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John Hegarty’s Missing the Big Picture

The 7th Chamber — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:07:51 +0000

Originally published on AdAge. Written by The 7th Chamber CEO Richard Spalding

John Hegarty’s rant last week on how TV ads are getting worse fails to recognize that advertising is now witnessing its most creative dawn. Never before has marketing been so exciting and innovative. It’s why now is such a fun time to be a part of this industry.

I spent a couple years at the Death Star (as it was affectionately known by BBH employees). Hegs was one of the most enjoyable creative directors I had the pleasure of working with in 15 years of advertising. And it was truly enjoyable producing some great advertising for Audi, Barclays and Lynx.

We made slick TV ads, beautifully crafted by well-paid creative teams. Print ads followed an equally well-trodden path. Agencies knew what they had to do to help clients sell more products. Back then, agency life was, well, simple.

John has always been critical of using data in advertising, but clever data usage is the only real hope advertising has left in its ability to survive in a chaotic and democratized world. The world’s biggest TV networks can’t guarantee brand advertisers 18-34 year olds. YouTube and Facebook can and they do it through data.

Now that marketing has taken a paradigm shift and is entering the abyss of the unknown, brands and their agencies can no longer rely on such conventional ways of marketing; it’s now all about data. Does that great TV ad work? Do clever posters on subways have any real impact? Does that extremely expensive full page in the NY Times move the needle? Without data, brand advertisers are just shooting in the dark.

Kids are growing up on a diet of Netflix and Spotify, most advertising to them is what they may catch a glimpse of on the side of a bus. A TV ad to this generation will be easy to miss, skip and probably irrelevant and untargeted. Meanwhile Netfilx is building a content creation business around data, which tells them, who likes what and how long that person watches for.

So it will be to the detriment of the brands and their agencies that fail to figure out how to get creative with not only the idea but also how they employ targeted data creatively.

Digital agencies, social agencies and content creation shops are now competing with the BBH’s of this world as these new breed of creative shops have figured out how to create content which can weave it’s way through the social world, effectively reach the audience and get shown on TV through the news outlets, as it newsworthy. We’re seeing social video become more of an event, which can pick up press around the innovation. A good TV ad is a one-way street without any sharable potential.

Consider that the only ad being talked about at media conferences two months after the Superbowl is not a TV ad, but a tweet created by Oreo during the game.

Brands need to accept that data will drive their sales and qualify their creative, but just making a better TV ad (as Hegs would very much like to see) is not going to better a brands marketing efforts in the long term. Brands have to figure out how to create mobile aps that customers find useful and delightful, build loyal Facebook fans (not just buy them) who engage and enjoy the brand conversation, and have something interesting to say on Twitter. They need to create brand videos at the rate of a newsroom (Vine will help you) and make YouTube a central part of their marketing efforts.

Never before have brand advertisers had a complex shopping list of marketing requirements which all take specialists to deliver against; never before have we seen such an unprecedented amount of customer touch points allowing brands to figure out who likes what, why, where and when.

Surprising your audience with creativity will always win out, but it’s not just about making a great TV ad anymore.

Brand Crisis.

The 7th Chamber — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:12:20 +0000

Why a brand crisis is a social media opportunity

The Oreo Super Bowl power outage crisis response demonstrated how brands are now able to produce marketing material within moments of a crisis and turn the situation into marketing gem versus a brand nightmare. Some brands still haven’t figured out how to harness the power of the new mediums available to us today from social to video, but some are on to something great.

Two Scenarios: Harnessing Social Media for Crisis

Subway’s woes are only getting worse, stemming from a small town in Australia a US lawsuit has blown up over the size of its foot long sandwich. Matt Corby, an Australian teen from Perth, bought a foot long subway sandwich and then claimed that it was only 11 inches, rather than 12 inches. After posting the photo on Subway’s Facebook page, it went viral. The Facebook post was flooded with angry customers demanding to know why the sub was short (131,000 likes, 3,900 shares, and 5,900 comments), unfortunately the company removed the post and made a public apology to its customers, explaining that it strives for quality and they can’t always get it right. Despite 20 million Facebook “Likes,” none of Subway’s other posts have had anywhere near that level of engagement. It was quite a missed chance by the battered company to turn a crisis into an opportunity.

