YouTube is shooting video ads for companies to run on its site

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YouTube is gunning to get more small business advertisers and it's enlisting professional filmakers to make it happen.

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In six US cities, YouTube is sending professional videographers to help small business owners write, shoot, and produce video advertisements for free as long as they commit to spending $150 on the site. 

For reference, the average cost of a small business marketing video in San Francisco is about $500, according to SmartShoot. 

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Filmmakers will spend one to two hours working with business owners to write a script that fits in one of YouTube's templates and two to three hours shooting and editing the video. Then, YouTube will deploy an ads specialist. 

The Director Onsite service is available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, and Atlanta. 

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YouTube also just rolled out a new app called YouTube Director that makes it easy for small business owners to make their own video ads.

Small businesses  represent an important advertising opportunity for companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat. YouTube has coaxed many big advertisers into spreading some of their TV ad budgets to the web, but small businesses are more of an untapped opportunity and the surge of digital video has both YouTube and Facebook scrambling to find ways to make video ads and other immersive formats easy to create. 

Digital advertising is expected to hit $77.4 billion next year, passing TV for the first time, according to eMarketer. 

Here's an ad made with Director Onsite:

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