Has YouTube Lost the Plot?

YouTube started advertising in London today on the most famous and expensive piece of advertising real estate in the land ~ Piccadilly Lights. Only 50 brands have ever advertised on this space in Piccadilly Circus since it was first introduced in 1955, a space historically dominated by just five brands ~ Coca-Cola, Samsung, TDK, McDonalds and Hyundai. I took this photo on my walk into work and couldn't stop thinking about it as I was having my morning flat white. YouTube advertising here both troubles and baffles me for a number of reasons. Let me explain...

This ad space sells for approx. ￡2m (based upon the rate that Hyundai paid for a similar position last year). Official figures from the managing agents of Piccadilly Lights show a number of impressive statistics about the site:

• 71,760,000 Pedestrians walk past the site each year
• 3,560,544 People pass the lights each year
• 23,218,936 People view the ads from coaches or buses each year
• 3,130,608 Cars pass through Piccadilly Circus each year
• 767 Square Meters of advertising space
• 774,144 Pixels in the Coca-Cola sign

What bothers me most about this whole situation though, is not the flakey metrics and numbers that media companies often use to sell high-profile ad space, but what drove YouTube to invest in such a site in the first place? The sceptical part of me hopes that they found some money down the back of the sofa and they had to spend before the end of their quarter to avoid tax, but I suspect the real truth lies in something to do with "brand awareness". This being the primary metric for global brand advertisers such as Coke, Samsung and Hyundai, why should we critisize YouTube for thinking the same way? I did a quick calculation while I was having my coffee...

The YouTube ad in Piccadilly Circus will generate approx 71.8m views a year. YouTube.com generates that many views EVERY MINUTE".

So what to make of this?

Being a digital marketer, it's easy to jump on the bandwagon and make fun of expensive "traditional media" campaigns, but I think this conversation should serve to remind all marketers of five very important points;

1. Traditional media still has a significant role to play when awareness (more than preference) is the primary campaign objective.
2. TV is still the most powerful channel to deliver brand awareness for global brands (for now). Just make sure that when the conversation flips to Twitter, you know exactly where those conversations originated from.
3. It's not fair to critisize any medium until you know exactly what that media cost in comparison to other channels
4. The old maxim of "50% of my advertising is working, I just don't know which half" doesn't apply anymore. Marketing technology is now sufficiently advanced to prove (in most cases), exactly which half of your advertising worked and which didn't.
5. MOST IMPORTANT --> The more channels you use to execute your brand campaigns, the more crucial it is to measure the (exact) value and impact of every view, click, like, click or share. If you don't know how to do this, find out. Fast. Before you lose your budget (or your job).

Does YouTube really need traditional media? Google is already spending heavily on TV ads, so Piccadilly Lights could just be another part of their marketing mix, raising awareness for their eco-system as a whole, (not just YouTube). Facebook experimented with TV prior to their IPO but they haven't run a "traditional" campaign since. They wanted to raise awareness for a purpose; to affect their valuation ~ but YouTube doesn't need to run such campaigns. I've always thought that traditional media needs YouTube more than YouTube needs traditional media. Am I missing something? It's a good debate...

According to a new BI Intelligence report (sorry, US figures), YouTube is especially valuable to TV advertisers who want to reach millennials. The online video platform reached more U.S. adults 18 to 34 years-old than any cable network. YouTube beat out ESPN, Hulu, Facebook and Comedy Central as the top place to consume content amongst millennials.

YouTube now reaches more 18-24 year olds than any cable TV network".

The Case of Traditional v Social Media

Consider this similar example that I saw last year, in an old copy of TIME magazine from 1965. I like collecting old books and vintage magazines and this ad really struck me...

It turns out that TIME were very proud of themselves 50 years ago, because 1965 was the year that they published 50m words in a single year. Impressive.

Being a social marketer, my first instinct was to fast forward to today and calculate how long it would take @TIME on Twitter to generate a similar volume? Let's look at some more numbers...

TIME Magazine Twitter Stats

• Av. 73.74 tweets per day
• TIME tweet 1,308 words every day
• Most tweets from TIME have 54 characters spare
• The words TIME tweet are an average of 4.85 characters long
• TIME tweet 17.7 words per tweet (on average)

Twitter Stats

• Over 500m tweets per day based upon Twitter’s S-1 Filing from their IPO
• There are currently 20,833,333 tweets sent per hour (globally)
• That’s 347,222 tweets per minute
• Or 5,787 tweets per second

@TIME + @Twitter = Big Interesting Number?