Just as Domino’s Pizza faced a quality crisis it turned the negative sentiment it was receiving into an advertising campaign. “Cardboard.” A description of a Domino’s pizza product, written by an unhappy consumer, flashed across the screen. Another called it “mass produced, boring, bland.” These words did not appear in social media comments written by angry Domino’s consumers, as you might expect. Instead the company shared these less-than-flattering reactions to its pizza in its own advertising.

The ads aired, which were tied to a debut of a new pizza recipe with a simple message – Domino’s was admitting it screwed up. “We’re trying to improve. Give our pizza another chance.” It was a huge success for the company, as in the same year that it launched this self-flagellation campaign, same-store sales rose 9.9%, and domestic store growth was positive for the first time since 2007. In the first quarter of 2011, the company’s net income rose 10.6%, to $27.1 million.

By embracing the momentum of criticism, which is now brought about by the democracy of social media, Domino’s Pizza engineered a brilliant coup and it paid off.

Embracing the New Media Landscape:

As brands employ social listening devices and tune into their consumers real-time reactions, customer criticism is a new mind field to be navigated through; what, how and why do brands respond. But with every crisis now lie opportunities to not only use them as content, but as marketing. We’re in the next phase of social marketing as consumers become the primary content creators, comments and tweets are still content, we just need to view and leverage them to their full potential.

As brands start to harness the power their fans can bring, (whether good or bad) the smart ones will figure out how to leverage the bad and ricochet into the good.

As web content becomes the only “true” source of marketing and as audiences turn away from traditional advertising, it’s critical that brands accept and encourage the negative be part of the conversation, and not just continue to use social media to push out fluffy competitions or new products. It may work now, but audiences are tiring of brands using social media as just another blunt marketing outlet.

What’s Next: Getting your audience to create the content

We see crowd sourcing brand films becoming the norm for brands in the not too distant future.
As Twitter recently bets on its launch of micro film making Vine, and services such as Cameo (creates 6 second films, slices them together and puts them to music all in the cloud) we’re going to be seeing a lot more user generated content circulating. In turn, as brands become more comfortable with users generating brand content, advertising creative as we know it will be severely impacted.

There’s still a lot of resistance from the doomsayers who complain that UGC content is not quality and it can’t replace a well crafted TV ad, but these protests mean nothing in social. Quality is about the ingredients of the content, not the look of the content: on the social web a German swimmer in tight underpants jumping mistakenly onto a ice pond will always outperform any expensively produced TV ad. Creative agencies just need to figure out how to make it with a brand wrapped around it.

The days of marketing by quarter are over, brands need to have an always on mentality to stay relevant. As they evolve into their own newsrooms producing content in real time, their new agility will allow them to not only retain the social pulse of their audience, but act quickly and effectively when a crisis hits, they will already be one step ahead of their audience and be preparing their social response hours before the crisis goes viral. We’re going to see a lot more Oreo moments in the future.

Social Media: an act of transparency?

Andrew John Collins — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:00:21 +0000

How many times have you opened your favourite web browser and logged onto a social networking platform this week? How many tweets have you sent? How many posts have you ‘liked’? How many places have you checked into on Foursquare? Social media is fast becoming a divide between reality and online and it seems to be very disorienting for many of us. With every social move that you display online your daily activities, special occasions and even location become an easy to access database of personal interests and tastes, a transparent window into your personal world of things that make you ‘you’. Every shred of information that you type into a social platform is stored and filed in a perfectly created filing cabinet in order for instant access when needed.

Perhaps this scares you when you really take the time to think about what you put online and with new tools such as Facebook Graph search (BETA), individuals can now search for virtually anything on the platform by certain criteria, music, check-ins, favourite food, people in your hometown, people who like cycling…anything!

