Tag Archives: YouTube

The BA Test Kitchen Loses Their Viral Video Talent over Pay Equality

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“Bon Appétit has not released a video on its beloved Test Kitchen channel since June 5, amid a reckoning of how the food brand treats and compensates its employees of color.

And once the video brand returns, it will look much different than what its six million YouTube subscribers were accustomed to.

Six members of Bon Appétit’s 13 on-camera talent have announced that they will no longer appear in videos with the food magazine’s Test Kitchen brand: Rick Martinez, Sohla El-Waylly, Priya Krishna, Gaby Melian, Molly Baz, and Carla Lalli Music.

Martinez, El-Waylly, Krishna, and Melian said in statements that Condé Nast’s lack of commitment to diversity and inclusion led to their departure. Baz and Music said they will leave out of solidarity with their peers.”

https://twitter.com/lallimusic/status/1293566520476471296

Which bears the question: Why not just make pay equity happen? And fast?

Gizmodo theorizes that Conde Nast higher ups don’t understand the work and detail that go into videos, as well as the heart. They were data driven in these decisions but video is mostly art.

Why It’s Hot?

Inflexible corporations need to not only put their money where their mouth is, but to do it fast. There is a price to pay for not flexing with culture, and minority groups are going to be more vocal about workplace inequity. There is a lot of humanity in the BA test kitchen, and sadly the data driven decision-making has soured BA’s audience on their content network.

 

 

NBA and ESPN bring lofi games of HORSE to the fans via Zoom

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The NBA has given basketball fans something to hold on to while the season has been cancelled due to Coronavirus. Using Zoom, ESPN and the NBA put on a HORSE tournament with players shooting hoops from their own back yards or at local courts.

The viewership is not as high as games, but it’s still around half a million for many of the matches and the 1 – 1 nature of the game could provide a wealth of content to keep fans engaged until the next season begins.

From Fast Company:

For the NBA, which suspended its 2019-2020 season on March 11, the challenge has been to keep fans interested and engaged.

Since then, the league has launched a number of new content initiatives, all under the umbrella of “NBA Together.” Those include Instagram Live sessions with star players, a new interview stream with broadcaster Ernie Johnson on the league’s Twitter feed, posting practice drills for young players stuck at home, new programming on NBA TV that has players commenting on classic games, and more.

But last Sunday, the league took its experimentation a step further, teaming with ESPN to take the big leagues to the playground with a televised pandemic version of H-O-R-S-E. The tournament started with eight players that span current stars from the NBA and WNBA, as well as a few retired legends, and was whittled down to four semifinalists playing for the crown on Thursday. Aside from bragging rights among the players, as part of the game league sponsor State Farm is donating more than $200,000 to COVID-19 response efforts.

Paul Benedict, the NBA’s associate VP of broadcasting content management, said, “I think it’s forcing everyone, not just in sports and entertainment, to approach things differently given the limitations, and to approach things more efficiently,” says Benedict. “The countless number of Zoom calls we’ve been on, you just have a different mindset when you approach collaborative efforts like these. H-O-R-S-E was a scaled-down production in some ways, but a massive effort in others that required quick thinking, split-second decision-making, and a lot of cooperation across the board. I think we’re going to come out as a league better from this, stronger, and more collaborative. It’s a great building block.”

Why it’s hot:

It’s interesting that the Zoom format gives a more intimate experience with the players than what you’d get with a typical ESPN broadcast. How will this change what fans expect of players and of ESPN content in the long run?

This format gives players the opportunity (or obligation) to connect on a different level with their fans, one where personality is perhaps taking on a bigger role.

Source: Fast Company

Live Entertainment Adapts To The New Normal

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Live entertainment is going digital. This weeks SNL took home cut video from cast members and made a #StayAtHome version. Check out the intro:

NYC theaters are also putting new content online. This week Playwrights Horizons launched a new podcast, Soundstage, putting new playwrights plays straight into your ear. This one is from one of my favorite playwrights, Robert O’Hara (Tufts Alumni for the strategy Jumbos).