• Taking TIME’s tweets as a benchmark (17.7 words per tweet)
• 5,787 tweets per second x 17.7 = 102,431 words tweet globally per second
• Publishing 50m words / 102,431 tweets per second = It takes 488.13 seconds for Twitter to send 50m words
• 488.13 seconds = 8 minutes 4 seconds

It took TIME magazine 1 year to publish 50 million words in 1965. Today it takes @Twitter 8 minutes 4 seconds.

Based upon these numbers, what it took TIME Magazine a full year to achieve in 1965, it now takes their @Twitter account just over 30 days. Once you see the exponential growth of digital media, if you've worked in tech for a while it's hard not to compare it to Moore’s Law. If you haven’t come across it before, Moore’s law is a really interesting observation by Gordon E. Moore (co-founder of Intel) who stated that the speed of computer processors would double every 18 months to two years, while their size and cost will half. (Co-incidentally Moore published his law the same year as this TIME magazine advert in 1965).

If you work in tech or are fascinated by the speed of innovation, you should read up on Moore’s Law ~ it’s interesting stuff...

Mark Zuckerberg made a similar claim in 2011 that went on to be named "Zuck’s Law" by many in the tech community. He claimed that the amount of social sharing would double at the same speed as Moore’s Law (every 18 months to two years). Bringing this back to our TIME conversation, another napkin calculation reveals an interesting prediction;

If you apply Zuckerberg's Law of Social sharing to Twitter, we could be Tweeting 50m words a second by 2050.

So... Big scary numbers. Big data. Lots of noise.

If you work in digital media, you'd be forgiven for peeing your pants (thanks Avinash), when faced with the prospect of trying to make your small budget campaign stand out against such large numbers. If you think that it's difficult to help your brand stand out and make sense of all your data available to you today, it's worth remembering that your job will never be as easy as it is today. The volume of data that we need to make sense of will never again be as slow as it is today. Frightening. I wrote recently that there are now more pieces of data than stars in the sky and the equivalent of Google is now being created every 4 days!

Where does this leave us all? Let me know what you think in the comments. I think that we need to make some plans. And we probably need to get some more people, equipped with some better technology, in order to filter faster, respond quicker and spend our advertising budgets more effectively...

Six Key Takeaways

1. Do not fear. Great content always wins. It always has and always will. This is why brand campaigns (especially where budgets are tight) are now rooted in social media ~ because social is still the one channel where you don't need to outspend your competitor in order to beat them.
2. Social media is not free. Do not be fooled. It still costs a significant amount to run an effective campaign. Compelling and relevant content, supported by well placed, timely and highly targeted paid media is the key. Go where your customers are talking. Facebook is usually NOT the answer. And you will not have a viral success. (Please remove the V-word from your vocabulary).
3. Understand your audience. Not because it's a cool thing for a marketer to say, but because if you truly understand your target audience (exactly where they spend their time, when and why), then you can reach them for a fraction of the cost of a mass brand awareness campaign.
4. TV still works - But make sure you have a solid Twitter strategy in place to respond quickly when the conversation switches on-line. And when you do, make sure that you use the right tracking technology appended to your photos or links, so that you can join the dots between those on-line and off-line conversations. ie. Who watched a show, responded to the ad you placed in the break, and then went onto Twitter before buying something?
5. Billboards still work. They just don't work very well. If you are Google and you can afford $2m on a digital billboard in London then knock yourself out. But chances are you are not Google. So spend your money wisely.
6. Build a Media Leaderboard ~ Aim to have all your advertising data (CPA / CPC / ROI) in one leaderboard. The more you spend, the more important it is to see how your media measures up; compared against press, outdoor, search, social, display, TV, email. And then constantly re-evaluate, splitting your marketing spend in line with the channels driving the most awareness, consideration or revenue.

As always, thank you for reading if you made it this far down. I didn't expect it to be a lengthy post - just a rant about a video site advertising on a billboard. Feel free to offer up your thoughts below. I'd love to hear them...