We are naked in an online world due to our own need to publicly display our lives. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and many other platforms tend to not let this bother them all that much, the more we share, the more knowledge about us they have stored on a data storage facility and if they eventually decide to sell chocolate teapots to those that may be interested in them then we’ve sure made it easy for them to do so.

With new start-ups emerging everyday this leaves us begging the question, is the social connection that names such as Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Crowley have made popular for good or for bad, are they a transparent window into each other’s lives or a virtual prison made of glass built to advertise to our every desire? In George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ he describes a world where ‘Big Brother is watching you’, well does this mean that Zuckerberg amongst others could be a modern day twist on the ‘Big Brother’? These companies are building a new age of web and the default setting is social.

Founding president of Facebook Sean Parker even argues that the disappearance of privacy is merely a casualty of human progress, another consequence of technological change for good, this all coming from a guy that in 1999 with John and Shawn Fanning co-founded an illegal P2P file sharing service known as Napster that could well be responsible for starting (or at least popularising) the whole idea of online piracy and destroying sales of music, film and software worldwide. It seems that individual privacy is a relic; it has a past but holds no future according to Parker.

We are all on exhibition to the world if we choose to be, pretty soon everything we want to achieve in life may be determined by the glossy image that you paint on your social profiles and it may well become the core of modern life. We may choose to like or dislike it but at the end of the day the goals of a select few to have us all connected and controlled on a worldwide database may well come true, but until that happens I will happily continue to Instagram pictures of my dinner much to the annoyance of those following me on Twitter.

Attention! Shoulder arms and…do the Harlem Shake

The 7th Chamber — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:30:45 +0000

This link was originally posted on The Sunday Times.

A unit of Norwegian soldiers is among thousands of groups to join in the latest web craze. And big business is marching close behind as the models Cara Delevingne, Jourdan Dunn and Rosie Tapner took their places to head out onto the runway last Sunday at London fashion week, the Topshop make-up artists and stylists backstage were feeling pretty pleased with themselves. With the final touches complete, they thought their work, for now, was done. The respite was to be short-lived, however, because all of a sudden the squeaky, clipped beats of the dance-music track Harlem Shake were filling in the air.

Dunn began to dance solo, grinding up and down with her fist pumping as Delevingne stood in front of her, her expression deadpan. Tapner, on Dunn’s right, was similarly paying little attention to her friend’s moves.
Then, as the song’s heavy bassline kicked in, the trio erupted into a frenzy of arm flails and head flicks. The stylists could only look on in disbelief as the models’ painstakingly crafted hairdos were destroyed in seconds.

The video has since amassed nearly 1m views, but it is just one of several thousand Harlem Shake videos to be uploaded on YouTube this month. The latest viral dance craze, consisting of a plethora of 30-second videos, has been viewed, collectively, 300m times. At the peak of the mania last week about 4,000 videos were being added every day. And it is not just America and Britain contributing to the trend — it is global.
Harlem Shake is, it seems, this year’s answer to Gangnam Style, the dance track by the South Korean pop star Psy that became YouTube’s most viewed video. But what is this Harlem Shake craze and where did it come from?

The finger points to five awkward, pelvic-thrusting teenagers in Australia. Alighting on the dance track that Baauer, a 23-year-old British-born American whose real name is Harry Rodrigues, released in May last year, the quintet were the first to send in a video of themselves dressed in latex suits and dancing to the music. Their video soon inspired dozens of copycats, and while costumes, props, location and the styles of dancing are often different, a blueprint for the Harlem Shake has emerged.

The first 15 seconds feature one person, often wearing a helmet, dancing alone to the intro of Rodrigues’s track, ignored by any other people in the frame. When the bassline comes in, the “go crazy” segment ensues and the video cuts to a chaotic scene typically packed with people dancing wildly in various disguises with an array of props from traffic cones to bicycles.