And The National Theatre in London through their NT Live program (usually shown in movie theaters) is now releasing a live play on video every week. Actually their newest feature is making its world premiere RIGHT NOW. DURING HOT SAUCE.

Why it’s hot?

Art has a way of surviving. Even live art. There has been some twitter criticism that stage work is not translating well to the digital form, but this is opening a brand new way of staging live art and it’s still in its nascent stage. Looking forward to lots of new brilliant work in these new times.

Hefty makes a brawny claim about reducing waste

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One of the biggest challenges when it comes to recycling and reducing waste is in educating people on what it is, why it matters, and how to do it, all while not boring people to death about it, or coming off as preachy. Hefty takes on that messaging hurdle with a little humor and smartly keeps the details vague.

Another issue with marketing a brand’s waste reduction is in equating it to something people can understand. How do you wrap your head around the fact that globally we produced 275 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2010! You can’t. People need a frame of reference to understand these abstract numbers, and this campaign does that with the help of a somewhat goofy strongman pulling a passenger jet, which represents the weight of the plastics that Hefty has managed to reclaim.

Once interest is piqued, people are taken to a micro-site that explains in more detail Hefty’s sustainability efforts: Hefty Sustainability.com

And what they’re doing is actually pretty cool and innovative. They have created a special bag in which to put hard-to-recycle plastics (those that are not accepted by most residential recycling programs) such as plastic food packaging, straws, candy wrappers, etc., which would otherwise most certainly end up in a landfill, in a tree, or choking the windpipe of a seabird.

Why it’s hot:

1. It doesn’t require you to identify as “green” in order to get it: A lot of “sustainable” brands lean into the lifestyle of the eco-conscious in their messaging, but that can turn off a lot of people who don’t identify that way. For a nationwide brand like Hefty, it makes more sense to stay away from identity and focus on their product and accomplishments.

2. It’s not much of an accomplishment actually, but it’s a start, and it’s backed up by action: Given the fact that more than 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into our oceans every year, a well-informed consumer might scoff at Hefty’s accomplishment of converting one measly airliner’s worth of hard-to-recycle plastic into new materials. But they have a model that helps collect plastics that you can’t normally recycle, and uses their product in a way people are already using it to do so.

3. Mining trash is actually a way to generate revenue: This is a mostly untapped market for raw materials, which is essentially TerraCycle’s business model, of gathering material others can’t (or won’t) and reselling it, which had it earning $20+ million in revenue in 2018.

Source: Marketing Dive

Look at this Meme!

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When meme’s collide! In order to understand today’s politics — it’s time to KNOW YOUR MEME. In order to understand why a Nickelback song from 2008 is trending on Twitter today.

This story starts at the global turn against the band. There is debate about when the tide turned. It’s either:

  1. A general outgrowing and distaste for grunge that sounds like a copy of a copy
  2. Chad Kroeger’s voice that some might say sounds like “a creepy maroon 5”
  3. A very embarassing UK furniture advertisement:

About the meme: according to Know Your Meme, “On April 27th, 2015, YouTuber Euphemism for Magic uploaded a video titled “Nickelstats,” in which Kroeger is shown holding a framed bar graph while singing “Look at this graph” (shown below). The same day, the video was submitted to the /r/youtubehaiku subreddit, where it received upwards of 4,500 votes (95% upvoted) and 120 comments in the first two weeks.”

It’s since been a long parodied meme and had huge success on Vine.

Apparently Trump tried to use the meme this morning to further his story against Hunter Biden.

However as you can see, Nickelback reported the video for copyright infringement…

Maybe Nickleback is due for a comeback?

Photograph by Nickelback also happens to be Shantie’s favorite song….

Why It’s Hot?

