Over the last year or so, I’ve made some serious efforts to reduce my screen time — at least on the socials that offer endless scrolling. With my newfound free time (time that I’d gained back from the cursed social apps), I found myself diving deeper into a couple of my hobbies: sewing and interior decorating.
Enter: Long-Form Content!
In these deep dives, I typically ended up on YouTube, stumbling upon some lovely creators who produce content like “upcycling old t-shirts and making them awesome again (sewing vlog),” and “How to do a Bedroom Makeover without buying ANYTHING new,” which typically averaged 30-40 minutes per video. I would play these videos on my phone as I sewed my own projects or spent time organizing and designing my space, of course, occasionally being interrupted by the classic skippable ads.
Around March of this year, I started noticing something different about these ads: the sticky banner that would appear in the bottom left corner of the screen after I clicked that delicious little “skip” button. As someone working in Paid Search marketing, I naturally became curious about these little banners, seen here:
After I had clicked “skip” on the Chewy.com ad previous to this section of the video, this sticky banner showed up. The only way to clear these banner ads is to click the three dots next to the CTA button and hit “dismiss,” though sometimes it will time out on its own and disappear.
Now, this new feature is still in its early days and may only be a test, so we can’t know for sure how widespread these types of ads will become. But even in test form, we do know that they’ve changed the meaning of a skipped ad. If “skip” no longer means the ad fully goes away, what does that mean for advertisers, for viewers, and the value of skippable ads themselves?
This is exactly where I started to feel split. As a viewer, I found it annoying; it takes up valuable real estate on your already small screen, often covering subtitles or important pieces of content. But as someone who works in PPC, I also get it. From an advertiser’s perspective, this bit of real estate helps with brand recall — even if someone skips the video ad, the brand still gets a little more time on screen with its logo, product name, and a CTA button that links right to the product or service being advertised. For a company like Chewy.com, that extra reminder could be enough to make someone click, search later, or simply remember the brand the next time they need pet supplies.
So, the question becomes:
- Is this a smart way to make skipped ads more impactful?
- And is the annoyance it thrusts upon the viewer worth it?
- Further, is annoyance a valuable tool to set yourself apart within the attention economy of the internet?
I did a little experiment myself, trying to recall all the brands that displayed these sticky post-skip banner ads — and to my begrudging surprise, I was able to remember quite a long list: Chewy.com, Thumbtack, Ruggable, Liberty Mutual, Ridwell, etc. Also included on this list was a local restaurant whose ads I had been forced to skip many times. Mind you, I have never seen this restaurant in person or even heard of it through friends. From experience, I knew that their YouTube video ad was generated or created in the Google Ads platform, so the ad itself wasn’t anything particularly memorable or special — but because I had to either choose to dismiss their sticky banner ad, or wait for it to time out and disappear from in front of my beloved long-form content, the name stuck. The ad did at least one part of its job: it made the restaurant’s name memorable enough for me to Google it later.
In this little thought exercise, I encountered a bit of a lightbulb moment. Is it the annoyance that made this brand recall possible? Or could it be the fact that I had to actually engage with the ad itself for a second time? Or maybe it’s a potentially genius combination of instilling a feeling within the viewer, forcing a second moment of attention, and providing extended time on screen that does it. And then how does the frequency of this multi-factor pattern play into brand recall? It’s hard to say for sure, but each of these elements seem to have been important in my own recall of a brand I had never known before.
Being bombarded with so many ads constantly, especially when consuming long-form content, I often end up watching the timer at the bottom of the screen, waiting for it to tick down to skippable territory, instead of paying attention to the ad. Those five seconds alone don’t seem to move the needle on brand recall — in trying to remember skipped ads that didn’t have a sticky banner, my mind’s eye is full of flashing jumbles of imagery and “Shop our Memorial Day Sale” verbiage, but no specific brands stand out.
That’s what makes these sticky banners so interesting to me, because they don’t necessarily make the ad better, or more relevant, or more persuasive — they just make it harder to fully ignore. And, at least in my very unscientific sample size of one, that was enough to make certain brands stick.
So, if you’re wondering how to log into Google Ads and set up sticky banners for YouTube mobile after a skippable ad, the short answer is that you can’t, at least in the current form that this test is taking. There doesn’t appear to be a way for advertisers to intentionally stake their claim of this valuable real estate on phone screens, signaling that these sticky banners are a product of Google’s modern, AI-driven campaign types, specifically Video, Performance Max and Demand Gen. And because of this, it also means that you don’t get to design it yourself, leaving Google’s algorithm in charge of dynamically putting together assets on the fly after a viewer hits that “skip” button.
And for my fellow data-nerds out there hoping to analyze the performance of these banners, the reporting is even more elusive. Google blocks every effort in trying to segment your data by how many people clicked on this element by burying that engagement under the giant, unhelpful umbrella called “cross-network clicks.” It’s the ultimate modern PPC paradox: a feature that drives massive nebulous brand recall, but it’s hidden inside a total black box with no clear ways to micromanage it.
Ultimately, these sticky banner ads force us to face a strange discomfort inherent to the reality of today’s attention economy: that sometimes friction works. By making it a tiny bit harder to get back to our beloved long-form sewing or interior design vlogs, brands are successfully sanding down our defenses and sticking themselves into our short-term memory. That friction, that annoyance, that extra few seconds where we have to make a decision to tap and dismiss, or wait for the banner to disappear on its own, is where Google’s genius lies: weaponizing our own impatience against us to force a brand name into our memory.
Of course, as a viewer, I’m still going to roll my eyes as I click “dismiss” on that Chewy.com banner every time it blocks my subtitles. But as a PPC strategist, I have to give credit where credit is due: YouTube found a way to make a skipped ad stick. And whether we like it or not, it’s working.