Unlike Gangnam Style, with its horse-riding dance, the Harlem Shake has no set moves, but the more flailing about, the better. Indeed, it seems that this lack of structure is what has got thousands of people across the world participating, and there is no shortage of creative takes on it.
Some of the most imaginative are a version from Georgia University’s swimming team, filmed at the bottom of a pool; one by some soldiers from the Norwegian army, who happily strip down and perform — some standing on their heads — in the snow; and one set in a snooker venue in Newport, Gwent, where the spectators, players and referee all go berserk for 15 seconds. Go to youtube.com and type “Harlem Shake news anchor version” in the search box for another witty example.

In an interview earlier this month Rodrigues reflected on the craze. “All I did was make the song,” he told the news website The Daily Beast, “so it’s kind of a weird place for me to be at. I birthed it, it was raised by others and now it’s like my weird, adopted teenage kid come back to me.”
There is no denying that the trend has served him well. After his single was released, it garnered only about 1,000 sales a week and did not make the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Once the videos went viral at the start of this month, however, it jumped to 18,000 sales a week. Last week it sold 262,000 downloads and shot to No 1 in the singles chart in America. In the UK last week it reached No 3.

A large chunk of Rodrigues’s profit, however, is likely to be coming from YouTube. As the owner of the royalties to the song, Rodrigues will receive a share of the revenue generated by advertising each time it is played in any of the videos.

Neither Baauer’s record label, Mad Decent, nor YouTube has said how much money has been generated; when asked last week how much he had made, Rodrigues replied online: “$1,000,000,000,000.” Clearly, this is to be taken with a pinch of salt, but if, as digital marketing experts reckon, he is making about $1,000 (£650) from every million views, Rodrigues certainly will not be doing badly.

Past viral hits on YouTube have generated big payoffs for songwriters: Psy netted a reported $870,000 from YouTube ad revenue alone. It is no surprise that, this time round, big companies including Google and Pepsi have been quick off the mark to upload their own Harlem Shake videos, their logos shamelessly visible. Indeed, for brands, these internet viral videos — or memes, as they are known — are lucrative vehicles to be exploited for the free advertising. Digital experts say brands are increasingly quick to jump onto internet meme bandwagons.
“If you’re not doing this as a brand, then there’s a real risk,” says Richard Spalding, chief executive of the viral marketing firm The 7th Chamber. “A lot of brands are trying to figure out how to do it. They’ve done Facebook and have a million ‘likes’ but the next phase is about latching onto trends like Harlem Shake quicker.”

He says the Oreo advert that appeared on Twitter during the Super Bowl was a perfect example. When the power cut out in the stadium just after half-time — America’s most coveted ad break — Oreo seized the opportunity and put a picture of an Oreo biscuit on Twitter with the message, “You can still dunk in the dark.” It was retweeted more than 16,000 times and left some wondering whether the quick tweet had had a greater impact than the half-time commercials that had cost millions to create and air.

Best of all for brands is generating their own memes. “The ultimate dream is to create something that reaches millions of people that you don’t have to pay for, and most brands are getting less risk-averse when it comes to doing this,” Spalding says. “You’ve got to produce content that’s of the moment.”

Some brands, however, are still cautious about embracing the advertising opportunities that social media trends offer.
Levi’s attached tiny cameras to the back pockets of two girls wearing its jeans as they walked around Los Angeles. The company uploaded the videos, which featured a lot of gawking men cranking their necks to get a better view.

The video reportedly received 5m views in three days but Levi’s then pulled it. Though the company has not explained why, there is speculation that it felt as though it had lost control of when and how its content was being viewed.

Memes have a short shelf life, so to exploit them brands must react quickly, says Spalding, who predicts a proliferation of Harlem Shake videos from global companies in the next few weeks. “Everyone will be bored [with] it in a month’s time when something else comes along.”

Why 1 Million Views Are No Longer Worth 1 Million Views

The 7th Chamber — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:34:58 +0000

Originally published on The Agency Post.

The question our clients always used to ask was, “How much for 1 million YouTube views?” We gave them our rate card price and worked the social networks and blogosphere to drive 1 million plus views to their YouTube video. Now things have changed; if you Google “buy YouTube views,” nearly 1 million results appear, all claiming to be from “real users” (not robots) and offer a “money-back guarantee if not all views show out.”

