Why media owners want to ‘help’ with creative
YouTube has announced plans to help advertisers create video content, but advertisers should be wary, says Dominic Mills – the online video giant is needlessly butting into their territory and we should expect a backlash.
What should we make of YouTube’s announcement last month in Cannes that it plans to run a pilot programme helping advertisers create video content?
How generous, you might think. Those with longer memories in the ad business will recognise this as an old trick. Local cinema ads – ‘come to Raj’s curry house just round the corner from this film theatre’ – worked on the same principle, banged out by an in-house production company staffed by students and second-rate creatives who had never quite made it.
Most radio broadcasters have a facility to make commercials for small advertisers; some broadcasters still do.
Media owners do it for a number of reasons: one, because some advertisers can’t afford to go to an agency; two, because agencies don’t take their medium seriously enough to make good ads (historically radio’s problem); three, because they think that the ‘wrong’ sort of advertising hurts their growth prospects, and if they can help advertisers make the ‘right’ sort, it’s win-win; and four, because they’re in a dog-fight with other media for a share of the media budget.
It’s a tried-and-tested tactic for media owners who feel they’re not getting their fair share and need to find ways to lure advertisers in. Offer free insight into your medium’s unique properties, chuck in creative help, and off you go.
So which category describes YouTube? Well, it clearly thinks it’s in category three. AdAge quotes a YouTube sales boss as saying: “By inviting advertisers into our partner program, we hope to give them access to resources and expertise that will help them develop even more compelling and authentic content on YouTube.”
To me, they’re in category four, slugging it out with TV for the advertiser dollar – with maybe Vine and its peers emerging soon as competitors (see below). And as wonderful as YouTube is, Google needs to see the cash rolling in sometime soon. That’s why it’s all about chipping away at TV: hence Eric Schmidt’s pronouncement in May that TV is ‘over’ and why it is going into paid-for content.
As always, it helps to read the small print. The help is only for advertisers willing to commit to guaranteed levels of spend – including the likes of General Electric, Amex and Pepsi.
The question is: do advertisers need help producing content for YouTube? If you think they need to get away from just transplanting TV ads into 30-second pre-roll spots, then maybe yes. More of that stuff most definitely isn’t the future. Longer-form definitely is.
But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what works on YouTube: it’s a combination of funny, weird, topical, original, exhilarating, parody, emotional and shareable (and if it’s got babies or animals, so much the better). And of that list, emotion and shareability are perhaps the two most important.
Readers of this column will know I’m a huge fan of Dove and Cornetto. I also like this from Mazda (disclosure: produced by Redwood, with whom I have a loose working relationship). You will all have your own favourites.
The point is that there are plenty of advertisers out there producing great longer-form branded content, none of whom need to go outside their roster of existing creative suppliers (including ad agencies, film production companies or content marketing specialists like Redwood).
Do these people think they need help from YouTube? No. It’s what they do for a living. Will they take kindly to YouTube butting into their territory? No. Expect a backlash.
How to woo those pesky procurement people
You all know the scenario. Your agency wins the business, high-fives and all-staff drinks invites issued.
Then comes the negotiation with the client’s procurement team. Ground down by people who don’t understand creativity, who buy everything by the yard, bring everything back to full-time equivalent (FTE) and have no concept of value, the win loses its lustre.
But I heard about a trick last week at a conference about demonstrating value to clients (Chatham House rules so I can’t disclose names). It’s this: when it comes to dealing with procurement, reinforce your finance director and their negotiating team with a top planner and a couple of people from the creative department.
The planner demonstrates how great creativity is highly effective and achieves better business results than average stuff (the evidence is there at the IPA); and the creatives craft your pitch (lots of lovely video, stunning PowerPoint and charts that double as art) with the same attention the agency gave to the one that won the business.
The procurement people like to think they have ice in their veins, but they’re as susceptible to a great pitch as anyone, and like many who profess to be unimpressed by ‘creativity’, they’re often in awe of people who are.
Result: the debate moves away from timesheets and spreadsheets to value, which is the area agencies should be focusing on anyway – and what excites clients.
The rise of short-form
You’ve got to hand it to BMB’s Trevor Beattie. His claim (somewhat tongue in cheek but with an underlying seriousness) back in March that advertising was moving to embrace the five-second ad didn’t go down particularly well.
At the time, Vine was just a few weeks old so not everyone grasped the link.
But as this report from viral distribution company Unruly Media shows, use and sharing are exploding. The number of tweets containing a Vine link has risen from five to nine per second. And it seems to be working for advertisers with, as Unruly says, branded Vines accounting for 4% of the top 100 most-shared vines, compared with just 1 pc for the top 100 most shared videos.
Of course, Vine still has a small user base (13 million or so), but it’s certainly popular with brands who can integrate Vine with Twitter. Include GE, Gap, Adidas and Pepsi among the fans.
Add in Instagram’s 15-second clip competitor to Vine, and you have a massive increase in the opportunities for short-form video.
Some have it that brands can’t say much in that short time, but I don’t agree. The best brand messages are singular and highly focused – the poster has less than six seconds to do its work – and advertisers are well used to sponsorship idents and the like. It’s a huge canvas with intriguing possibilities.