The objective of this chapter is to understand how the use of a particular type of music may or may not capture the attention of the online user when viewing an ad and, perhaps, activate a click and an eventual conversion. An original advertisement was created to support this research and obtaining results through quantitative research in the form of an online questionnaire application. The way music can stimulate attention, memory, familiarity, the coherence of elements, rhythm, and personal tastes was analysed, as was understanding how these concepts interconnect with what the viewer visualises in an online advertising campaign. The ad was published on YouTube because in this social network there is only a short period of time of mandatory exposure of the ad to, consequently, lead to the conversion of the user to a landing page. It was concluded that the music of an online audiovisual campaign can induce the recipient's attention, confirming that the maximum optimization in an online advertising campaign occurs when the coherence of the music with the ad is prioritized.
TopIntroduction
Digital advertising today plays a leading role in the dissemination of content for virtual media. However, with advertising ubiquity, we are increasingly faced with an information overload that triggers automatic conditioning on the part of the viewer, developing a stimulus predisposed to ignore almost anything that constitutes an advertising message. Therefore, companies must implement more relevant and distinctive ad strategies, placing digital advertising in constant interaction with the apogee of the audiovisual aspect (Valdellós, 2011).
According to the consultancy firm PwC, cited by Julio (2019), about 30% of advertising content produced is disseminated through the online audiovisual aspect, with an exponential growth expected over the coming years, with a view to equal or even surpass traditional advertising in the maximum period of 5 years. This trend is already predicted within the digital media itself, where there has been a considerable increase in display ads (video and banners) in favour of more traditional ads (text) present in Google's search (eMarketer, 2016). Thus, we are beginning to observe a huge trend towards the supremacy of advertising communication in the form of video, proven by recent market studies released by Cisco (2021), where it was evidenced that around 81% of internet traffic is generated through video.
However, this boom in online advertising could not be so expressive without the growth of social networks that, according to SproutSocial (2021), are the main responsible for its colossal increase. When we check the figures released by Statista (2021b), we can understand the size of this market and the existing potential in terms of advertising. In October 2020, about 4.66 billion active internet users were registered, of which 4.14 billion actively used some social network every day. Furthermore, in the study conducted by Buffer (2019), 73% of brands said that their social media ad experiences were positive or very positive from a financial return point of view. Also, every year the percentage of internet users who use social media to search for products has increased substantially, which generates great opportunities for companies in terms of advertising, culminating in a percentage of 54% in the year 2019 (GlobalWebindex, 2019).
The study presented here in this chapter was applied to Youtube, something still little explored in the literature. Consequently, it is possible to understand if the mandatory exposure time may have a different impact from the one it could have if it was displayed in the regime of “non-blank videos”, techniques that are currently made available by Youtube for advertisers (Puccinelli, Wilcox, & Grewal, 2015).
However, results can only be achieved if we meet the theory of Herget, Schramm and Breves (2018), which exposes the relevance of the topic under study when they equate music to a powerful marketing tool that can influence the individual's purchasing decisions. In turn, Zoghaib (2019) points out that companies should adapt and understand this theme, as well as seek to apply this technique in their campaigns to increase the attention and predisposition of the user towards the ad. Thus, for the ad creator, the best way to avoid the Youtube ad being ignored will be to create a campaign that manages to establish a perfect audiovisual symbiosis (Tandyonomanu, 2018).
This study allows companies seeking to promote their products or services on the Youtube social network to understand whether the choice of music for one of their campaigns can substantially increase their click-through rate or not.