Asian advertisers are missing the point of YouTube advertising

Photo credit: Bloomberg

YouTube is one of the most powerful search engines in the world, and certainly the most powerful video search tool.

As the undisputed king of personal entertainment platforms, the now mature YouTube platform has many utilities; public forum, how-to guide, and most recently, the biggest opportunity to build a long-term relationship between brand and customer. As mobile video advertising revenues across Asia continue to soar, scalable growth is overtaking quick conversions as a key business goal for brands.

At this stage, the question is no longer whether brands should move television advertising online – mass media is dead. It is now a question of what is the right buy for them and how brands ensure they have the right content, in front of the right user, in the right environment. With the awesome scale and diversity of videos available, YouTube is a veritable smorgasbord of opportunity, though naturally with scale comes complexity.

The beauty of the YouTube audience is that with the combination of search tools and video volume, the viewer has always already actively searched for that specific piece of niche content at that precise moment. With YouTube processing over 3 billion searches per month, this makes it the most powerful online video platform there is in terms of granular content targeting.

This might mean placement next to fewer videos – and advertisers need to stop thinking gross rating points and start thinking quality, long term engagement – but it can certainly mean increased ROI whether your KPI is something as broad as brand-recall or down-the-funnel sign-ups.

One of the things I have seen in Asia is that the shift towards recognising the sweet-spot where great ad content meets appropriate publisher content and engaged user has been slow.

Maximising the return

In the US, advertisers are already very conscientious about where brands are being placed. Media buyers are willing to pay more for YouTube content that interests their customers and matches their ad content. They are thinking premium in the way that media buyers used to purchase prime slots on television, but better and more targeted. They also know there is a lot of wildly different content on YouTube.

Value added technology layers can offer more brand-safe content, at the same time as curating campaigns by offering additional granular targeting and hand-picking specific content for ads to run against. Instead of buying spots in premium products like YouTube channels, the right advertising partners can create custom channels for advertisers to ensure a highly contextual environment for brands.

APAC is less developed from a targeting standpoint, as advertisers are still finding the balance between low-cost reach and high-quality content. In order to really move the needle on seeing an ROI, brands need to move away from procuring low-cost videos, which can position ads against potentially negative, inappropriate video content. For example, an airline could (and it’s happening right now somewhere on YouTube as you read this) be placed alongside an airplane crash video compilation, because of the pairing of keywords flight + holiday + destination. Protecting your brand with precision targeting will cost less in the long run.

The way past this poorly targeted and risky video content lies in education. Everyone in the eco-system, from agencies to tech platforms like us, need to be showing brands how to find the right kinds of content as well as the negative repercussions that may come from not doing so.

Shifting the paradigm

During AdParlor roadshows, people often ask us questions like ‘What’s the lowest cost-per-view (CPV) I can get on YouTube?’ That’s actually not where the focus should be. Instead, the right content targeted with the right creative allows campaigns to scale while attracting people who might actually need your product. The results in the engagement metrics will prove it. By looking at the campaign as a whole, brands can be with the customer every step of their purchasing journey.

New take on old models

The conversation about getting the cheapest content needs to be disrupted.

Instead of saying, ‘I’ll give you $100,000 of my TV budget, if you can get me seven cents per view of my YouTube channel’ we want to move the dialogue to ‘I’ll give you $100,000 of my TV budget if you can enable me to target consumers watching exactly the right kind of content, track their engagement and give me insights’. Naturally they have to move the budget online, the audience has already moved, it’s just a case of reaching the right audience with the right content.