Key Takeaways from YouTube Brandcast 2020

Globally, 500 hours of content uploaded every minute on YouTube. This and more highlights from the flagship advertiser event for brands and agencies - YouTube Brandcast 2020.

With YouTube being a significant fragment of the media mix for advertisers with considerable investments in the platform, insights from the YouTube Brandcast 2020 apprise us about the shifting dynamics of the medium, metrics that propel creative effectiveness, and more.

Sanjay Gupta, Country Head & Vice President, Google India mentions that since the advent of television, video has become the primary mode of entertainment, delivering entertainment, experiences, and education, and YouTube has played the role of a catalyst in this fundamental shift.

The event gives an overview of the two pillars of YouTube - creators and audience, viewing experience and advertising on the platform, and data-driven insights.

Creators

• Globally, 500 hours of content uploaded every minute; India is one of the largest contributors to this

• India now has 2,500 channels with over a million subscribers

• India is one of the fastest-growing YouTube markets

• The number of YouTube creators with over a million subscribers in India has grown from 20 in 2016 to 2500 in 2020

Audience

• YouTube is now the most used platform for watching online videos in the country

• More than 325 million 18+ users tune in month on month

• YouTube watch time in July 2020 was 45% higher than the same time last year

Also Read: Google improves attribution for YouTube TrueView for action ads

YouTube Advertising

• A Neilsen study says YouTue effectiveness is 4.8X greater than TV effectiveness

• A meta-analysis on Lay's India's 8-week long TV + online campaign created on the basis of data-driven insights for creative messaging found that it delivered 12.5% sales lift, 5.05 ROAS, the highest sales uplift seen in APAC to date

• 89% of YouTube campaigns deliver a significant lift in offline sales

Creative Effectiveness

The transforming period, when some traditional learnings remain applicable and some don't, and one not being able to differentiate which is which, few insights would aid brands and agencies in the execution of campaigns.

Priya Barve, Head, Unskippable Labs, APAC shares a few insights to boost the efficiency of YouTube campaigns. The insights are concluded from a review of top and bottom performing ads, and experiments conducted to find effective opportunities for brand communications.

Here are the learnings:

• Bringing together data-driven audience insights & messaging can open up new possibilities in how to tell stories

• The creative power of the ad is often more important than the media decisions that sit behind it

• While most advertisers during the pandemic were wondering what not to say, what to say, and how to say it, it was found that almost 90% of effective ads did not reference the crisis, it showed everyday life, and continued with business as usual messaging

• The basics: show the product, solve a problem, and do it in an interesting way, still remain applicable

• A study on eleven thousand ads across 5 verticals found that most creative attributes solved only one problem, if a campaign works for ad recall, it may not work for purchase intent, if it works for consideration, it may not work for awareness

• Different goals need different stories, three different ads work better than the same ad three times over

• Different ads work for different audiences

• The path to growth is better insights and diverse stories