It’s a dark world out there, which Sony and Universal recently discovered when YouTube culled billions of views claiming them to be suspect. Suddenly, those millions of cheap views they bought from “real” people are not looking so cheap.

YouTube has invested heavily in technology to not only fight the bots, but to punish the videos on its site that have poor user retention or lack of engagement. What’s important for brands to understand is that YouTube is just one big search engine made up of millions of videos — brands need to recognize this huge potential to reach their audience.

They should think of it as being just like the search initiatives they already spend millions of dollars on. Just as brands desire to appear on page one of Google results (both organically and via ad buys), they also need their videos appearing next to related videos or be discovered by their target audience in the categories related to their market.

Unfortunately, if they choose to only buy YouTube views driven either by a third-party vendor or even just YouTube TrueView products, their videos will fall foul of the YouTube algorithm, which only pushes up content it thinks the audience likes, shares or relates to. Brands need to understand that by not employing all the social opportunities available to them — and just using YouTube as a host — the results will be costly and ineffective for the marketing efforts.

What YouTube is very useful for is measuring an audience’s reaction and engagement with the brand, serving as an instant metric to show brands that their advertising agency is doing its job. It paints a transparent story of the relationship between a brand and its audience. After all, TV, displays and posters don’t talk back.

Properly promote a brand video on YouTube, and you’ll have all the brand sentiment and customer feedback you could have ever asked for — a living, breathing workshop of opinions never seen before in market research. Promote a video badly on YouTube (using third-party vendors who blast the video in embeds on ad networks), and you throw all of this information away, strangling the video from finding an organic, targeted audience.

The prime reason we talk to clients about measuring EPM (engagement per thousand views, likes, shares, comments, etc.) is that they need to track efficacy beyond just a video view. We want our clients to take advantage of the social currency a video can foster. From the more than 100 branded videos we tested on YouTube, we’ve seen an average of 15 engagements per 1,000 views, which is the minimum standard that we recommend our brand clients to expect.

According to a September 2012 report by eMarketer, the social video market value is closing in on $6 billion by 2014 (a growth rate of 38.9 percent). YouTube charges $500,000 just for the pleasure of being on its home page for 24 hours. If brands want to play in this space, it’s costly but can drive all the emotions and brand uplift as a TV ad can while being more measurable and potentially much more cost-effective.

However, when brands are paying more than 15 cents per view (a much more expensive CPM than display or pre-roll), it will only be worthwhile if brands can not only measure efficacy but also expect to see an average or above average engagement score. Without it, they may as well go back to searching for a cheap vendor who has figured out how to cheat YouTube’s bot police.

Heineken – Capture a Generation

Andrew John Collins — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:48:06 +0000

Heineken, we love it and we’re sure that you love it also but they do not just produce one of the finest cold ones known to man (and woman). The good folks over at Heineken HQ are also very creative as proven by previous ad campaigns that they have run. This time around they are offering to hand over the creative spark to you, me and anybody else who fancies a crack with their ‘Capture a Generation’ challenge.

Heineken have asked all individuals young and old around the world to film, photograph or write their observations on the lifestyles and preferences of the 60-70 age group. I personally have met some very unique persons of age in my life (my mad gran is one of them) and I am sure you know of at least one that will let you document their awesomeness.

The challenge will run until 28th February 2013 and participants have the chance to win a share of $10,000 (around £6382.84 depending on the exchange rate once I have posted this article) and have their entries included in a 60+ documentary movie.

Oh and if this wasn’t amazing enough we should let you know that acclaimed director Donald Petrie will be part of the official jury, he’s probably just as awesome as my gran.

Take a look at the video below…

Climbing the social vine

Andrew John Collins — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:02:23 +0000

Apologies for the lack of words from myself, this is due to the fact that I have been on a very overdue vacation. Although a well earned holiday can be bliss just after the hectic Christmas period it can also hold downsides in this line of work. For example, whilst I cut myself off from the rest of civilisation a new social tool decided to surface and leave me in the trail of dust when I arrived home, it’s called Vine and personally I am a little unsure.

