ITV, the Network that puts on “Britain’s Got Talent”, seems to have a knack for uncovering great singing talent. In 2007 it was Paul Potts and Connie Talbot. This year it is Susan Boyle.
Considering Paul Potts and Connie Talbot are a 2 year old success, it is quite amazing how many views they have attracted consistently, and more so recently, in the wake of Boyle: almost a fifth on Potts and Talbot views were in the last month. For comparison, see the following chart:
Approx development of views on Potts, Talbot and Boyle videos
All three videos have achieved around 50M views. Obviously, BGT is a huge success in social video and has enabled the show to become a world-wide story rather than limited to British borders. But has ITV been able to monetize on the success online?
In 2007, content owners hadn’t really come to grips yet with the value that YouTube presents. Thus, neither the Paul Potts video nor the Connie Talbot video are actually published by ITV. More importantly though, in 2007, YouTube was only starting to develop means to enable content publishers to share in ad revenue on their high performing content. YouTube actually had nothing to offer for these content owners. Nobody can blame ITV for not monetising the YouTube success in 2007.
Seeing all these successes, one would expect that ITV had made arrangements for revenue sharing with YouTube and possibly other sites well before this year’s show in preparation for a potential social video hit. Looking at YouTube, where the overwhelming majority of the success has been focused, it seems, however, that they missed the boat. According to The Times UK, the management at ITV insisted that they wanted special terms from Google for the Susan Boyle video because they saw the videos taking off.
Instead of opting for the YouTube tried-and-tested advertising methods, ITV went into discussions with them and wanted special pre-roll ad options, which YouTube wasn’t able or willing to offer. However, they achieved some special treatment after all, since it is not possible to embed any of the non-offical copies out of YouTube.
While ITV set up their own YouTube channel and show to publish official copies of the top BGT performances online, they could only watch as the user uploaded videos took off. Kudos have to go to ITV for acting generously and not taking down the copies – at least they can now get official numbers on the complete views on their content.
YouTube offers a revenue share model to publishers of high-performing content through a partnership program. This enables advertisers to place the following kinds of adverts next to the partner content:
InVideo ads: These are little overlays that start at 10s into the video occupying the bottom 20% of the video player and containing Google ads. If a user clicks on it, the video is paused and a new tab opens with the clicked-through link.
Companion ads: These are a 300×250px banner ads that appear on the watch page of a video of a partner in the prime position next to the video.
These ads can be targeted on user demographics, location, time-of-day and content genre. The content owners receive a 50% share on the CPM charged for these ads.
The ads can be placed on all copies of a piece of content, no matter whether it is published through the official channel of the content owner or through consumer copies. This is just as well for ITV, since the official video of Susan Boyle’s performance is only the 10th best performing Susan Boyle video on YouTube when ordered by view count (on 13th May). For relevance ordered queries, the official video ended up on top for a while, but is now down to position 7 – obviously YouTube’s ranking is based on freshness of a post as well as views.
Assuming the £20 CPM value that is quoted in The Times Online, the top performing video on YouTube alone could have made £1M in advertising revenue, half of which would have gone to ITV – certainly a number that hurts.
Indeed, this number should hurt YouTube as much as ITV, since YouTube only makes money from highly performing videos if the publisher becomes a partner and makes money, too. It should have been in YouTube’s interest to allow advertisements next to the prime performing content as quickly as possible. Maybe this shows a need for an additional revenue model for content owners that is not dependent on them setting up a channel or show with YouTube. YouTube should take this as an opportunity!
In the meantime, ITV is indeed making money on YouTube. Their own videos have seen an amazing number of views in the past weeks and the show keeps coming up with amazing talent. For Hollie Steel, the ITV channel indeed provides the video with the highest view count. More than 30M views have come to BGT content since the 24th April and all of this content bears advertising. This means the ITV channel should now have created approx £600K of ad income – a substantial number indeed.
You may have been wondering that we haven’t written about the Susan Boyle success on this blog yet. However, we wanted to gain a few weeks of data on this particular social video story and turn it into something special.
Well, it has turned into something special in a different way: Tim Burrowes who writes the “mUmBRELLA” blog about the Australian media and marketing industry allowed us to publish it as a Guest Post there.
Check out the article on the Susan Boyle phenomenon at Mumbrella. It is called “What Paul Potts and Susan Boyle teach us about the changing face of social media” and compares the world from 2 years ago with Paul Potts’ success on “Britain’s Got Talent” to the current Susan Boyle success and what has changed since then. There are some nice stats there.
Because of it’s beauty, let me add here the almost perfect statistics of the Susan Boyle top performing video on YouTube:
Statistics Susan Boyle video
Many thanks go to Tim and also Ian Lyons from Amnesia Razorfish who introduced me to Tim.
