shorter, more visually immediate, and built to work without audio. The targeting capabilities are strong, particularly for consumer audiences, but the viewing context is fundamentally different from YouTube.

TikTok has a unique creative culture that resists conventional advertising formats more aggressively than any other platform. Ads that look like ads perform poorly. Content that feels native, that matches the platform’s aesthetic and pacing, performs significantly better. Working with creators is not optional on TikTok in the way it might be on other platforms. It is often the difference between an ad that gets skipped and one that gets shared.

Programmatic CTV is the most expensive on a CPM basis and the hardest to measure. It reaches audiences in a lean-back, full-screen, often unskippable environment that has more in common with linear TV than with digital social. Frequency capping is a genuine challenge because identity resolution across CTV devices is still imprecise. The risk of over-serving the same household repeatedly is real and often underestimated in planning.

Endemic advertising in vertical video contexts, such as healthcare, finance, or specialist trade publications with video inventory, deserves separate consideration. The audience targeting is often less sophisticated, but the contextual relevance can more than compensate. A financial services brand running OLV within a business news video environment is reaching an audience whose mindset is already aligned with the message. That context premium is real.

Where OLV Fits in a B2B Context

B2B marketers have historically underinvested in video advertising relative to their B2C counterparts. The assumption is that business buyers are rational, research-driven, and unaffected by brand-building activity. That assumption is increasingly hard to defend.

B2B purchase decisions involve multiple stakeholders, long consideration cycles, and significant uncertainty. In that environment, brand familiarity and trust play a larger role than most B2B marketers account for. A buyer who has seen your brand in video content over several months before they enter a formal procurement process is not starting from the same position as one encountering you for the first time in a search result.

The challenge in B2B OLV is that the audiences are smaller and the targeting is less precise. LinkedIn video advertising is expensive and the inventory is limited. YouTube targeting by job title or company size is available but imprecise. Programmatic B2B video through specialist data providers is more accurate but carries a significant CPM premium.

For B2B financial services specifically, where trust and credibility are the primary purchase drivers, video can do something that static display and search simply cannot: it can convey the character of an organisation. How people speak, how they explain complex ideas, what they choose to emphasise. Those signals matter to buyers making significant decisions. B2B financial services marketing is an area where OLV is genuinely underutilised relative to its potential impact.

B2B technology companies face a similar dynamic. Corporate brand and business unit messaging often pull in different directions, which makes video briefing particularly complicated. Getting alignment on what the video is actually saying, and to whom, before production starts is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a campaign that builds something and one that confuses the market. A clear corporate and business unit marketing framework is the foundation that makes OLV briefing tractable in complex organisations.

How OLV Connects to the Rest of Your Funnel

OLV does not operate in isolation. Its value is partly intrinsic, the awareness and consideration it builds, and partly in how it changes the performance of everything downstream.

When I was overseeing a significant growth phase at an agency, we ran an experiment across several clients where we deliberately increased OLV investment and held search spend flat. In every case, branded search volume increased. Cost per acquisition on search campaigns fell. Direct traffic lifted. The OLV was not showing up in last-touch attribution reports, but it was clearly doing something. The downstream channels were performing better because more people had been introduced to the brand before they started searching.

That is the relationship that most performance-first organisations struggle to account for. They see search and social performance metrics and attribute them to search and social optimisation. The reality is often more complicated. Brand investment, including OLV, creates a warmer pool of potential buyers that makes every downstream channel more efficient. Stripping it out to save budget often produces short-term savings and medium-term deterioration in performance metrics that gets blamed on the wrong variables.

For organisations running account-based or appointment-driven models, the connection is even more direct. Pay-per-appointment lead generation programmes perform better when the target accounts have had prior brand exposure. A cold outreach to an account that has never encountered your brand is a fundamentally different proposition to one where the prospect has seen your video content in their feed over the preceding weeks. OLV can be the warm-up act that makes the direct response effort more effective.

Before you can plan that integration properly, you need a clear picture of how your current digital presence is performing. A structured analysis of your company website for sales and marketing strategy will surface the gaps that OLV needs to bridge, and the landing experiences that video traffic will encounter when it arrives.

The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the broader channel integration questions that sit around OLV planning, including how to sequence channel investment as you move from early growth into scale.

What Good OLV Planning Actually Looks Like

I remember the first time I was handed full responsibility for a major video brief without a safety net. The founder of the agency had walked out of the room for a client call and literally passed me the whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm. The internal voice was immediate: this is going to be difficult. But the discipline that situation forced, having to think clearly and fast without someone more senior to defer to, is probably where I learned more about what actually matters in video strategy than in any formal training.

What matters is not the platform selection or the format mix or the targeting parameters, though all of those matter. What matters first is being honest about what you are trying to change in the audience. Awareness. Consideration. Preference. Purchase intent. Each of those requires a different creative approach, a different success metric, and a different media strategy. Conflating them produces campaigns that are optimised for nothing in particular.

Good OLV planning starts with a single clear objective. It then builds creative strategy around the viewing context, not around what the brand wants to say. It sets measurement frameworks before the campaign launches, not after. It distinguishes between reach-focused and frequency-focused phases of the campaign. And it connects OLV performance to downstream metrics honestly, using incrementality rather than attribution as the primary lens.

Growth-focused marketing teams often resist this kind of rigour because it slows down execution. The argument is that speed of iteration matters more than planning precision. That is sometimes true in performance channels where you can test and optimise in real time. It is much less true in video, where production costs are real, campaign windows are finite, and the cost of a misaligned brief shows up weeks after you can do anything about it.

The brands that consistently get OLV right are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated technology stacks. They are the ones that have taken the time to understand what the channel is actually good at, and have built their strategy around that understanding rather than around what the channel can be made to look like it is doing.

That is a discipline that applies across every channel decision. Go-to-market strategy at its best is about making clear-eyed choices about where to invest and why, not about maximising activity across every available channel simultaneously.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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