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Friday, May 1, 2009
Video Views
YouTube growing up as an advertising medium
MHT Editor Doug Banks on NECN: How companies are using social media
MHT Editor Doug Banks on NECN: Decoding the Gen Y workforce
Making Mass. a mini-Hollywood: Efrain Viscarolasaga on NECN
More businesses seeking new marketing solutions are trying YouTube’s advertising products.
According to Advertising Age, YouTube is now selling ads against 8.7 percent of its 5.3 billion video views in the U.S., which is up from 6 percent just one year ago. While parent company Google Inc. won’t disclose the rate, Google spokesperson Victoria Katsarou said their video portal is “monetizing hundreds of millions of video views in the U.S. every month and seeing a lot of progress and momentum” toward adoption of YouTube by advertisers.
According to Katsarou, 70 of the top 100 advertisers are now on Google’s video sharing site, purchasing branded channels, contests, mastheads, banner ads, in-video overlay ads, and using an assortment of YouTube marketing tools.
Big brand agencies appear to have figured out the viral video formula, using promotions to jump-start viral forwarding. Boston video measurement company Visible Measures Inc. is keeping track of the most popular agency videos, teaming up with Ad Age Digital to publish a top-ten weekly chart.
Results show that to win at this game it helps to have a dancing gecko (Geico), extreme sheep (Samsung), dancing eyebrows (Cadbury), talking filet-o-fish (McDonald’s), or talking babies (eTrade). A Geico video featuring the insurance company’s gecko and YouTube lip-sync celebrity “Numa Numa Guy” garnered nearly 1.5 million views just two weeks after it was released March 23.
Geico used YouTube’s Promoted Videos to give their video a nudge, according to Katsarou. Like Google’s Ad Words, the Promoted Videos product, released last October, allows advertisers to bid on keywords that people search on to find a video. “YouTube is not just about watching videos; it’s about searching for videos,” said Katsarou, who added that YouTube is the now world’s second largest search engine after Google.
Google product manager Tracy Chan believes YouTube is well positioned to serve advertisers as more consumers use the Web during the recession and search for ways to save money. “Rest assured,” said Chan, “that the consumers you want to target will be on YouTube since our community is as large as the fourth largest country in the world.”
With or without an ad spend, any video producer can use YouTube analytics to hone online video skills. The free program “Insight” goes beyond view counts to show demographic as well as video attention data. According to Katsarou, “analytics is an area where YouTube is going to open up its platform and experience a lot of development.”
YouTube still has a long way to go before it returns search results that are as useful as they may be entertaining. But even at this time, when many marketers can use a laugh, YouTube is looking more like a serious marketing solution.
Denise de Murcie is director of brand management at Liberty Medical Supply Inc. She can be reached at ddemurcie@gmail.com.
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