On Tuesday we watched the new TV show “Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation” on Network Ten. The show was rather funny and all, some great ideas. But the biggest surprise came at the end and was very subtle: there were no credits shown at the end – no information about the names of the host, the generals, the guests, the producers, the writers etc. Instead, there was a one-liner: Credits can be viewed online. Wow! This to me is one of the biggest indicators that we are mirgrating from TV to online. Online, such a note would be accompanied by a link and if you are keen you can click on it. Easy enough! But on TV…?
The report analyses global trends for how users interact with online media and make recommendations for how advertisers should should react to them.
Of course they had to point out the explosion of social video use in the past few years and recommend increased use of social media and video to advertisers.
But what really impressed me was that they actually took their own recommendations and applied them to their own marketing strategy: the report was published on a blog with a YouTube video showing Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank explaining the report.
It’s only one of two videos that they have posted to TheNielsenCompany channel, so it’s a new phenomenon. Yet, it’s what I would call “eat your own dogfood”. Nice work!
BTW: Nielsen should put some video SEO on those YouTube videos! At minimum they should add some links and improve the descriptions.
With social networks abound, consumer created content that is brand-damaging can spread at an amazing pace and make it onto mainstream media to cause additional damage. This week, Domino’s was hit with such a brand disaster.
Two employees at a Domino’s in the U.S. had nothing better to do during their work time than to record a video of themselves putting all sorts of bodily fluids into the meals they prepared. They uploaded it to YouTube a few days ago and started a nightmare for themselves and for the brand that they are ridiculing. Their video is here, if you are willing to stand it.
The video obviously created an enormous brand damage and had a pretty bad effect on the fast food market in general with people proposing that such actions happened every day across a lot of the fast food chains of the world. Domino’s executive first decided to not react aggressively to the posting, but hoped the controversy would die down, but that is not how viral sensations work.
Only when many posts on Twitter asked for Domino’s reactions did they decide to work against the brand-damaging ongoing discussions: the workers were fired, charged with food tampering, the restaurant in question was closed and completely sanitised, and Domino’s start a Twitter channel to directly respond to customer’s concerns. Domino’s president Patrick Doyle even posted a message to YouTube in which he apologises and clarifies the company’s commitment to food safety.
Accordingly, the call for tools to help deal with such situations is growing louder. Social media monitoring tools provide a means to make sure brand-damaging postings are captured early, their impact is measured exactly, and adequate reactions can be prepared. Tools like Google Alerts, and Sydney-based companies S7, Brandtology, and also Vquence provide tools to address the challenges.
The whole affair engaged people so much that there are now almost 100 copies and replies to the video available on YouTube. Some of these are copies of the original video, some of Mr Doyle’s apology – one even with captions.
Interestingly, the Domino’s Incident has stayed mostly a YouTube phenomenon. There is no copy on MySpace.TV, there are only two copies on Dailymotion, one on Break.com, one on Metacafe, one on Yahoo video, and a few more random singles on other sites. It is a big public discussion held on YouTube. The videos are reaching 500K-1M views and 5.5K comments here. But given the reactions of Domino’s, we expect the buzz to die down rather quickly before creating more brand damage.
In comparison to that, the recent “Susan Doyle” videos with the star from “Britain’s Got Talent” have spread across many more sites. There are 87 copies on Dailymotion, 23 on MySpace.TV, 7 on Break.com, 13 on Vimeo, 14 on Yahoo video, and 42 on Metacafe. The original video on the BritiansSoTalented YouTube channel reached almost 30M views and 150K comments. This video single-handedly achieved 700 video responses and many many more copies.
It is a good sign that a positive message where a person lives up to her dreams and out-performs all expectations receives a much higher spread than a brand-damaging, stupid prank.
YouTube announced yesterday that they are now a new destination for television shows and an improved destination for movies. This obviously has two aims: to fight the dominance of Hulu in the space of professional content, and to create more valuable advertising space. The first will draw more eyeballs to YouTube, the second will make sure Google gets a return for its investment into YouTube.
All-excited, I went to YouTube to enjoy some shows. However, the first problem I had was that – at least here in Australia – the announced “Shows” tab was not available on the front page and there was no way to find the “Shows” or the “Movies”. Fortunately, the YouTube blog post also provided direct links, so I went there directly.
With new hope, I browsed the available shows and selected some to watch. I was, however, very disappointed. Most of the shows that I clicked on were not available in Australia. After some trial and error, I managed to watch “Astro Boy”, “Do you like Hitchcock”, and “Staffers”. I wasn’t able to access “Alf”, “The young and the restless”,”Star Treck”, “Beverley Hills 90210″, “MacGuyver”, “I dream of Jeannie”, “Dilbert” or “Bewitched”.
I would prefer if YouTube only exposed those videos that were actually available in Australia to us. What’s the point in pretending all this content is available, when it’s not? YouTube is no different in this respect to Hulu, which is virtually useless for an Australian.
Here in Australia, many agencies are starting to include viral video elements in their online marketing campaigns. The biggest question they all face is: how will we make it go viral?