I personally love the depth of understanding that’s required for internet memes. But it’s a language that so many are fluent in, maybe without even understanding all the parts…

Blurring the media lines, in a world where content is king

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Dream Team, the fantasy football offshoot from U.K. tabloid The Sun, has had a retention problem. From one year to the next, the free-to-play game would have to reacquire two-thirds of its audience who signed up to play the previous year, which is typically around 1 million subscribers. As well as wasted effort, re-acquiring audiences costs more than retaining them.

To address this churn, Dream Team built a new content vertical including a newsletter and YouTube series around fantasy football last summer. Now it has begun to bear fruits: Dream Team retained 68% of last year’s customers this season, increasing annual audience retention rate 21% year-on-year, and won new branded content clients; however, the publisher was unwilling to share exactly how many people subscribed for the 2019 season.

“We are building a more franchise approach to content,” he said. “As many brands in the digital space find, bringing in audiences with content is easy, but digital content brands can struggle with loyalty and retention.”

After hearing that audiences wanted more fantasy football content — rather than generic football news content — at the start of the football season in August 2018, Dream Team also launched an email newsletter, Dream Team “Coach,” devised in part by Jimmy Lloyd, content development editor. The newsletter, written by football expert Nick Elliott, to add a more personal feel, goes out every Thursday and features tips and hints on which players are likely to play well that weekend for subscribers to switch around their fantasy football teams.

The newsletter now has over 1 million subscribers and an open rate of between 15% and 20%, according to Bearryman. The content is mostly self-contained content, so it doesn’t track click-through rates via links to external stories.

“That was the big shift and was a battle in many ways; people are used to using email a certain way,” said Bearryman. “We looked at Red Box [political newsletter from News UK’s subscription title, The Times of London] and what audiences want from email. Like other off-platform distribution, audiences don’t want to be thrown around.”

As an extension to the newsletter, in February, Dream Team launched “Coach TV” on YouTube, a weekly 20-minute chat show focused on football news. Videos typically get up to 20,000 YouTube views, last season had over 500,000 unique viewers. Over the course of 12 months, viewer retention rate doubled retention rate from 20% to 40%, according to Bearryman. Watch time on season two is over six minutes compared with three minutes last season.

Publishers like BuzzFeed are increasingly making series over one-off episodes in order to bring people back more regularly. It’s this regular viewing that attracts brand budgets too. The success of “Coach TV” was instrumental in signing bookmaker Betway to a season-long branded content campaign. As well as Betway badging alongside the Dream Team logo, the bookmaker gives exclusive betting odds and offers for the “Coach TV” audience. It’s a natural fit as 50% of Dream Team managers have an active betting account. The season-long campaign, exclusive to Dream Team rather than The Sun, cost £1.04 million ($1.27 million). According to Bearryman, the conversion rate of traffic referred to Betway is 2.5%, which compares favorably with Dream Team’s internal content conversion rates.

Over the last year, Dream Team itself has run between 10 and 12 other branded content campaigns across other sub-brands or franchises. One such sub-brand is “Hometown Glory,” a weekly show where former England football player Alex Scott takes other football players back to their hometown. Dream Team is currently in talks with two consumer goods brands for sponsorship for the season.

More franchises are in the works, according to Bearryman.

“We want to build other online sub-brands and franchises to become famous for and reach new audiences,” he said.

Why It’s Hot

A good example of the power Relationships built around common interests – authentically activated across channels, platforms and formats, and orchestrated over time.

Update: YouTube Adds Features to Make it Less Terrifying for Children

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As a follow up to an often mentioned topic on Hot Sauce, YouTube is trying desperately to court brands that are finding the networks AI to be unsafe and promoting fringe ideas or are dangerous to children. 

YouTube’s original answer to it’s child algorithm problem was an app whitelisting sources so that parents could put children in front of YouTube without fear of what they might find (not a great parenting technique but that’s neither here nor there… ). Originally YouTube incentivized views at all costs, and content makers turned to AI to auto-generate films that were hurting children’s cognition.

They’ve hired a whole team to support this initiative, and they finally have actual humans watching the video. YouTube was losing a lot of revenue because of brand safety.

Why it’s hot?