If you have not heard of Vine then please let me drag you from under your rock and bring you up to speed. Vine is a micro-video sharing service owned by the good folks over at twitter. Following in the footsteps of twitpic and twitvid it allows users to upload a clip with the maximum duration of 6 seconds and share it with their followers. At first glance it seems as though this is just a service for people to showcase their quick speed cooking skills however some have managed to be rather creative with the app.

Steak tartare in six seconds. vine.co/v/bOIqn6rLeIDvia @dhof

— dick costolo (@dickc) January 23, 2013

Ok so twitter may well be the fastest growing social networking platform today, we are all mad for it and it has the capability of sharing text and image down to a t but video I feel is another matter. It’s a little early to tell whether the app could be a blessing or a hindrance for the viral world, but as this tool pairs quick fire video footage with a fast growing social network then it could well be the perfect way to catch a quick clip of your friend trying to recreate Knoxville & Co’s antics and publish the ‘go wrong’ moment to your own personal twitter feed. On the other hand this app seems to have a limited explicit content filter as proved by the porn scandal yesterday. What’s to stop Joe Bloggs uploading whatever the heck he wants!

The online social world may currently be giddy over the 6 second craze and I am pretty sure there is a straight love hate divide between those that use the new app to cram everything into the smallest amount of time allotted and those that downloaded the app, signed up and then deleted it, I am sadly part of the latter selection of individuals…for the time being.

“Connected Consumers” Want Feedback Recognised

The 7th Chamber — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:28:24 +0000

This post was originally published on Marketing Charts

8 in 10 consumers digitally engage with brands, while one-quarter are “brand connected consumers” (BCCs) who both post to and about brands online at least once a week, according to survey results from JWT, OgilvyAction, and EXPO. These BCCs use social media sites more frequently than the average consumer, and they expect their online voices to be heard. For example, 80% feel that it’s important that their feedback on a brand’s social network page is acknowledged, while 75% share that opinion about their feedback on review sites, and 70% about their feedback on their personal social network pages. That’s important, given separate survey results indicating that 70% of consumers will stop buying from a brand if it fails to respond to a negative post about it.

Brand-connected consumers do appear confident that their voices are seen and valued. Roughly 8 in 10 believe that brands see their posts on social network pages and review sites, and a similar proportion believe brands value the information they provide in those locations.

Other Findings:

25% of the time that a consumer is less than satisfied with an online exchange with a brand, they will stop buying products or services from the brand.

Conversely, when consumers are satisfied, 4 in 10 claim to purchase significantly more of the brand’s products and services, and 2 in 10 will buy something from the brand for the first time.

About the Data: The data is based on a survey of 300 general population respondents, of whom 84 counted as brand-connected consumers after weeding out duplicate submissions, error-filled submissions, and non-connected consumers.

YouTube Cracking Down on Fake Views

The 7th Chamber — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 10:18:42 +0000

Google has taken action against the large number of ‘fake’ YouTube views from music industry giants, which include Sony/BMG, RCA records and Universal. In an effort to enforce its ‘Viewcount Policy’, YouTube cracked down on by removing billions of video views from over 500 artists including Rihanna, Michael Jackson and Justin Beiber.

What determines a ‘fake’ YouTube view is using deceptive methods to raise viewership, known as ‘black hat’ techniques. These techniques manipulate YouTube views by tricking people into to watching a video, such as a misleading embedding of a video, that leads away from intended content and pop-unders, which appears as a pop-up advertisement underneath a web browser and forces a view.

It has been known for black hat marketers to offer thousands of views for next to nothing, although a message posted by Stefan Vraspir on YouTube’s Partners & Creator forum warns:

“If you are going to contract someone to help promote your content, it should be someone you absolutely trust, as you may be putting the fate of your channel (and your business on YouTube) in their hands. If they are using methods that aren’t within our terms, you will be the one to pay the price, as it will be your videos and your channel that get taken down.”