YouTube is a large international site. Uploaded videos don’t easily rise above the general noise of the site.
If you are prepared to spend some money, there are ways in which videos can be lifted above the noise within YouTube. Particularly good candidates are the YouTube front page and search results pages, where a video will be exposed to many eyes and get a much better chance of being picked up and shared with friends, aka “going viral”.
YouTube Australia offers three different types of advertising on the front page: a masthead, an expandable video unit, and a video ad, each of which can be booked for a 24 hour period. The YouTube front page is localised, so your ads can be exposed to an Australian audience.
If you would like to target your audience further, you may want to consider advertising on search results pages. You can target age group, gender and interest areas of the searchers, thus reaching more valuable eyeballs.
An example of a campaign that has successfully used such an approach is posted on a recent AdAge article: advertsing pushed Geico’s “Numa Numa” video over 500K veiws on the first day, reaching more than 1.3M overall views by now.
There is a myth out there that a social video marketing campaign on YouTube – or more generally on social networks – can be done for free without spending any money on placement. The myth continues that merely publishing good content will automatically make it go viral. This simply is not true. Just because you don’t pay for the original placement, doesn’t mean your campaign can do without media buy expenditure.
There are strategies for exposing videos to more eyeballs – cheaper and more expensive ones. Advertising your social videos is one way – paying experts to execute a seeding strategy is another.
At our recent VQmetrics launch, I mentioned that seeding a video for broad viewership can go a certain distance, but in order for a video to go viral it really needs to hit a nerve.
A new social video ad was uploaded on 25th March by Mini. It is about a couple of guys sitting in a car on the German Autobahn and watching two Minis do some crazy moves. At some point the moves become suspiciously unreal and the guys start commenting that they obviously got drawn into a viral video ad. The end consists of typical TV ad titles and the Mini logo.
This video absolutely hits a nerve. The stats that we have collected over the last 3 days are just amazing:
It hit 30,000 views within 3 days and continues to grow. By today it has taken 9 honours on YouTube.
What is it’s secret? Maybe it’s the honesty of the ad. It starts out like a dark viral, but at the minute that it is obviously not real any more, the comments make it funny and the effects are quite cool. There is no shame in confirming it as an ad in the end.
One of the biggest fears in our industry is that online video will replace TV, and the consequences this will have on advertising and broad audience reach. According to recent research reports, the notion that online video is pushing TV out of the market is at least partially mistaken – instead, both, TV and online video viewership are continuing to increase.
With time-shifted TV increasing over-proportionally, and therefore people increasingly skipping ad breaks, new and more effective forms of advertising on TV are increasingly necessary – such as sponsorships, overlay ads, or clickable product placements. However, the traditional ad breaks will not fully go away – they just need to be used more effectively.
The important finding in the reports is that 31 percent of Internet activity occurs when consumers are also watching TV. Almost every third person uses the Internet while watching TV! Surely, this is an opportunity that advertisers must not miss!
The Superbowl ads show the way: this year, almost 70% of the ads had a URL embedded and planned for interaction with their customers after running the ad. The role of TV ads is changing: they are now a start to online user engagement. Advertisers have to be aware that consumers have their universal look-up tool at hand as they are watching TV and are keen to type in a URL and follow it to explore new products, play an online game, or interact in some other way with the brand that is advertising on TV.
Even now, TV ads are still a very good means to reach a large and diverse audience and seed consumer interaction. The minimum of user interaction that a TV spot should provide is that a copy of itself can be found online and shared with others through a link. Having your TV spot uploaded online is a great means to seed a viral ad to an audience that is used to sharing through their social networks.
You just need to check out view counts on some of the top Superbowl ads of this season to see that their online impact can be enormous:
A good Australian example is this Toohey’s ad, which was uploaded by a random user and achieved more than 500K views. Toohey’s would have gotten a lot of information about their audience and possibilities to re-connect to that audience had they published it themselves.
So, the next time you roll out a TV ad, also roll it out online and don’t wait until one of your customers does this job for you out of sheer frustration that it is not otherwise available.
Set up a channel on YouTube, through which you publish it. That gives your ads a common home and an authorised place to live. It also allows you to check out YouTube Insight metrics to analyse the composition of your audience.
Since YouTube is regarded by most as the default online video search engine, it should be your first call to upload it there. Another site to consider is MySpace.TV – if you have a MySpace page for your brand or campaign, you should also have your video ad at MySpace.TV. There are plenty of other sites that may be relevant depending on the audience you are targeting.
When you upload the video, also make sure to fill in the metadata with lots of information – this is your means of performing Search Engine Optimisation within YouTube and makes your video turn up in the “related videos” box of other videos more often.
Also consider making your TV ads more interesting for an online audience. Some recommendations for making interesting video ads for online were recently published by Daniel Flamberg at iMedia: make them short, funny, and use animation. And don’t forget to include a URL in your TV ad so you can direct your customers to the right place of engagement.