AI can be dangerous. Keeping humans involved and not letting AI run wild is key to success even if it means slower revenue. If you don’t make brand safety and human safety a concern you might lose out on LOTS of revenue down the line. Is money the only way to keep big tech and AI accountable?

Try On a New Lipstick… On YouTube

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For those of us who go down YouTube Makeup tutorial rabbit holes, like myself. It’s easy to get discouraged that you don’t have the color to look for yourself… that’s half the point of watching the video.

Well, YouTube has a solve for that (and for makeup brands who want to sell product). Try on while you watch!

“The feature is currently in the very early stages of development — alpha testing — and is being offered to YouTube creators through Google’s  in-house branded content program, FameBit. Through this program, brands are connected with YouTube influencers who market their products through paid sponsorships.”

YouTube has already found that 30% of viewers chose to try the experience when it was available on the iOS app. And those who tried spent an average of more than 80s engaging with the tool.

YouTube’s new AR Beauty Try-On lets viewers virtually try on makeup while watching video reviews

Why it’s hot?

A mix of VR and ecom! This beauty try-on gets over a big makeup hurdle. However this is not totally new. This is something sephora has done on their website, but it’s a much harder UI, this new way with YouTube should score google some extra referral cash, and users entering buy pages would be much more primed.

Saving the Trees One Ad View at a Time

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65% of people skip pre-roll ads. But Busch Beer’s new “Tree-Roll” ad is giving people a compelling reason to watch to the end. For every full completion view, Busch is planting a tree.

They’ve partnered with the National Forest Foundation as part of the foundation’s effort to plant 50 million trees across America by 2023. For every $1 donated, 1 tree is planted.

The campaign ladders up to Anheuser-Busch’s larger effort to become the industry leader in sustainability.

Why It’s Hot

Besides being a creative way to get people to watch ads all the way through, Busch is hitting on a major area of interest for young Americans by taking a stand on climate change.

Source: https://cassandra.co/marketing/2018/10/25/more-trees-please 

xfinity’s pre-roll cost calculator…

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Xfinity (to promote its mobile carrier service) recently unleashed a suite of 6-second pre-roll ads to show customers of their competitors exactly how much money a YouTube video they watch costs them in data.

The company says it’s tailoring the ads based on users’ carrier (AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon), and the type of video they’ve chosen to watch, making it hyper-relevant to each viewer.

Why It’s Hot:

It’s not just advertising, but utility. If anyone you know can tell you how much it costs them to use data for different applications or purposes, they’re much more clued in than the rest of us. But more importantly, it’s intended to be personalized to each user, further signaling that the future of advertising (and products) are truly individualized.

[Source]

YouTube’s Algorithm Helps Spread Lies

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Time to re-litigate our favorite Hot Sauce topic! Are social media platforms media platforms or not? Do they have a journalistic responsibility to the public?

Last week YouTube’s quickly algorithm spread a rumor that Parkland HS shooting survivor David Hogg was an actor hired by democrats. It had 200K views shortly after it’s posting, but has since been taken down.

Mashable, the source for this post had a very apt understanding of the problem at hand:

YouTube’s job, as it sees it, is to get as many eyeballs on as many videos as possible. It’s as if a media tycoon founded a newspaper, invited every conspiracy theorist to contribute, and blithely waved away the notion that there should be any ethical responsibility to put forth the verifiable truth — because selling ads was all that mattered.

In a recent Guardian study this recent Guardian study out of 643 of partisan videos  recommended to people watching politics content in 2016, 551 were conspiracy-based content that favored Trump while 92 favored Clinton. This study also notes that “More than 80% of the YouTube-recommended videos about the pope detected by his program described the Catholic leader as “evil”, “satanic”, or “the anti-Christ”.”

The Guardian tells the story of french programmer Guillaume Chaslot founder of https://algotransparency.org/ who was looking to make changes internally at YouTube in 2013 before he was fired (reportedly for performance reasons, but I’ll leave that up to you.) He believes that the YouTube Algorithm was biased towards Trump because it is biased towards divisiveness and conspiracy (things that shock and awe audiences can get more clicks). You can read his full blog post on the subject here.

