4. Sim Rugby, o2


Visit the official site here: SimRugby.co.uk

3. Test Your Awareness : Whodunnit?, Transport for London

2. Extreme Sheep LED Art, Samsung

1. Symphonia, Vodafone

As a practical matter, Gartner’s projections contend that broadband penetration of the consumer market will be above two thirds of households in almost all developed countries by 2012. For YouTube this means substantially bigger audiences, increased sharing and a substantially higher level of user-generated content.

2. User-Generated Content (UGC). This is an area where YouTube is at the forefront. Not only is the vast majority of the video on YouTube generated by users (29 percent of them have uploaded a video within the last three months) but commenting and rating are key activities that constitute content and simultaneously help determine the viewing performance of the associated videos.

3. Social networking sites are obviously amongst the hottest internet properties today. YouTube is a part of it in a unique way. The purpose of social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook is to help people connect with their friends and to find others with whom they have something in common. But YouTube is not a social networking site.

Jon Gibs, senior director of media for the market research firm Nielsen/NetRatings follows the social networking sector. He says of YouTube: “You don’t create a buddy list and share your buddy list, but you do have consumer generated (or at least consumer-added) content. You have tagging around that, and you have conversation around that, and you have association between elements. To me that’s social networking.”

Even so, Gibs describes YouTube as “a video-sharing site with social networking tacked on.” That’s a good way to consider the marketing power of YouTube and it’s an important one.

The true social networking sites are the converse – users can add video but the video (typically user-generated snippets of films, TV shows and comedy clips) is generally secondary to the “friends” motif.

YouTube will increasingly become a more hospitable environment for marketers. If you have a good video, like the Sephora videos, they can carry your brand message without conflicting with the purpose of the site.

Key Point

Because of its video focus, YouTube should offer more marketing possibilities and flexibility than the social networking sites.

YouTube today is uniquely positioned as a marketing channel on the net. And we have a good idea of how it will develop in the months and years ahead.

YouTube will Develop in Some Predictable Ways

Thanks to academic studies of the way consumers adopt innovations, we have a good idea of how YouTube will develop over the next few years. We think that YouTube will follow the patterns and timelines of the consumer adoption of technological innovations such as the internet and television. The basic trails are well-blazed.

Consumer adoption of technological innovation moves from younger to older people. Young people adopt or grow up with innovations. As they age, the proportion of older people in the total population using the innovation increases. You can count on the user base for YouTube to get older until it is more like the total population.

Consumer adoption of technological innovation moves from urban to rural locations. In the case of YouTube, that is likely to be an infrastructure issue. The number of broadband connections will need to increase in rural areas before the number of YouTube users will increase but you can count on the YouTube user base to become more evenly distributed geographically.

Consumer adoption of technological innovation move from more affluent to less affluent households. In countries where broadband is not subsidized that means that YouTube use is likely to move down-market as more broadband connections become affordable. You can count on the YouTube user base in the future to more accurately reflect the income distribution of the countries where you do business.

Consumer adoption of technological innovation moves toward the mainstream at a predictable pace. It takes most technological innovations about fifteen years to move from first public trials to a saturation point. If YouTube follows a similar pattern, saturation will come around 2020. But there’s a more important point to pay attention to for marketing purposes.

The adoption curve for most innovations is an S shaped, or Sigmoid, curve. The log phase of the curve, the part with the most rapid growth, usually begins around two years in and lasts until the midpoint is reached.

Using our dates from YouTube history, the upturn should have been around early 2007. But the YouTube curve turned up earlier.

If we use videos viewed as a guide, the fast-growth phase for YouTube began in the first quarter of 2006 when usage was almost doubling every month. That early turn was the result of two things. First, YouTube was an elegant service, a simple solution to a mass market problem. Second, the enabling technology, broadband connectivity, was already in place for many affluent households.

If you’re a marketer, what’s most important is that the time from the introduction of YouTube to the midpoint on the adoption curve is likely to be seven years. That means that by 2012 at the latest the mainstream adopters will be onboard in the US and the UK. In other countries, that date may move slightly in either direction depending primarily on the prevalence of broadband connections.

That gives you a window of less than two years to gain some early-mover advantage.

Action Ideas

Act now to gain a presence on YouTube and position your company so you’re established by the time the mid-point of adoption is reached.

Mine the video you already have. Just be sure to edit your clips for a length and tempo so they fit YouTube.

