Most marketers think of video and display as two separate things. You run video on YouTube or LinkedIn, and you run banners everywhere else, and the banners are static. So when I tell a client they can put video inside an ordinary display banner, the one that’s already sitting on the pages their buyers read, the reaction is usually that they didn’t know that was possible. It is, and it’s one of the more useful options hiding in plain sight.
The appeal is simple. The video plays right there on the page, no click required, while the buyer is already reading something else. You’re adding motion to display inventory you may well be buying anyway, and motion is what carries the character and feeling that makes a brand stick. It’s a way to get some of video’s memory-building effect into a placement that would otherwise be a flat image.
Where it fits in the bigger picture
This isn’t a replacement for video on LinkedIn or YouTube, and it shouldn’t be sold as one. Those channels are where you target precisely and where the film does its main job. The video banner is a complement: it extends that same memory-building work across the wider web, on the sites your buyers visit between the moments they’re on LinkedIn or watching YouTube.
Think of it as keeping the film working in the background. A buyer who saw your video ad on LinkedIn last week, and then catches a few seconds of motion from the same campaign on an industry site they’re reading, is being reminded by something they don’t even have to choose to watch. In a long B2B cycle, that quiet repetition is exactly the kind of presence that decides who gets remembered.
There’s a ladder, not a single option
The thing worth knowing is that there isn’t one way to do this, there are a few, and they sit on a ladder from simple to advanced. At the easy end, you can run video in a responsive display ad with almost no barrier to entry, starting from a tiny daily budget, with the film hosted on YouTube and slotted into the banner automatically. It’s the sensible place for most companies to begin.
Further up the ladder you get full control over how the video looks and plays, built directly into a custom banner with no YouTube involvement. It’s more powerful and more flexible, but it comes with higher requirements around budget and account access. And at the simplest end of all, if you don’t have a video at all, a looping animated banner gives you movement without any film at all.
I’m deliberately not turning this into a setup manual, because the formats and their requirements are exactly the kind of detail where the wrong choice quietly wastes money. The point is just that the option scales. You don’t need the advanced version to start, and you don’t need to commit to the whole thing to find out whether motion on display does anything for you.
Where to begin
If you’re already buying display, this is close to free upside: the same placements, with motion added, doing a bit of the memory work your static banners can’t. Start with the simple version, see whether it lifts the things video is supposed to lift, and step up the ladder only if it earns its place.
What’s not obvious from the outside is which rung you should be on, given your budget, your account setup, and what you actually want the video to do. That’s the judgement call, and it’s the part worth getting right before you spend anything. The format is accessible. Matching it to your situation is where the value is.
That closes out the channels I set out to cover, with one exception I’ve saved for last. In the next post I’ll turn to Meta, the channel most B2B marketers write off too quickly, and explain why that instinct is usually wrong.
If you in the meantime want to discuss effective marketing, just reach out to:
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
