YouTube Helps Small Businesses Create Pre-Roll Ads With Its Director Suite

Through programs like Google Preferred, YouTube has encouraged big-name brands and top ad agencies to buy its pre-roll advertising space. Now, through a new toolkit, the world’s largest video site is reaching out to less spendy advertisers, too. It has launched YouTube Director, a suite of offerings that are all aimed at small businesses.

The two most attractive tools in the Director suite are a mobile app that lets potential advertisers film their own spots and an onsite production service that does the heavy lifting itself. Through the app, business owners, with the help of preset templates, can put together their own videos. They can then submit their work to an AdWords expert who can help them place it on YouTube. Here, courtesy of a Los Angeles barbershop, is an example of an ad filmed with the YouTube Director app:

Director’s onsite offering pairs business owners with local filmmakers, who create pre-roll videos based on templates provided by YouTube. The business owners then work with YouTube to push their ads live. According to YouTube, the entire onsite process takes less than a day from start to finish.

The Director app is available for free on the App Store. The onsite service is also free, but it comes with a catch: Business owners must pledge to spend at least $150 on YouTube advertisements. The best result, from YouTube’s point of view, is that brands see the value of pre-roll ads and commit to additional ad buys in the future.

The ads produced by YouTube’s onsite teams are informative but unspectacular, so we’ll see how much small business stand to gain from Director. The onsite program is available in six American cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, and New York.