Key Points

However, be careful, just because you have video doesn’t mean it’s good or meaningful to the people in your market. Either modify it so it is, or don’t use it.

Key Points: Just because it’s easy to do, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Check everything you intend to post on YouTube to make sure it represents your brand and moves your mission forward.

Google’s Purchase of YouTube is Good for Marketers

Google’s ownership of YouTube is important for marketers. Google brings three key strengths that will further improve YouTube’s marketing attractions.

Google is highly business oriented. At the time when Google announced the purchase of YouTube. Google executives declared that one of their key objectives was to “give professional content owners more opportunities to get their work out to a wider audience.” Google was started with the goal of being a successful business and the founders have consistently acted with a business focus. Google will therefore act to make YouTube more valuable to advertisers and more profitable for them.

Google has excellent development capability. The company has made its mark developing algorithms that deliver content to searchers and searchers to advertisers.

Google has lots of money and patience. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has described monetizing YouTube through ads as “the holy grail.” Finding it means trying different forms of advertising. Google intends to leverage those strengths.

Here are some of the ways in which we believe Google will further improve YouTube for marketers.

Google will find new ways to grow its audience. This will happen by raising the quality of content to attract more viewers to the site for longer and by multiplying the number of ways to access the site.

Improving the quality of content will happen progressively through agreements with owners of desirable content. The agreement with Lions Gate, announced in July 2008, is an example.

YouTube will also expand its viewing audience by being available on more devices. That includes mobile phones, iPods and critically importantly, home TV. In the US, TiVo, the provider of technology and services for digital video recorders (DVR), announced in March 2008 that it will offer access to YouTube videos directly from the TV via a TiVo DVR. IPTV is very likely to be the next revolution in consumer technology and YouTube will be a major beneficiary when it arrives in early 2009.

Google will find new ways to deliver ads. So far this includes pre roll and post roll ads and “in the chrome ads” placed in the frame around the video. According to C-net, so far “the company is happiest with in video ads that are embedded across the bottom of the video area itself.”

Example of a pre-roll ad on YouTube:

There’s bound to be more. Since August 2007, ads have been placed in a transparent overlay at the bottom fifth of the video window on material licensed from media companies. Product placements in videos have been appearing since 2007 as well. Tests of other possibilities are ongoing.

Key Point

Google will continue to introduce new ways to serve the needs of marketers and content providers to the benefit of both.

Google will develop new service offerings for marketers. For example, in May 2008, Google introduced a service called “Buzz Targeting.” The service uses an algorithm to locate videos that are about to “go viral” by monitoring blog traffic, IMs and email. Ads will be overlaid on the bottom fifth of viral videos supplied by YouTube partners who then share in the ad revenue.

Google will develop sophisticated analytics for marketers who use YouTube. Analytics is a Google strength. The company already provides analytics for web masters and participants in other programs. And it’s started to do the same for marketers using YouTube.

In March 2008, Google introduced tracking software on YouTube that provides video viewing information. The information includes when and where the video was viewed. Some information is only shared with paid advertisers and partners. They can learn, for example, how many viewers watch 25 percent, 50 percent or the entire video.

YouTube today offers you a dual challenge. It’s already a market and marketing venue that you can exploit, so you have to understand the YouTube of today. YouTube is also developing in ways that will make it more attractive still to marketers and to more marketers in the future. YouTube Revealed contains a wealth of information to help you meet both challenges. We’ll start by looking at who uses YouTube today.

By April 2006 visitors were watching 35 million videos a day. The company received another round of funding from Sequoia Capital: $8 million to expand sales and marketing efforts and build-out the data centers. In October, Google agreed to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. At that point YouTube visitors were downloading over 100 million videos a day. The purchase was finalized in February 2007.

Speaking at the Library of Congress in June 2008, Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University described the impact of YouTube. “YouTube produced more hours of video in the past six months than the three major networks have produced since 1948.”

Clearly, YouTube is an important force on the internet and in digital media but as Professor Wesch also noted, the vast majority of videos on YouTube today are short, amateur videos of three minutes or less. YouTube today is not what YouTube will be in a year or three years. The changes are driven by some powerful trends and will follow predictable patterns; Understanding them will help you get out in front of the curve.
YouTube is Already a Market

Marketers using YouTube benefit from the commercial infrastructure that is already in place on the internet and the extent to which people around the world have become accustomed to shopping online. According to Nielsen Global, as of February 2008, 875 million people worldwide have bought something online. Buying is strong across many countries.

“Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97 percent), Germany (97 percent), Japan (97 percent) with the U.S. eighth, at 94 percent. Additionally, in South Korea, 79 percent of these Internet users have shopped in the past month, followed by the UK (76 percent) and Switzerland (67 percent) with the U.S. at 57 percent.”

This matches up with the numbers we see on YouTube. 91 percent of YouTube users have purchased something online. 63 percent have done so within the last three months.

When it comes to direct buying influence, the numbers are lower but remember we’re considering the influence of a single site so the statistics are impressive. 35 percent of YouTube users have purchased something online that they saw advertised on YouTube and 30 percent have followed a YouTube link to make a purchase. These figures are almost certainly depressed since users include a sizeable proportion of teenagers who do not have a credit card to make online purchases.

Online purchases are only the tip of the iceberg. Many people who shop online are likely to buy offline. According to a 2007 study by eMarketer: “for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.” Our survey found that 37 percent of YouTube users have purchased something offline that they saw advertised on YouTube.

In general, the purchasing demographics of YouTube follow those for the internet as a whole. With the exception of teenagers, younger people are more likely to purchase online than older people. Men are more likely to purchase online than women. The commercial action on YouTube isn’t limited to consumers. 25 percent of visitors to YouTube have used the site for business. About half of them do so regularly or at least occasionally.

From our research we identify that YouTube’s commercial usage breaks down into three main categories. Almost half of business users are looking for more information about a subject that will help them commercially. 45 percent are seeking information about products or services to purchase and 28 percent are checking out the competition.

YouTube is already a market that you can exploit. There are some key trends that YouTube is part of and that will define what YouTube will become.

An Introduction to YouTube Report 2009

An audience this size is hard to ignore. In our work with clients we searched for studies about this audience and what one can do to reach it as part of a marketing program. When we established there was little that has been published we decided to create it. After all, Entertainment Media Research was founded over a decade ago by the former head of music information for MTV Europe with the belief that the coming digital revolution would bring together the worlds of entertainment and marketing.

With entertainment expertise and quantitative research skills we serve entertainment, media and consumer businesses around the world from our base in London and are therefore ideally positioned to study the impact and opportunities that YouTube has come to offer. We started by undertaking a comprehensive audit of usage, attitudes, and preferences of YouTube users in a robust online survey of 1,758 US residents. The sample was then weighted to the demographic representation of the US online population. We then applied the findings from this proprietary research to inform our YouTube User Guide and in doing so, remove wherever possible assumption from the marketing process. YouTube Revealed: a marketer’s guide to understanding and making the most out of YouTube.

Our primary objective in writing this report is to help marketers sharpen their understanding of the YouTube phenomenon, grasp the marketing implications and flatten the learning curve to putting this knowledge to highly effective use. The User Guide therefore combines detailed practical advice at the functional How To level, with strategic thinking and background information. Here’s a brief overview of what you’ll find in the User’s Guide.

YouTube is already a place where many kinds of businesses are starting to promote their wares so we begin with a review of how YouTube was founded and developed. But YouTube is developing fast, as changing demographics and evolving possibilities make it a place that is even more attractive to marketers of all kinds. Of course, teenagers and young adults are the dominant users right now but they’re far from the whole story. We fully expect YouTube to change to such a degree that over the next three years its demographics will more closely match the online population as a whole. Every marketing-driven business needs to understand this market-place and how best to exploit it before its competitors.

The key marketing objective is to achieve a viral impact through user recommendation or “word of mouse.” This is much easier said than done so we detail why and how people come to YouTube today, what are their primary reasons and how this is changing as the demographic usage mix inevitably changes. We identify the most popular types of video by demographic and we review the controllable and non-controllable factors that affect viewing of a particular video.

We move on to review the patterns of typical YouTube sessions. We cover what the “Watch Page” looks like along with advertising possibilities to ensure you get the most out of the available feedback. We analyze what happens after a YouTube visitor has watched a video and then recommend how you should structure your content to exploit this trend and optimize your opportunities for engagement and branding.

