Pixel Bling – The Embedded Culture
The purchase of YouTube is one of those Internet deals that will be remembered for years to come. It ranks up there with other landmark acquisitions such as Yahoo’s buying Overture, eBay buying PayPal, IAC buying Ask.com, and of course News Corp buying MySpace. At a price tag that falls closer to two billion dollars than one billion, it’s only natural to wonder how history will treat this deal. Will YouTube still thrive, its significance only increasing in time much as Overture’s or PayPal’s has, or will it be simply a shell of its former self and worth a fraction of the original purchase price? As much as I’d like to say otherwise, I have come around to the dark side, the one that can justify the price, and in this piece, I take a different route as to why. It starts with brands.
I remember attending an interesting session during the OMMA tradeshow in Hollywood earlier this year. During this session, the speaker, a senior executive at an agency, asked the audience to close their eyes and picture the type of person he described. Instead of providing the normal clues such as height, hair color, etc., he only mentioned brands. He would take one person versus another and ask the audience who they thought was more likely to have certain attitudes or tendencies, e.g. who would more likely vote Democrat, the Mini driving, Mac Book pro, Urban Outfitters person or the Wrangler Jeans, Chevy Silverado one. It was amazing to see the uniformity of judgments in the room.
People spend more and more time online, but brands play as big a role now than seemingly ever before. Perhaps it is because people have more condensed interactions that they chose to identify with certain brands for what it says about them and who they want to portray themselves as. What you own and wear, whether you mean to or not, tells others about you. It’s part of the context that accompanies communication, but how do you accomplish the same in the virtual world? This is what MySpace discovered without necessarily meaning to uncover – people need the ability to express themselves; it’s why tools that users customize their pages with have become not only popular but almost necessarily. Widgets such as RockYou can grow from three posts on a message board to several million strong because they are the online Abercrombie & Fitch – perhaps less about utility (not being naked) as you-tility, i.e. a component of your brand, your self-image, your bling.
Being online used to be an anonymous event. We went places, read things, bought things. It was about us but not about sharing us with others. The online behavior has changed, certainly largely in part to the number of people who have grown up with the web; it is their TV, but unlike TV, it is their mall too. And, being at the mall gets back to the notion of self – it’s where you go to communicate, to express your own brand, be influenced by others’ brands, and obtain new pieces of yourself through new brands. This is where YouTube fits. It is a vehicle of self-expression and for discovery of others’ expression. Who you are is the mixture of what you watch, share, embed, rate, comment, review, etc.
With YouTube, Google purchased more than a platform and more than an inventory source. It purchased a culture. Google as a company has a culture, and while clean and cute, it’s products are more utilitarian than anything else. They don’t have culture. Google is about going somewhere else, not about creating. YouTube on the other hand is much less mission oriented; it’s a lifestyle. That’s why it beat Google in video. The percentage of video use for utility is a fraction of the use of video as part of life online, and it shows in YouTube’s larger share of video use.
If YouTube were simply a video hosting service it wouldn’t have grown to the size it did. Putting videos on MySpace is not about utility but about bling. If you have a video that you made with friends, you can put it on Google for utility or you can put it on MySpace or YouTube and have it be an extension of yourself. Google knows how to organize information and has among the best platforms around. They understood, though, that with video, having the platform wasn’t enough, and there was no way that their video service was going to compete. Google is a tool not an extension or lifestyle. Video, much like clothes, is an important component of information separate from the brand and/or how you “wear” it. All of us will benefit from Google applying their search algorithms to it, but it is Google that benefits the most and in the end didn’t have a choice when it came to buying a piece of video.