It is understandable with the ever-changing digital music industry this may have been perceived as a strategy to tackle piracy. YouTube is seen as the worldwide unofficial charts, making music video views valuable, which is an obvious indication for the number of inflated fake views. But by using methods that violate YouTube’s TOC, the music industry has truly suffered most.

Source: SocialBlade.com

In violation of this policy, YouTube views can be retracted from videos, videos may be removed and even delete your account. Universal and Sony have been made an example of, Universal having billion of views removed and Sony’s channel left bare with only three videos on their channel. It sounds like Google has sent out a clear message, it’s time for unethical YouTube marketers to hang up their hats.

What’s A YouTube View Really Worth?

The 7th Chamber — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:37:21 +0000

“What is a real, successful YouTube view?” This is a question we are asked by clients all the time. Unfortunately – like most other online measurement questions – there isn’t one standard answer that has been largely adopted by the industry.

Since YouTube doesn’t reveal its algorithm, it’s important for brands to have some solid way to help measure whether or not their videos are working for them effectively. To help brands do this, we’ve compiled our own research to help them better understand what a makes a social video view considered a success, which includes looking beyond paying for completed views because — as we will lay out in this article — “all views are not created equal.”

All Views Are Not Created Equal – Engagement vs. Views

Engagement is the pinnacle of a video campaign, the catalyst that initiates a user to get closer to purchase or drives brand uplift. This is why many people in the industry value actual “engagement” over a simple “view” when it comes to measuring success. But whether you’re in the engagement camp or not, there’s no argument that it’s a solid indicator of efficacy.

The fact is that video advertising is a premium product. CPMs are very high (compared to static banners or pre-roll video) ranging from $20-$800 ($20 being Trueview, more like run of network; $800 being native advertising). In order to justify this cost the question must be asked: “Shouldn’t the client be expecting some sort of post action?” We think so.

We use a formula that measures “Engagement Per Thousand Views,” or EPM. The formula comes from broad user engagement by measuring the following: YouTube likes/dislikes, comments; Tweets; Pins; Facebook shares/likes/comments; tumblr posts; stumble; Reddit; etc. We then calculate how many engagements these videos get per 1,000 views – hence the term “Engagement Per Thousand Views.”

Trueview Isn’t Always the Best View

For the purpose of this exercise, we based this research against the value of Trueview, YouTube’s ad server do-it-yourself service. To add context to this hypothesis, we did some basic research using a random sample set of 20 YouTube videos produced by brand advertisers that have predominately (90%+) used Trueview advertising as their view generator, versus 20 YouTube videos also produced by brand advertisers using predominately (90%+) a video seeding agency. We deliberately avoided videos that were “viral” successes, and then we looked at the numbers for true commercial viral videos that have gone crazy, into the millions of views – Old Spice, VW Darth Vader, Red Bull videos, etc. To add further context, we looked at the massive user generated viral hits not shackled by a brand that are well into the millions — cat videos, dancing men and laughing babies, etc. — to calculate their EPM.

The results speak for themselves. When it comes to engagement, Trueview advertising fares poorly compared to seeded video, but what’s interesting is that the EPM of the well-made commercial videos (Old Spice, Samsung, etc.) is not that far off from more organic, user-generated viral hits (cat videos), which is a good indicator that a brand’s reach into viral nirvana is not too out of reach. Interestingly, branded viral videos successes had exponentially more Facebook engagement than laughing babies or cat videos, putting to waste the theory that users don’t engage with branded videos as much as they engage with UGC content.

We don’t believe that Trueview is a poor product, but by its own design and nature, it makes it harder for a user to engage with the video. Even if the video content is reasonable and could trigger some social interest, a client using Trueview alone to promote their video will not benefit from this opportunity. Content that has very little engagement can also become a victim of YouTube’s own harsh algorithm; if a video has weak engagement (even with a lot of views), the algorithm will believe that users are not interested in the video and it will never see the light of day in any featured list and will never have the chance to earn any organic media.

The answer is that there’s not a single answer. To make the most out of videos, brands should look at the big picture, which means not only looking at views but also measuring total engagement to make the most of their videos.

Read original article HERE.