Much has been made in the mainstream media about the YouTube community. We cover some of the ways that marketing into this community is uniquely different. We will suggest to you that brand channels are an effective way to concentrate your marketing efforts on YouTube. In our chapter on channels we look at the place of channels on YouTube today and how to make your brand channels work most effectively. We review what YouTube users think of advertising on YouTube and what some of your options are today. Those options are bound to change as YouTube seeks more ways to make the site profitable.

Throughout the report we share key insights on how best to apply your marketing skills to YouTube whilst pointing out where the fundamental principles still apply. People or businesses who buy your product or service will still buy for the same reasons they always have. The marketing research you’ve done about important benefits and messages will still be relevant; only the environment of YouTube will be different.

On YouTube, video is central. You will therefore discover ways to use video to build awareness, convey benefits, and support sales and service. On YouTube, word of mouse is crucial and the community is in control. We know that integrated marketing programs that tie YouTube marketing efforts to other marketing and branding efforts are generally the most successful so we’ll show how best to facilitate the process.

YouTube offers marketing challenges and opportunities for everyone. Giant companies like 3M, Nestle, and IBM are already using it as part of their marketing and so are individual service firms. Whether it’s the mass market or the farthest end of a long tail, you have the opportunity to derive important marketing benefits from YouTube. As there are special challenges for different markets and companies, we offer suggestions about how to adapt your use of YouTube for different kinds of businesses. There are chapters for B2B marketers and small businesses as well as chapters on ways to use YouTube to improve your relationship with existing customers and ways to use YouTube for marketing research.

We close the User’s Guide with a look at the future of YouTube and recommendations about what you should consider implementing. Now, let’s get started with “YouTube Now and in the Future.”

There’s one more thing before we go on. If you aren’t yet familiar with YouTube, just reading about it won’t be nearly enough. You need to spend time familiarizing yourself with what it is and how it’s changing. You’ll also pick up ideas from other marketers who are already using the site.

Number 10

Youtube.com/McDonalds (Student From Singapore)

McDonalds has had more than its share of PR problems in the past, but surely a company of this size shouldn’t be scooped to their own Youtube domain by a student from Singapore. The account www.youtube.com/mcdonalds has two videos in their account, and both clips that have nothing to do with burgers. The student is obviously reluctant to give up his account as it could be a cash cow in the future.

Number 9

Youtube.Com/DavidBowie

David Bowie lost out to his own Youtube domain and now has been forced to us the rather clunky username of youtube.com/OfficialDavidBowie. Youtube deals with squatters by changing the url file tree to redirect users to the official page. For example, if you type in “youtube.com/DavidBowie” you’ll land on the “Official David Bowie” page. It’s just lucky for Bowie that YouTube doesn’t always mind making ch-ch-changes.

Number 8

Youtube.com/MTV (Korean Youtube account with over 300 subscribers)

You’d think that for a company that pioneered music videos they would have been more aware than most other brands how important Youtube might become. Unfortunately for MTV their account has been taken by someone in Korea with just over300 subscribers. Instead of showing the latest cutting edge music videos and interviews, anyone visiting MTV’s channel will have to make do with watching Korean gameshows and pregnancy videos.

Number 7

Youtube.com/CocaCola (9 subscribers!)

If you saw the username CocaCola on youtube you probably wouldn’t expect to see such titles as “Tales of the LOLbyss” available to watch. What makes this even more surprising is that Coke recognised the value of Youtube pretty early on when they held a competition for users to upload their videos.

Number 6

Youtube.com/Volkswagen (1 subscriber)

Volkswagen are no stranger to problems with Youtube users. They even tried to take a user to court because a user put a Nazi spin on a VW Golf commercial. If having a spoof of their video put up on Youtube wasn’t bad enough they’ve also lost out on their username to someone who has a the grand number of 1 subscriber.

Number 5

Youtube.com/BMW (Eddi, 48 years, 14subscribers)

Another car company who missed out on their own name was the German giant, BMW. You might not learn anything about cars or BMW if you visit this channel, but you will get to see Britney Spears and Christina Milian.

Number 4

Youtube.com/Disney (9 Subscribers)

Youtube could have been the perfect place to showcase old Disney films and trailers for upcoming movies. Instead, the Disney channel on Youtube has 10 subscribers and the owner of the channel has only watched 1 video.

