When asked what keeps the new CMO of YouTube.com up nights, the answer came easily:
“I think a lot about how to take the YouTube environment and bring [it to] marketers in a really meaningful way, without messing it up,” said Suzie Reider, CMO, YouTube.com. She added that she ponders what broadband means for the brand, and media in general, as service spreads and consumers across the globe can readily access online content anywhere.
Reider joined YouTube at the end of the summer to build the company’s sales and marketing groups. It has since been purchased for $1.65 billion by Web search portal Google.
The vision for YouTube is that it will become the “greatest entertainment media destination in the world,” she said yesterday during a keynote session called the Online Video Revolution: A Marketer’s Dream or a Consumer-Generated Mess.
Consumer-generated content and its impact on marketing and advertising—with YouTube the obvious frontrunner—is keeping many marketers up at night thinking (and dreaming) of how to best fit in and understand the rules for this new type of behavior. At YouTube.com, users upload about 65,000 new user-generated videos per day with 100 million videos being watched daily, Reider said. YouTube viewers stay on the site for 18 to 20 minutes per visit and prefer “little snacks”—they typically don’t watch a video for longer than two minutes—before moving on..
Consumers will be setting the pace, with winning brands being those that let consumers tell the best stories to other consumers, not brands telling the stories to consumers, said fellow panelist Sarah Fay, president of Isobar Communications.
“We’ve hit something that appeals to human nature,” she said.
As an example, she said that 55,000 people on MySpace made Adidas a “friend” after the brand built a MySpace Web page.
“That may not be a big number, but it created 55,000 advocates for the brand,” Fay said.
She said that consumers have “tuned out of ad messages” and that consumer-generated content puts them in control and pulls them back into a brand’s messaging.
However, “brands that put themselves out there [in videos] show consumers that [they] trusts them,” Fay said of the ability video-sharing sites give consumers to rate or comment on posted videos. “We’re asking people to participate. I think it is a good thing, but there is always the risk and potential for backlash.”
A Chevy truck video, for example, may generate interest online, but could garner comments about the gas guzzling nature of the vehicles, she said.
Reider said that the YouTube community enforces control at its site. She said 2,500 pieces of content were recently banned by the community.
“If videos are offensive, the community will flag those videos,” she said. “The community polices itself. It’s the community that’s in control. Not us.”
YouTube users also freely upload clips and content by the owners of videos, films, television shows and music often posting comments and spreading the clips around virally. To stave off lawsuits, Parent company Google recently signed deals with CBS, Sony, BMG, Vivendi Universal Music and Warner Group to feature their videos at YouTube. When asked how YouTube is dealing with copyright issues, Reider said, “If asked to take something down, it comes down.”
Google is in talks with film and music studios to strike similar deals.
As for the future, there is no sign that the speed of consumer-generated or the content will slow. For example, the number of people who downloaded TV shows from the Internet doubled from September 2005 to September 2006, Fay said.
“People are showing that they want to watch videos online and they want to participate in social networking,” Fay said.
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