YouTube Korea wants you to skip 'skip ad'

Making consumers stay away from the "skip ad" button has become the real challenge in the world of media marketing these days.

From left: Kim Kyoung-hoon, Google Korea country director; Kim Jung-ah, chief creative officer at Innocean; and Park Hyun-woo, Innored CEO, on screen, during a press conference held Tuesday in eastern Seoul [YOUTUBE KOREA]

Making consumers stay away from the "skip ad" button has become the real challenge in the world of media marketing these days.

YouTube Korea on Tuesday held a press conference for its annual YouTube Works Awards at the S-Factory building in Seongsu-dong, eastern Seoul.

The YouTube Works Awards, in its fourth year in Korea, is a competition for creative advertising campaigns, hosted by YouTube in collaboration with Kantar, a research company. The event is currently held in over 20 countries worldwide.

During the press event, Kim Jung-ah, chief creative officer of local advertising company Innocean, and Park Hyun-woo, Innored CEO, emphasized that ad campaigns need to actually be worth watching in order to reach consumers nowadays as YouTube took to center stage in media marketing.

“I believe humbly admitting that people do not wish to watch advertisements anymore is the starting point of making a good ad campaign,” said Park.

Park explained that “YouTube gave individuals an option to watch the content or not” and, therefore, advertisers need to create an ad campaign well-made enough to be chosen by the consumers.

Kim also said that “it has become extremely difficult” to create an ad campaign amid the flood of content, adding that “when planning an ad campaign for YouTube, we try to consider the perspective of the consumers more than in the cases of other types of media."

Both Kim and Park participated as judges during this year’s awards ceremony.

This year's Grand Prix winner, which was announced later that day, was Samyang Foods' ad campaign by Studio K110 and SIDE9.

YouTube Korea set up a media art exhibition along with this year’s YouTube Works Awards Korea at S-Factory, which will last through Saturday.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]