Why Its Hot?

Let’s continue the conversation about how AI and algorithms shape the way we live, is there a way we can make them more human instead of human pandering.

ASMR: Sounds and Videos That Feel Good

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ASMR was once a YouTube niche trend, but now it’s appearing in museums and ads, and funding creative empires. KFC was one of the first brands to capitalize on this phenomenon, but others will likely follow suit.

But what is ASMR?

ASMR or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a sensation triggered by soft sounds like whispering, hair brushing, or page turning. Not everyone feels ASMR, but those who do describe a tingling sensation in the base of their skull or the back of their neck. The trend emerged on YouTube in 2008 and shows now sign of slowing down. According to Co. Design,

As of [August 2017], there are over 9 million ASMR videos on YouTube. According to Google’s internal data, ASMR grew over 200% in 2015 and continues to grow consistently. […]

 

The term ASMR is pseudo-scientific; there hasn’t been any major academic research yet on this subject. Early adopters of ASMR would compile clips of “tingling triggers”—the rustle of trees in nature documentaries, for example, or the sound of typing in a commercial. Bob Ross, the famously ‘fro’ed host of 1990s instructional painting videos, turned out to be a popular source of ASMR found footage. As the community grew online, people began making their own videos. Since ASMR triggers can be different person to person, DIY videos offer up a spectrum of different scenes and scenarios. Some are made of tightly cropped shots of hands popping bubble wrap, crinkling paper, or scratching rough surfaces. Others feature ASMRtists—mainly women—speaking directly into the camera, usually at a whisper (for some, intimate attention triggers ASMR). Still others feature role play and fantastical settings, giving narrative context to the sounds that provoke ASMR feelings. […]

 

[B]y and large, most people in the ASMR community consider it to be more about relaxation and self-care. Many watch the videos to ease anxiety, insomnia, or depression. Even people who don’t feel the tingling sensation can find the videos therapeutic.

Why it’s hot

ASMR’s is not simply growing in the fringes of the internet. The power that this experience gives artists and others to connect with audiences in a physical and visceral way is bringing it fully into the mainstream. IKEA is one of the brands quick to capitalize on the trend, releasing an ASMR audio version of their traditional catalog.

Read more at Fast Co.

Facebook launches new video sharing tab: “Watch”

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Facebook is rolling “Watch” out to a limited number of people in the US. The official launch date to the rest of the U.S. has not been disclosed, but will precede international expansion. Users with access will see a TV-shaped Watch button in the bottom navigation bar of Facebook’s main app that opens the new video hub.

While Facebook has offered video for years, it typically appears in the news feed when liked by friends. In this case, people can specifically seek video content and subscribe to it. The similarities to YouTube are obvious, but the usage of the Facebook platform is quite different, so success will require a behavioral change.

Facebook admits that “we’ve funded some shows” as examples, but notes that these are only a small percentage of all the available shows. “We want any publisher/creator who is interested to be able to create a show in the future,” a Facebook spokesperson told Tech Crunch. “So there will be hundreds of shows at launch, and we’ll hopefully scale to thousands.” Original content developers will be compensated; earning 55% of associated ad revenue.

Why It’s Hot: Alphabet seems unstoppable, with core offerings such as Google Search, YouTube, and less so, Doubleclick Ad Exchange, commanding a huge share of their respective categories. These platforms are not always marketer or agency-friendly. Their privacy policies are among the most restrictive. Their brand safety solutions are less customizable than others. Their technical support is notoriously slow to respond. Their products are limited and prices are high. Competition, even when offered by another media behemoth, gives marketers more options to test and may lead to positive changes at Alphabet/YouTube.

Snickers Puts the “Video” in Video Games

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Knowing that videos tend to run the risk of being skipped, Snickers developed a way to keep viewers engaged by developing video game videos.

