Gravity Road founder says brands must stop treating YouTube channels like a spare room for their junk – it’s time to get creative

“So you go on most of them [YouTube channels] and there’s a staff training videos, a video of the chairman giving a cup at some golf championship, there might be a few ‘making of’ films; there’s nothing that anybody’s going to care about.”

His comments echoed those made last week by YouTube head of brand propositions, Derek Scrobie, who said that at the moment brands “lack confidence” in content creation, are stuck in the 30-second ad mentality and using the platform as a vehicle for their TV ad campaigns.

However Boyd said this must, or rather will, change as brands wise up during this evolution from a period of brands simply “having a go at the content thing” and thinking of it as “nice to have”, to actually being aware of the content people want to spend time with, the places they go to do that, and seeing it as “essential”.

“Social video is not going away. It will become exponentially more important to businesses. What we’re hearing is that there are still brands with their campaign hats on,” said Boyd, explaining that some simply look ahead to annual events like Easter or Valentine’s Day and say “oh, let’s just do a film around that”.

“A more considered approach about the role that video, particularly social video, could play in their overall comms plans means that [brands] can start planning and budgeting for the always-on space. It isn’t just a way to fluff an ad. It can play a lot of very important, strategic, roles across a brand,” he said.

However, he does believe it takes a certain amount of specialist knowledge to get it right.

“Bigger agencies just struggle with their cost base around YouTube, the challenge needs a different kind of structure, different kinds of people. It needs YouTubers,” Boyd said, citing some recent work he compared between two videos, both of which received over three million views. The only difference between them was one was made by a YouTube fashion blogger and the other by one of the top ten UK advertisers.

“You can smell the big brand, big agency work a mile off. The brand film had something like 23 likes, and five comments,” said Boyd.

“The YouTube created film had 75,000 likes and something like 30,000 comments. I think it just demonstrates that the skill set and knowledge base is completely different. Brands and agencies have a slightly patronizing approach to a YouTube audience, and YouTube is a brilliantly brutal place.”

Gravity Road is well versed in what it takes to launch, grow and maintain a successful YouTube platform having done exactly that for brands like Bombay Sapphire and Grazia, and for itself with the creation of the fashion dedicated channel, Fashtag, a YouTube funded space housing six other channels which together have amassed nearly three million views.

"We run and own a successful YouTube network and that’s why we think we’ve got unique experience of this,” he said, before explaining that its new production arm, Native Play, now offers brands an end-to-end service in social video creation.

“Our approach at Gravity Road, and what we’re specifically doing with Native Play, has always been a simplistic separation. Advertising has often been what businesses want to tell people and advertisers that bring that same approach to social video space. What all of us need to do is create something that people want to spend time with, and if we get that right in the YouTube space then that’s really important.”

Looking ahead to 2014, Boyd was asked to give his predictions for what will happen in the social video space. More of everything was his answer.

“More videos, more brands, bigger spend, more opportunity,” he said.

“There are going to be some campaigns on YouTube that are going to have some real, genuine skill, and be properly socialised. We’re going to see more branded channels, channels that actually create a centralised hub where lots of videos might appear and commit to creating video on an ongoing basis.

"Equally, brands are going to get smart and savvy about pushing that content out to lots of different, interesting places. Spend on social video is going to be more significant. YouTube talent is going to get more expensive – we’re seeing quite a lot of inflation already.

"There’s every reason why some of the biggest brands will be going 'Ok, at the heart of our next campaign is a social video' and that might be expressed in other ways and other places. It could even be that advertising is the thing they utilise to promote the social video, so the social video becomes the main event rather than the other way around.

“Those will be some of the big plays in 2014.”

Boyd will be speaking at The Drum's 4 Minute Warning conference, taking place in London on 4 December.