Unskippable

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Unmade.

Today: What we learned at last night’s YouTube Brandcast event.

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It’s not TV. It’s YouTube

Week two of Upfronts season and it was back to the Hordern Pavilion for Brandcast, a 60 minute unskippable ad for YouTube.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been invited to Brandcast, and the message has evolved. Last time I was there, it was a message to marketers aimed directly at persuading them to shift dollars out of their television budgets. That job has been done; this time the messaging was more about YouTube’s own strengths.

Over the last 15 years or so of attending Brandcast, it’s taken time to make peace with the sinking feeling I get every year when I don’t know who most of the creators showcased actually are.

In truth, we’re no longer in a monoculture. Nobody knows. That’s the biggest single difference with YouTube compared to every other video platforms. Thanks to the creator content, it’s got the longest of long tails. As they put it in last night’s show: beware the monoculture.

And based on last night’s event, you’d think most of what lives on YouTube is professionally (or semi professionally) made by creators sharing in the monetisation. All those pirated uploads were left to one side.

The job of Brandcast was to remind marketers and media agencies of the promise of both reach and engagement.

What’s trickier for any global platform is that there’s only so much that can be announced at a local Upfronts. Generally, it’s about the timing of the release of features which already exist elsewhere.

The Creator Partnerships Hub sounds genuinely useful for brands wanting to wortk directly with creators.

And another of the announcements was the unskippable 60 second ad format. When YouTube boss Caroline Oates told the room, there was a noticeable murmur among the 700 or so people in the audience. What I couldn’t tell was whether this was a murmur from people wearing their marketer hats and excited at the prospect of a new sales tool, or their reaction as YouTube viewers with hearts sinking at the prospect.

For consumers, YouTube used to be a less interruptive experience than watching broadcast television. Now, the ad load may actually be higher.

The next thing to degrade the viewing experience will be a new AI tool labelled as “peak points” to detect the moment when viewers are most interested in a piece of content and to immediately drop in an ad. According to YouTube: “This AI-powered tool uses microsignals to deliver an ad when a viewer is most emotionally receptive to it, at the ‘peak’ of an experience.”

The nearest the event came to gunning for trad TV was when Ben Jones, previously the creative director of YouTube’s owner Google, gave a preso in which he argued that six second ads and 60 second ads outperform other formats, and 30 second ads (like the ones you get on telly) underperform.

Among the other stats promoted at the event was the Ipsos Iris calculation that 13.3m Australians watch YouTube on their connected TVs. That would be about 65% of all Australian adults apparently using the YouTube CTV app. I’m a little sceptical. A similarly impressive Ipsos number was the claim that on average, online adults watch 87 minutes of YouTube per day.

Which reminds me – I really must improve my understanding of how Ipsos gets its digital data which always seems to be very helpful for the media owners who fund it.

The event also included implicit endorsements from third parties. Analytic Partners popped up a lot. Screenshots of Mark Ritson appeared over a presenter’s shoulder, like a ghostly Obi Wan Kenobi. There was even a five year old tweet from Byron Sharp

The event also featured a hearty endorsement from L’Oreal’s chief digital and marketing officer Georgia Hack, in which her ten minute on-stage interview with host Sam Fricker was read by both of them from the autocue.

The reason for Fricker MC-ing the event was not his Olympic diving exploits but his YouTube channel and accompanying podcast. The rise of YouTube as a podcasting platform was woven into the mix. Joe Rogan featured a couple of times in the reel.

YouTube has now truly followed the path of broadcast television. It’s not for the viewers; it’s for the advertisers.

Seven West Media rallies on the Unmade Index

Seven West Media’s share price recovered a little on Wednesday after slipping close to its lowest point since April. SWM’s stocks ticked up by 3.6% to a market capitalisation of $231m.

Fellow broadcasters Nine and Southern Cross Austereo also improved yesterday, rising by 0.6% and 2.6% respectively. Vinyl Group was up by 4.2%.

Among the stocks slipping was Ooh Media which lost 2.8%, Enero which dropped 5.6% and IVE Group which lost 0.7%.

The Unmade Index closed up by 0.44% for the day, on 582.4 points.

More from Mumbrella…

• Agency hits out at ‘lazy thinking’, accuses rival of stealing campaign

• Mango Sydney gone, team folded into Eleven

• Mamamia shifts brand strategy as new content launched

• Mamamia claims to be ‘most prepared publisher in Australia’ as industry grapples with AI

• ‘Good work solved a lot of problems’: Inside Uber’s public relations u-turn

Time to leave you to your Thursday. We’ll be back tomorrow with an audio-led edition looking at tonight’s Foxtel Upfronts. Tis the season.

Have a great day.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher – Unmade + Mumbrella

tim@unmade.media