YouTube in the Goldfish Era – Insights from YouTube Insider

Attentive reach. Brand Lift. Cultural influence. The Goldfish era.

These are one of the keywords heard in the YouTube Insider EMEA 2017 conference held last week at Google Dublin. Over 200 advertisers and agency representatives gathered together for two days to learn more about the best practices on YouTube.

We started the day – of course – by watching a YouTube video. DO WHAT YOU CAN’T by Casey Neistat, a YouTube star who just sold his company to CNN for $25 million.

“Do what you can’t. In this new world, no one really knows anything “.

These words by Casey Neistat are also applicable to YouTube, since anyone can make their videos go viral on YouTube and get their voice heard. Culture is in the hands of all of us. YouTube is an ecosystem where users, creators and brands are interacting.

Dyana Nadji told us about the next big thing on YouTube: Director Mix .

The director mixes the video’s assets and creates thousands of versions to align with the audience being targeted. This saves time and management on the part of the advertiser, with YouTube doing the heavy lifting to make sure the most relevant message is shown to the right audience. Read more about Director Mix from Marketing Land.

Nikki Fleming spoke about the cultural significance of YouTube and the two major emerging trends:

Being able to recognize these types of trends and reaching customers at the right moment can be vital for advertisers. Advertisers should stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.

A map of the biggest Cultural Moments in 2018 provides help to advertisers and brands while they’re planning their YouTube content to reach customers at the right moment.

And what was the thing about goldfish?

Goldfish has a span of attention of 9 seconds, and for humans the average has dropped from 12 to 8 seconds. This means that it would be easier to capture the focus of a goldfish than a human. In this goldfish era, it’s critical to create content on YouTube that catches the viewer’s attention from the very first seconds.

In order to capture attention, the creativity of the content has a key role in YouTube. Especially if you’re using TrueView ad format, the viewer’s attention need to be captured during the first few seconds – otherwise the viewer is going to skip the ad. There are some assets to be used to facilitate the catching of attention from the first frames of the video: faces, music, trailer, humor, brand and craft. It has been studied that if the viewer sees some of these assets in the beginning of the video, there’s a higher probability that the ad won’t be skipped.

While YouTube is often seen as a branding channel, the ultimate goal is to make conversions. We move from Intention to Attention and yet to Action.

Soon advertisers are able to target consumers in YouTube by using Custom Affinity Audiences. This means targeting customers by using search keywords as targeting criteria. If we already know what the customer is searching for from search network, we can use these intent signals to offer more relevant ads to the customer also in YouTube. Read more about Custom Affinity Audiences in Inside AdWords.

Brand Lift is a measurement that provides insights into how your ads are impacting the metrics that you want to measure, such as lift in brand awareness, ad recall, consideration and purchase intent. You can and you should use brand lift in all your eligible campaigns in YouTube. With another metric, Conversion Lift, you can measure site traffic and online conversions.

The biggest brands in the world are leaning on YouTube to reach attention, influence the culture and ultimately, to get proven results. According to a survey conducted by Google, YouTube offers the best opportunity for a viewer to see and hear an ad. Read more about the survey in think with Google.

To summarize the main lessons learned from YouTube Insider 2017, we already know how to reach our target audience – at the same time, it has become more difficult to capture the attention of this audience.

“Reach is no longer the scarce commodity. Attention is.”