News: Sidemen’s hype man loves YouTube
Opinion | Future of Brands: Creator Economy Week in Focus
The CEO of the management firm behind The Sidemen has some opinions about TV. Trouble is, they’re rather misleading, argues Elliott Millard, Thinkbox CSO.
When The Sidemen believed they’d “hit the limit” of YouTube and wanted to move on “to something even bigger”, that something was TV.
Is TV bigger than YouTube, though? Where it counts, it certainly is. Commercial TV reaches an audience in a day on the TV set that takes YouTube a month.
The Sidemen’s move into TV is a well-trodden path. King Kenny is currently enjoying greater fame thanks to The Celebrity Traitors. John Nellis is the latest content creator to use Strictly to boost his recognition.
For all the talk of creators replacing TV, it’s striking how many still regard TV as the step up – something worth noting whenever YouTube claims to be TV.
I use all this as backdrop to the predictable assertions made by The Sidemen’s hype man, Matt Elek, in his recent podcast interview with The Media Leader. Plenty of side eye from The Sidemen.
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Where to start? Life’s too short to deal with every claim Elek made, but some themes…
Primetime
Elek claims that creators are now the “de facto primetime”. People come home, turn on the telly, and head to their favourite creators.
Some do, no doubt. But why so binary? Given YouTube accounts for 11% of TV set viewing and TV 89%, that’s an astonishingly bold claim. That’s the average, of course; for 16-34s it is different: TV is 80%.
And, even if some creators rack up millions of views, that doesn’t make those views equivalent to a primetime TV audience. Over what period and for how long were they watched? And let’s not forget that YouTube recently moved the goalposts so that a view is now a glimpse.
Total TV
Elek has noticed that people watch less TV than they used to. He’s no prophet in this regard, but he is trying to profit by audaciously extrapolating this into, checks notes, “terminal decline”.
Anyone who reads The Media Leader knows people watch less linear TV now, especially younger audiences. But they’ll also know the growth of broadcaster VOD and subscription streaming has transformed how people watch TV. You can’t judge Total TV on one form alone.
Do we watch as much TV as we did 20 years ago? No, but it is still an enormous amount of the highest-quality media time on the planet available to advertisers, with an effectiveness record creators simply don’t have. If you’re advising advertisers where to spend money, as Elek does, effectiveness evidence is a good place to start.
Culture
Not done swinging, Elek found time to suggest that creators are replacing TV’s place in culture.
It’s a fashionable assertion. Culture is often confused with what’s new, viral, or trending. But cultural influence is about much more than being talked about today. It’s about creating shared experiences and references that endure.
We recently commissioned Cultural Advantage to measure different media’s cultural impact. It found that content creators rank very low in cultural influence – only podcasts have less impact (we didn’t calculate the impact of someone championing content creators on a podcast).
TV topped almost every measure. Its cultural influence is big, it lasts, and, crucially for advertisers, it’s predictable. Brands can reliably tap into culture through TV rather than gamble on what might go viral.
Individual, outlier creators like The Sidemen do have cultural impact. The study showed they were on a par with Gogglebox. But extrapolating from a handful of exceptional creators to claim they’re replacing TV’s cultural role is a leap.
Safety
Amid the shade Elek throws is a contender for understatement of the year:
“Bad shit is happening everywhere,” he laments. “It does happen on YouTube. It does happen on TV. Not quite in the same way.”
Not quite in the same way, Matt?! That’s like saying thumb war is not quite as bad as actual war. He needs to gen up on the enormous gulf between TV and YouTube when it comes to the regulation that protects users and advertisers.
This leads us to an ironic tension at the heart of Elek’s assertions.
When he wants to talk up creators, he goes big, conjuring TV’s demise. When he wants to emphasise creators’ commercial value, suddenly it’s time to talk up their TV credentials – they’re like primetime, they’re on the TV set, they aspire to the measurement standards, trust, and rigour of TV.
No one is denying YouTube’s popularity, nor the success of its biggest creators. But that doesn’t mean you have to trash talk TV and pretend creators have replaced TV’s cultural role.
I get it. He likes YouTube. I also like YouTube. But I like facts and balance more.
Elliott Millard is Thinkbox’s chief strategy officer.