Number 3

Youtube.com/ IBM (6 Subscribers)

The owner of the IBM channel has watched over 14,000 videos. Judging by some of the comments left it seems that there are other youtube users who think the site belongs to IBM. This is one of the comments left “i hate you!!! i hate ur laptop! (mine) it sucks! but very light =)”

Number 2

Youtube.com/Microsoft (32 Subscribers)

Despite the mixed reactions to the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads last year, surely the Microsoft username would have been far more memorable and valuable than the Youtube.com/WindowsVideo that they eventually went with. You can’t watch the ads on on the Microsoft channel but a clip entitled, “LINDSAY FULLY LOADED” has been set as a favourite.

Number 1

Youtube.com/Yahoo (45 Subscribers)

Probably the most surprising of the companies who didn’t secure their own username was Yahoo. The search giants probably hoped that Yahoo videos would be a bigger success as Youtube, but it still means that they lost out to someone with only 45 subscribers.

While it might seem harmless to most – if you are a brand and are not securing your Youtube name then you could be seriously hurting your brand.

The Youtube Report 2009 reveals that 43% of users click on the username to discover what’s uploaded in that channel. It is important for a brand to own the username to control the messaging being communicated under its name. 61% agree with “ If a username is the same as a familiar brand, I would expect the brand to be behind the channel”.

To receive a the first chapter of the Youtube Report 2009 enter your details into the form below

So, what is the importance of YouTube for musicians?

What we tend to forget is that the digital world is still very young and far too small for us to realistically expect to reap rewards right now. Here’s a good example: Avril Lavigne’s video Girlfriend is the number 1 most viewed video of all time with 116 million views. Let’s put that into perspective. The clip was uploaded in February 2007 which therefore equates to 5 million plays a month world wide. That sounds impressive until you realise that it’s equivalent to just 1 play per month on Chris Moyles’ breakfast show on Radio 1.

If a track gets a rotation on Radio1 it will receive 10-15 plays per week which may equal some 50-75 million YouTube views in the UK. By the way, the most viewed music video in the UK has 83 million plays. That is less than 2 weeks on a Radio 1 rotation.

The importance of YouTube to the music industry has not been financial yet. It is about building fan bases around new projects. Having 100,000 YouTube plays for an artist’s new video can be sufficient to start their viral ball rolling. From that, a new artist is able to emotionally connection which is absolutely vital if the revenue is to start flowing.

Clear Proposition

One of the most important things to consider is what your channel proposition is. The odds are stacked against you if your approach is to build a channel and hope for the best. Youtube users expect channels to be “formatted”, which means there is an underlying theme they are interested in.

A third of all users in the US say that they subscribe to a channel because they expect to find similar videos in one place. Think about who your audience are and what you have that they may want. Then focus on delivering it.

Links

Never forget to put a link to your product/homepage into the video. 39% on average notice these. This number climbs to 63% with 15-19 year olds. There are lots more possibilities to seed links. Get familiar with them and use them.

Regular Contribution

Don’t forget to contribute regularly. Nearly 2 in 3 Youtube users believe that brands with “channel” are really forward thinking and innovative, but remember that everyone can see how active you are in your channel. YouTube is an online community, and to be a part of it, you need to be involved.

Not updating your channel regularly exposes you or your brand as not being a part of the community.

Title Research

Don’t be lazy researching the right title. Forget Youtube tags for the moment and concentrate on finding a great keyword heavy title. It’s the most powerful thing for people to find you through search. A video of mine was uploaded for two month, when suddenly an event made people search for the word “Angel”. That day, the video received 30,000 plays because that keyword was in the title.

Don’t spam your title, it has to be relevant, or your clip will get flagged up!

Sex

Don’t be (too) sexy with your thumbnail. What given many of todays Youtube stars such as AtheneWins an early headstart is now banned. Too sexy thumbnails will get your video algorithmically demoted. Make the Thumbnail compelling as 43% of Youtube users say that if it is it encourages them to watch it.

Can you think of any other YouTube mistakes? Let us know in the comments below

According to Comscore: “YouTube led the growth charge, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed versus December, as it surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time.”

Google continues to surpass others in terms of online video viewing with a 43 percent market share. Of that, YouTube accounts for 99 percent of the videos viewed. Fox Interactive Media account(3.7 percent), Yahoo! Sites(2.5 percent) and Viacom Digital(1.9 percent) are trailing behind by a wide margin.

In January 2009, 147 million U.S. internet users watched an average of 101 videos per person.

Are these numbers what you expected? Where do you see online video growing from here? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.