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Google Youtube Weapon7

YouTube's advertising effect - eight years after its birth

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By Jeremy Garner, creative director

May 25, 2013 | 5 min read

This week recorded the eighth anniversary since video streaming website YouTube went live (yup, it is really eight years!) while it also revealed that 100 hours of content were being uploaded each minute. Jeremy Garner, executive creative director of Weapon7 discusses the impact that the site has had on advertising over the years and how its use as a platform has developed.

Since YouTube was founded back in 2005, the site has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have for advertisers in eight years.

It’s not hard to see why. As the third most visited site on the internet YouTube now has over one billion unique users a month, and sees over 100 hours of video uploaded each minute.

In terms of the impact that YouTube has brought to video campaigns, there are probably several prevailing trends.

Perhaps the trend that stays most true to YouTube’s roots is outright entertainment. The kind of videos that just provide a respite from the working day and become shared, on impulse, between people.

A quick look at big-hitting campaign videos that went viral such as Evian’s ‘Roller babies’ (68m views) or Blendtec’s ‘Will it blend?’ (100m views for the combined ‘series’ since it launched in 2009) show the kinds of numbers that brands using YouTube as a platform to entertain can achieve. But there’s more to it than that. As research from the Evian campaign showed (up to 80% of people who watched the clip wanted to talk about it, and over 65% wanted to share it), YouTube can be an incredibly powerful platform to house the ammunition to ignite word of mouth. In that regard, it’s very TV-esque, but the ability to comment, like a video, or post a video response means that the experience resonates that much deeper. It gives people the means to experience each video on their own terms.

As with any format, it wasn’t too long before advertisers discovered that experimenting with the nuts and bolts of the interface could be surprising, positioning the brand as innovative and being entertaining in its own right. I remember watching the YouTube takeover for ‘Wario Land: Shake It’ in 2008, which shook the whole page, destroying the headlines and captions as it did so: it still holds up as a good example today.

The flexibility of the platform was used to perhaps even greater effect in 2010 by Sylvester Stallone’s movie ‘The Expendables’, and gave a taste of the guns and explosions-ridden film. It also showed that an emphasis on production values was becoming more important and, with a Hollywood star playing the lead role, it encapsulated the increasing weight that YouTube was beginning to assume in campaign plans at the time.

Empowering users to choose a direction is another important trend. The Met used this to much thought-provoking effect a few years ago with a user-controlled, multi-thread plot to tackle gang violence.

The technique drags the viewer deeper and deeper into the story, which works as a strong metaphor for the issue at hand, and creates an immersive linear storyline. The casting of this video was particularly strong; there was lots of street casting and large amount of the dialogue was improvised, which leads to the last trend of authenticity – a trend also used powerfully by Dove ‘Evolution’ back in 2006.

It’s impossible to say what the most impactful advertising video on YouTube is as they all have different objectives. But the Old Spice responses campaign will always stand out because it combined all the trends to dramatic effect.

It was entertaining on a mass scale, yet witty and well written. It made excellent use of the platform itself, with new videos appearing with rapid-fire frequency, and it effectively handed over ‘control’ of the subject matter to users by responding to people. Plus, it was so immediate that it was almost an exercise in authenticity in itself.

Furthermore, it is estimated that it cost a modest $250,000 to run. Not bad when you consider that the total video views reached 40m in just a week.

With results like that, it’s not surprising that YouTube has become a must-have element in video campaigns.

Google Youtube Weapon7

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