Following its bid to take a slice of TV adspend earlier this year by attacking the effectiveness of television ads, YouTube has now shifted its tactics by claiming its platform is a place where popular culture is born.
Alison Lomax, head of brand solutions at Google, told Mediatel: “The things that get us really excited are obviously the numbers, but it’s also the cultural influence. For years, brands have always wanted to connect with popular culture and YouTube, as a platform, enables them to do that.”
Lomax, who was hosting YouTube’s Upfonts on Thursday evening, said that new genres of music such as grime “grew up on YouTube” – through channels like SBTV – and that popular culture had found a new place to develop and thrive.
Lomax’s focus on the content – rather than numberwanging – is a slight departure from earlier tactics to grab a lager pot of advertiser money.
The platform came under fire earlier this year after claiming that in 80% of cases YouTube ads were more effective than TV ads in driving sales – and suggested advertisers should be allocating up to six times more of their budget to YouTube than they currently do.
It also said advertisers targeting millennials should give it 24% of their TV budgets.
TV’s marketing body, Thinkbox, was quick to unpick the research leading to a high-profile spat.
On Thursday, Lomax told Mediatel: “We haven’t been around as long as TV so we don’t have the same bank of case studies; but for what we have been producing recently, YouTube is actually really proving itself to be an effective channel.
“If you are representing a brand, whether you’re a media agency or an advertiser, it’s really important to realise quite how huge it is now, it’s not something you can ignore.”
Improved measurement
Presented with a host of viewing statistics for YouTube, Mediatel asked – in light of the Facebook video debacle – if third party measurement was on the cards.
“We’re working really closely with third party measurement tools to ensure that we can increasingly share data which is third party verified,” said Lomax.
“We work with people like Moat [the analytics company focused on digital advertising] at the moment, so we have a lot of third party verification involved when it comes to serving advertising and we’re seeing really strong results from the advertisers.”
Elsewhere during Thursday’s event, Google’s agency leader, Peter Cory, took a swipe at Facebook’s main video advertising product by saying that advertisers’ money is wasted on videos that often play without sound, or are scrolled past rather than watched as they should be.
Lomax also confirmed to Mediatel that a live sporting update is coming soon, but no details can be shared at present.
