Brands talk tough with YouTube, but aren’t likely to walk

The fear and disappointment that gripped brands in the wake of the brand-safety crisis on YouTube in March has been replaced with pragmatism and caution in the latest one.

Last week, investigations by the BBC and The Times of London found ads that ran against content and comments that exploited kids, which pushed brands such as Adidas, Mars and Diageo to freeze spend on YouTube. The platform has since deleted hundreds of accounts and removed 150,000 videos. British advertisers’ trade body ISBA called Google execs to a meeting with top marketers to dress them down over the problems. But despite the tough talk, marketers for the most part aren’t threatening to pull ad spending, unlike the previous brouhaha. Now, marketers are more likely to take the onus on themselves to institute proper whitelist strategies.

“We [L’Oréal] can’t say we’re not going to use this channel because of certain issues [like brand safety]. At the end of the day, consumers are there,” said Stéphane Bérubé, L’Oréal’s CMO for Western Europe. “I can tell you we’re working very closely with Google and Facebook [on ad placement] and have seen a lot of improvement in this area. It’s our responsibility as advertisers, not just L’Oréal, to be able to find solutions that let us control the environments where our ads are served.”

Bérubé discussed the importance of brands acknowledging the nuances of content on the site. The cosmetic brand won’t advertise on certain YouTube channels even if they are brand-safe because they are at odds with its own values. While most big brands would agree with Bérubé, preferring to adopt stricter whitelists, some are happy to display ads next to safe but edgier YouTube channels because this is where their audience is, according to Aydin Moghaddam, head of paid search at digital agency Roast.

The safety or suitability of other content is subjective, added Andrea Ching, CMO at OpenSlate, a video analytics firm specializing in YouTube. Marketers must continue to balance maintaining suitable environments for their brands and staying current with the “changing content landscape and shifting social norms,” she said.

It comes down to advertisers knowing what they’re buying, said one media expert who consults with marketers on media strategy, speaking on condition of anonymity. During the first brand boycott of YouTube, the source’s client took advantage of the cheaper rates and bought more ads on the site. “When everyone else pulled out, the marketer said, ‘As long as you know what you’re buying and you’re chasing an audience, you can go deeper into the platform,’” the source said. “There will be more of that same pragmatism from brands toward YouTube because for all the fear and complexity, marketers are saying they have to get on with it.”

YouTube is too big for most global advertisers to refuse even if they don’t have full confidence in it. In the U.K., 18- to 34-year-olds watch an average 55 minutes of YouTube videos a day, according to comScore data cited by Google. What’s driving the attention to YouTube is the content, much like it is for TV, according to Ronan Harris, Google’s U.K. managing director.

YouTube’s pitch to brands, however, has left many demanding more from the video giant. As proactive as Google has been at addressing some of the industry’s trust issues, the perception is it’s still struggling to get to the root of the problem. Take Google Preferred, for example. In the wake of the initial brand-safety crisis, YouTube moved some advertisers to its Preferred lineup of the most popular channels, which were also sold as advertiser-safe content zones. Yet videos that brands don’t want to be associated with still slip through the net. Google Preferred combined with greater monitoring still doesn’t offer 100 percent protection, said Matt Bushby, Just Eat’s head of growth marketing.

Speaking to Digiday prior to the latest brand boycott of the video platform, he said: “There’s a lot of gamer content in there [Google Preferred], which might be a good audience for us, but actually is it premium content? That’s a conversation we’re having with YouTube because while we have lightened our spend there, we’re still on the platform, and it’s a challenge that we have to work together to solve as an industry.”

Neither Jellyfish nor M/Six believe Google Preferred is the most cost-effective or efficient way of buying media on YouTube.

Digital agency Jellyfish uses a system that plugs into the YouTube application programming interface to select each individual video its clients appear against at scale. “No one can say 100 percent of their activity will always be brand-safe, but we’re pretty confident our technology, in conjunction with Google’s approach, is better than relying only on Google Preferred,” said Daniel Wilkinson, head of paid media at Jellyfish.

YouTube will remain consistent with past behavior, proactively working to resolve the content problem, argued Todd Krizelman, CEO and founder of ad sales insights platform MediaRadar. But for those keeping score, he said, “the perception is that YouTube is struggling to solve this problem.”

The post Brands talk tough with YouTube, but aren’t likely to walk appeared first on Digiday.



from Digiday http://ift.tt/2i2o5Wt
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2nfcqsC

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Use Content Scrapers to Automate these 7 SEO Hacks

Image
Everyone is looking to get ahead when it comes to SEO. But that can be hard when your competitors are putting out content that ranks better than yours. There are a lot of reasons why their content ranks, of course. Maybe they have better domain authority  than you do, or maybe they have a larger built-in audience. That shouldn’t get you down, though. There are ways that you can use their content to your advantage. One of those ways is to use a content scraper (also known as a web scraper ) to gain insights into what they’re doing so you can do it, too. The only caveat is that you have to know how to use them correctly. Otherwise, you could be stuck with the wrong data. Here’s what to know. What is content scraping? Content scrapers are automated programs that pull data from multiple websites. Let’s say for a moment that you wanted to see what sort of titles your competitors were using on their blog posts to get the most clicks. You could visit each website individually...
Read more

What 759 Content Marketing Campaigns Can Teach You About Link Building And Organic Traffic

Image
If you want to generate more organic traffic or build links, your campaigns have to perform well. There isn’t any cut-and-dry formula for crafting successful posts or running effective marketing campaigns. There are tons of suggested formulas, tips, and tricks out there. But not all of them are worth your time or energy. And it can be hard to find formulas and elements of a campaign that are actually proven to work, based on data. Luckily, the folks at Fractl examined 759 different content marketing campaigns from 2013 to 2017 that can teach us a lot about what successful campaigns usually look like. Here’s what these 759 campaigns can teach you about link building and organic traffic. An overview of the data Fractl’s Director of Marketing, Kerry Jones , decided to gather data from 345 marketing campaigns  and share it to help marketers improve the quality and effectiveness of their content. A few years later, she tried the same tactic with data from a sample of 759 campa...
Read more

Hack Your Way to 50,000 Google Visitors with these 9 Tips

Image
There’s no single hack for getting huge traffic numbers from Google. Sorry. I wish I could tell you that if you added a very specific keyword to your site or if you optimized your images in just the right way you could net 50,000 unique views. But it just doesn’t happen that way. The reality is that you can’t rely on one technique to bring in unique visitors. You have to approach it using a combination of different strategies. Depending on your budget, some of those strategies might be out of your reach right now. That’s okay. Because over time (and yes, it does take time) anyone can hack their way to large traffic numbers. What does it take to get 50,000 new visitors? The key to getting 50,000 (or 100,000, or a million) new site visitors is to play it safe. I know what you’re thinking. Safe? It’s not something that entrepreneurs or marketers want to hear. Safe means slow. But a slow, steady, multifaceted approach to growth will always win over the quick tricks. Take a ...
Read more