Lessons in YouTube Analytics and Product Placement

Recently my colleagues on Taylor’s Minute Maid team uploaded the latest Minute Maid Enhanced TV advert (via Doner) to YouTube. It’s a funny, well-produced ad, and thanks to the terrific suite of YouTube analytics, we were able to gain some terrific insight into the consumption of videos on YouTube. I’m not at liberty to go into full detail, but there was one key take-away I did want to share. First, if you haven’t seen it, here’s the spot:

 

As I mentioned, YouTube provides some pretty robust data, for free, that can provide a wealth of insight. In addition to learning where traffic is coming from and what sort of key search words consumers are using to find the video, another interesting take-away occurred to me.

The nature of viewing a commercial on YouTube is very different than watching it on television. On TV, commercials are primarily an unwanted interruption. If we could we would fast forward through them or skip right over them (wow, if only someone would invent a machine that let you do that!). On YouTube, people are seeking out your commercials, at least the entertaining ones. Which leads to an important question: Is your ad merely entertaining, or is it doing something for your brand or product as well?

With YouTube Insight, you know exactly when people are clicking off of your ad. If you’ve created one of those really clever ads with no product shots or messaging until the last three seconds, you may be in line for a Cannes Lion, but you can kiss that Effie goodbye.

We’ve seen the increasing use of product integration by brands to overcome the Tivo effect, they should be considering that as well in their own ads.  The Doner team did a nice job of weaving the Minute Maid juice into the ad in a relevant way, without it being overpowering. As a result, the product was the hero and consumers saw it throughout the spot, so even if they didn’t watch all 30 seconds, they still saw the product enough to make the product name, and even the specific flavor, come up in key word searches.

As marketers become more sophisticated and content platforms provided greater analytics, we’re going to see fewer cases of ads build for disruption and less calls of “make me a viral video” and a greater desire to see work that takes into account the ways in which the audience consumes content across a wide variety of platforms.

Tags: funny juice ad, minute maid enhanced, minute maid juice, scooter the bunny

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.