In line with their “You’re not you when you are hungry” campaign platform, the first features a school-bus driver whose hunger has turned him into a WWE wrestler with incessant road rage. In the second, a hungry tennis umpire has transformed into a whining rockstar.

In both scenarios, a series of Snickers bars float across the screen towards the character’s outstretched hand, but the viewers must click the pause button at the correct moment to help the characters grab them.

If they’re successful, the WWE wrestler calms down into a bus driver, and the musician morphs back into an umpire. If not, they’ve got nine more tries to get it right.

Why It’s Hot:

  • Smart and entertaining way to engage viewers when consuming video
  • It’s another example of how platforms, such as YouTube, are flexing to service creative ideas led by agencies
  • Shows the growing trend of choosing to develop platform-digital-specific work rather than “copy and paste” TV commercials, which generally don’t perform as well

 

Gone In 6 Seconds

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Australian retailer Myer hosted a flash sale using YouTube’s six-second pre-roll ad slots.

The 6 Second Sale ads feature more than 100 Myer products with discounts greater than those available in store and online by 5%. Viewers have only six seconds (the length of the pre-roll ad) to secure the deal being offered, with those that manage to click on the offer in time are taken to a pre-populated shopping cart on Myer’s site.

The campaign created using Google’s Vogon –  customization tool that lets brands create unlimited variations of the same ad by changing the text, audio or images. The targeting used in the 6 Second Sale ensures no YouTube user will see the same ad twice.

The 6 Second Sale is being promoted through Myer’s website, social channels, catalog and print.

Why It’s Hot

-It merges shopping impulse with a platform experience that times out in a very short amount of time

-Leverages scarcity to heighten the need to buy and drive sales

-Great example of a brand “hacking” a platform to drive a campaign

 

 

Someone Please Buy This Guy’s Car!

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Last moth, Eugene Romanovsky posted an ad to sell “my best friend,” his 1996 Suzuki Vitara on YouTube. This absolutely amazing video has amassed over 3.9 million views and reportedly two thousand offers to buy his car.

Eugene’s “adventures” with the Vitara include evading the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, thundering down the desert dunes alongside Mad Max and the War Boys convoy in Mad Max: Fury Road and diving into the depths of the ocean to swim with sharks.

In case you’re wondering, Eugene is Creative Director/ VFX Supervisor/ Head of Motion GFX dep. at Gravity – an international Creative, Design, Animation and Effects group, situated in sunny Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Why It’s Hot

Just because your objective is simple—like selling a car—doesn’t mean you can’t think outside the box and have fun!

 

Google Training Ad Placement Computers to Be Offended

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After seeing ads from Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart appear next to racist, anti-Semitic or terrorist videos, its engineers realized their computer models had a blind spot: They did not understand context.

Now teaching computers to understand what humans can readily grasp may be the key to calming fears among big-spending advertisers that their ads have been appearing alongside videos from extremist groups and other offensive messages.

Google engineers, product managers and policy wonks are trying to train computers to grasp the nuances of what makes certain videos objectionable. Advertisers may tolerate use of a racial epithet in a hip-hop video, for example, but may be horrified to see it used in a video from a racist skinhead group.

That ads bought by well-known companies can occasionally appear next to offensive videos has long been considered a nuisance to YouTube’s business. But the issue has gained urgency in recent weeks, as The Times of London and other outlets have written about brands that inadvertently fund extremists through automated advertising — a byproduct of a system in which YouTube shares a portion of ad sales with the creators of the content those ads appear against.

This glitch in the company’s giant, automated process turned into a public-relations nightmare. Companies like AT&T and Johnson & Johnson said they would pull their ads from YouTube, as well as Google’s display advertising business, until they could get assurances that such placement would not happen again.

“We take this as seriously as we’ve ever taken a problem,” Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, said in an interview last week. “We’ve been in emergency mode.”

Over the last two weeks, Google has changed what types of videos can carry advertising, barring ads from appearing with hate speech or discriminatory content.

