YouTube to give creators an edge with Attentive Reach on videos

Hosting the fourth #BrandCast in Mumbai, India  on March 24, YouTube under this event brought together top advertisers, agencies and creators from across the country to celebrate YouTube.

With 1 billion hours of content watched on YouTube daily, India is one of the most important markets as of now. YouTube Brandcast shared more such statistics, giving a view of what works in the Indian market.

In the mobile era, capturing attention is the crux of any content, where advertising itself breaks down to “to turn one attention to”. Watch-time is the ultimate attention currency, making viewability, audibility, and watch the time three aspects matter.

According to Sapna Chadha, Head of Marketing, Google India and South-East Asia Attentive Reach is the most important currency.

“According to a survey we conducted with Majestic Research, using eye-tracking technology we discovered, the first ad in an TV ad break is watched actively by 50% of people while the last one is watched actively by only 13% of viewers. Attention has always been inherent to advertising. But, capturing and keeping attention has never been harder for advertisers,” Chadha explained.

Addressing the media, Chadha asked them to change how they buy and plan media for attentive reach. She also shared that over the years, YouTube captures audience attention by delivering 95% audibility and 93% viewability.

YouTube has various ad formats, where bumper ads for 6 seconds are shorter in time but bigger on impact and are made for shorter moment of attention, created mostly for festive seasons. Next, the 15-30 seconds ad format which are usually utilized by brands and finally the long format ads, usually running on a story-telling approach.

Speaking on how to make advertising more effective online, Jonah Goodhart, CEO, MOAT, said, “Everywhere in the world, consumption patterns are changing, making ‘attentive reach’ the foundation of any digital campaign. Measurability is the key to understand the efficacy of any brand engagement and we are thrilled to be the first company to independently measure viewability on YouTube.”

Goodhart explained how human attention span is falling from 12% to 8%, which makes us less attentive than a goldfish. Emphasizing on the significance of attention, he gave the attention metric method where the more audible time, the higher the likelihood that people will remember it and it goes same with the screen time, longer the easier to remember.

Sanjeev Handa, VP and Head of Marketing, Maruti Suzuki, said, “Case in point, is the launch of the IGNIS which was done simultaneously through the physical as well as digital medium to engage with the millennials and, the results were astounding. On YouTube, the launch was viewed over 10 million times, and 20% pre-launch bookings came from digital in the first 10 days.”

He further added, “For advertisers to leverage digital effectively, one needs to have deep insights into your consumers, look to target their interests and effectively measure the viewability of the ad.”

A YouTuber for almost a decade, Kurt Hugo Schneider having around 8 million subscribers, shared how concept integration is necessary for marketers and not product integration. Advicing content creators, he even shared how thumbnail and title are the two things necessary to click on the video to earn people’s attention.

Elaborating on his experience of working with brands, Kurt Hugo Schneider, said, “Concept integration and not product integration, is key to making a brand video authentic and earning people’s attention. With technological innovation, brands today have the opportunity to interact more closely with their audience and get a feel of their preferences.”