The Early Boom of YouTube
Most of what led to this boom can be traced as far back as 2005 with the debut of YouTube. Video marketing had already been on the superpowers of marketing. However, the growth of YouTube gave marketers and businesses a much more intimate and easily accessible platform to reach audiences with. The marketing potential was first realized when Nike uploaded the first video ever on YouTube. As a result, it reached over one-million views a mere four months after the platform debuted.
The next development in the realm of video marketing came a little over a year after the Nike ad. Industry giant and practical household name (at this point) Google purchased the online video platform for an outstanding 1.65 billion dollars. Furthermore, began to pave the way for video marketing as we know it today. Once Google caught on, many other brands and platforms started to take notice. Almost all of them started to launch campaigns, boost recognition, and most importantly start reaching a large spectrum of views and possible customers.
YouTube Ads
With the vast amount of advertising tools at its disposal such as AdWords and the ability for people to monetize their ads on YouTube, the platform became the go-to industry platform for online video advertising. The capability for businesses to see their ad performances in real-time due to YouTube analytics, made it so that big brands started to become more clever on how they crafted their ads.
Examples of Successful YouTube Ad Campaigns
One of the first examples of this new era of strategic video marketing came in 2010. Men’s grooming products brand Old Spice launched the very first interactive video ad campaign. The campaign was centered around their mascot, the Old Spice Man responding in the video to fan-comments. It proved wildly popular with 5.9 million YouTube views on the first day alone. This skyrocketed Old Spice’s popularity and led to it becoming the leading brand in men’s grooming product by the end of 2010. As a result, they had over 125% increase in sales and 1.4 billion impressions generated by the campaign. Furthermore, within a week of the campaign’s launch, Twitter followers of Old Spice increased by 2,700%. The number of Facebook fans rose nine-fold.
Another of the best examples of how big brands were beginning to create targeted, emotional, and shareable ads is Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ campaign. The campaign utilized sketches drawn by a trained FBI sketch artist that were women’s perceived appearance of themselves against sketches drawn by the same agent. However, based on a stranger’s perception of the women. The stranger’s interpretation was less critical with what the subjects actually looked like. This illustrated Dove’s point that women are often overly critical of their appearances and don’t see their true beauty.
Recent Developments
The most recent development in YouTube is that it has optimized itself for mobile advertising. Therefore, you may have noticed them in the form of bumper ads and the TrueView ads. Bumper ads are the short, non-skippable ads that run for about six seconds. You create them in Google Ads through a video campaign and you pay for these ads on a CPM (cost-per-thousand impression) bidding model. This means that you pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times. TrueView ads are can be as long as you want them to be with the standard being around 15-30 seconds. These ads can be skipped but you only pay when someone watches the ad for about six seconds. Both of these types of ads lead to an increase in brand awareness, action, and more. As a result, this has led to them becoming the industry standard for advertising on YouTube.
This leads us to today with YouTube accounting for over 1/3 of the entire internet user population. Furthermore, more people spending time on mobile devices than on traditional television. Because of this, many traditional brands are now investing cheaper, multi installment video ad campaigns on YouTube. Moreover, rather than instead of spending millions of dollars on a single TV commercial or ad buy. According to an article published by Digital Marketing Institute, in 2018 alone 81% of companies use video for marketing purposes, compared to 63% in 2017. Additionally, 76% of marketers say video has helped their company increase sales.
In Summary
With the ever-evolving nature of technology, it’s difficult to predict where the growth of YouTube marketing will be in the next decade. However, the ad campaigns will continue to become more and more catered to individual tastes as analytics steadily improve as time goes on. Furthermore, as more and more people spend time on their mobile devices, it’s possible that we will see a shift in favor of more digital video marketing than traditional TV ad space. Especially with an increase in bumper and TrueView ads.
