Mobile users in Korea watch YouTube on smartphones. For these consumers, LG U+, a mobile telecom company in Korea, wanted to give an offer to these mobile users.

The offer was to use the YouTube Premium service for 3 months free of charge. As you know, when you sign up for YouTube Premium you do not have to watch ads on YouTube.

In order to engage customers to subscribe to the service, we needed a YouTube ad. For instant subscription to the service, we had to lead the viewers to click on the overlay button to land on the subscription page instead of the original skip button. But who would click on the overlay button instead of the skip button?

The big mission we had was to create an immediate reaction from the viewers to land on the subscription page instead of just showing an ad.

YouTube viewers do not want to be bothered with watching an ad in front of the content they wish to see. Therefore, they always are prepared to click on the skip ad button. We used this insight of the viewer’s tendency to create our message. The message that attracted a lot of attention from the viewers was “This is an ad that stops ads for you.”

In order to create an immediate response from the viewers, we created an overlay button with the offer to skip ads for three months to further not see any ads on YouTube.

The focused attention to the original skip ad button was redirected to “skip ads for 3 months” button by using an image of arrow and lights. This creative strategy worked. The viewers who were about to click on the original skip ad button turned to “skip ads for 3 months” overlay button.

YouTube viewers hate an ad that stops watching their content. By this viewers always want to press the skip ad button. Our strategy was to use these viewers’ behavior. The copy we used was “This is an ad that stops ads for you.” By analyzing various YouTube categories of interests, 155 different ads were created with different video contents matching to different interests of our target audiences. For example for those who are interested in music, we shown the message “This is an ad that stops ads from watching K-Pop.” And for those interested in football, we attracted the attention of viewers by showing “This is an ad that stops the ad from watching football.” We engaged immediate response from the viewers to click on the “skip ads for 3 months” button if not wanting to see any ad when watching on YouTube.

155 different ads were made based on YouTube target audiences in order to engage viewers to the copy ‘This is an ad that stops ads for you.” If we were to use YouTube’s Director Mix solution, it would have been easier to create different variations of ad content. But to achieve a more effective result, we created 155 different ads by placing different images and messages matching to different target audiences’ interests.

Also knowing that the size and location of the overlay and original skip ads button on Android and IOS devices are different, we created video ads meeting each standards. By device targeting, we made sure that video ad and overlay button different per operating system are matched.

Subscription Page View: 3.2 million

Unique Visitors Count: 1.4 million

Overlay button achieved an average CTR of 1%. Compared to an average CTR of 0.3%, overlay button, it achieved the record high as 230%.

Total service subscribers: 3.6 million [KPI 227% overachieved]

Ranked first place on televised commercial categories on Korean ad ranking site for 41 days.