Used badly YouTube is “fool’s gold”, says McLaren’s group brand director
Misperceptions over how best to use YouTube are still rife in the marketing sector, according to McLaren’s group brand director John Allert.
Speaking to The Drum, Allert said if misused YouTube can be “fool’s gold”, adding that many marketers have historically failed to fully grasp the opportunities the platform itself and branded content, in general, can provide, which have resulted in costly mistakes.
“YouTube is not an empty vessel requiring to be filled with minutes of content, it is actually a fantastic strategic opportunity to cherry-pick relevant, adjacent audiences to those you already have, as a means of multiplying your own fan base,” he said.
His comments follow the news of a strategic tie-up between the racing car brand and YouTube, which Allert said could in future include the co-creation of content between McLaren, YouTube and its partners.
However, all ideas will be thoroughly vetted so as to avoid “boiling the ocean”, which is an easy trap to fall into when it comes to branded content, according to Allert.
“There are so many dead minutes of expensive content on the web that leaves a trail of disappointment, simply because people are probably guilty of thinking that posting content alone was the achievement of an objective. But that’s just the beginning.
“A lot of it is on there [YouTube] because marketers were prematurely overexcited by its reach, but not clear enough about how they could get in touch with the right people.
“When we can measure the right kinds of eyeballs we will be a very happy marketing industry, but we are still on that journey, and unfortunately the pioneers in this space will have learned some very expensive lessons along the way,” he said.
YouTube has evolved far beyond its original roots as a platform for user-generated content, and the commercial world is now “waking up” to that realisation, according to Allert.
“Unfortunately a lot of people have already probably spent hundreds of millions on content that is never going to be seen by anyone in particular,” he said.
McLaren’s tie-up with YouTube will see it work more strategically with the platform to identify opportunities and optimise the distribution of its content, which includes its computer animated branded content series Tooned, created by special effects firm Framestore.
However, Allert believes there is also huge misunderstanding regarding the term “branded content”, which needs addressing if its potential is to be fully unlocked by brands.
“I get thoroughly depressed by the endless misuse of the term branded content. People running a traditional, 30-second ad on broadcast TV and then patting themselves on the back by saying they are doing branded content. But putting a two-minute branded video on YouTube is not what branded content is all about.
“Branded content is people-shaping your brand through touch points that will resonate with the people you want to target. That can be products, events, services, retail partnerships, all sorts of things – it can even be a two-minute video, but it is not a two-minute video alone. This is a basic misunderstanding of what the opportunities are.”
Tooned is midway through the second series, following a successful experiment last year. A full interview with John Allert and the Framestore team and a deep dive into the branded content strategy for the Tooned series will be published in the forthcoming issue of The Drum.