It is also putting in more stringent safety standards by default, so an advertiser must choose to place ads next to more provocative content. Google created an expedited way to alert it when ads appear next to offensive content.

Google’s efforts are being noticed. Johnson & Johnson, for example, said it had resumed YouTube advertising in a number of countries. Google said other companies were starting to return.

To train the computers, Google is applying machine-learning techniques — the underlying technology for many of its biggest breakthroughs, like the self-driving car. It has also brought in large human teams (it declined to say how big) to review the appropriateness of videos that computers flagged as questionable.

Essentially, they are training computers to recognize footage of a woman in a sports bra and leggings doing yoga poses in an exercise video safe for advertising and not sexually suggestive content. Similarly, they will mark video of a Hollywood action star waving a gun as acceptable to some advertisers, while flagging a similar image involving an Islamic State gunman as inappropriate.

Armed with human-verified examples of what is safe and what is not, Google’s computer systems break down the images of a YouTube video frame by frame, analyzing every image. They also digest what is being said, the video’s description from the creator and other signals to detect patterns and identify subtle cues for what makes a video inappropriate.

The idea is for machines to eventually make the tough calls. In the instances when brands feel that Google failed to flag an inappropriate video, that example is fed back into the system so it improves over time. Google said it had already flagged five times as many videos as inappropriate for advertising, although it declined to provide absolute numbers on how many videos that entailed.

Source: NYT

Why It’s Hot
Shows intelligence can be used to create better experiences for both advertisers and consumers, and the quick response to some bad PR is impressive. Intelligence is evolving and being able to adapt to context is a critical step.Response to advertiser concerns

Opportunistic Content 101: Toys R Us Giraffe Cam

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“April the Giraffe” – a wildlife park’s pregnant giraffe, April, is set to give birth any day now, and the internet is watching. Toys R Us has capitalized on all the eyeballs by sponsoring the zoo’s live feed of April. The buzz has come in the form of genuine excitement and anticipation as well as conspiracy theories.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClnQCgFa9lCBL-KXZMOoO9Q/live

Why it’s hot: Toys R Us saw the simplest of opportunities – a basic sponsorship getting their brand name and logo in front of hundreds of thousands of people who likely fit within their target demo – and seized on it quickly, having to do little more than pony up the cash to support the zoo. It remains to be seen if the whole thing is truly organic, or if it’s a PR stunt orchestrated by Toys R Us, the zoo, and/or Doubletree Hotels whose local franchise has also placed advertising on the giraffe’s dedicated landing page.

The Winners and Losers of YouTube’s Brand Saftey Crisis

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The ripple of the video giant’s woes has gotten so great that some have predicted the impact from major brands could cost YouTube $750 million. Seemingly, there are some that are happy when such a kink in the armor is exposed, but there are myriad of stakeholders, each with their own perspective. With that amount of money – as well as brand reputation and confidence – at stake there are going to be some winners and losers, and here they are:

WINNERS

Old-fashioned publishers

These are the classic media players who started losing their lunch the second Google started owning the internet. One could imagine publishers grinning ear to ear, thinking, “Told ya so. Quality content isn’t so easy.” They can can make a more convincing case that knowing the content and the audience actually is still important.

This issue can resurface a shift to high-quality, direct-bought content, where brands have the most control but pay a premium for it in some cases.

Streamers

Anyone selling streaming ads is in a good position – including Sling, Dish and even TV networks. Hulu, Roku, TV networks and anyone with a digital video platform will be showing off their highly curated content. These new shows and programming will look pretty good to anyone with a heightened interest in knowing exactly where their messages will appear.

Tech tools & 3rd Party Verification Partners

Brands have called for digital platforms like Facebook and Google to clean up the media supply chain and to be more transparent with data. The brand safety issue on YouTube is yet another bit of leverage to force more cooperation.

Independent third parties like Integral Ad Science, Double Verify, Moat and others will find more brands at their doorsteps looking for ways to ensure their ads appear near quality content.

The agency

One of the most important roles for agencies was helping brands make sure their ads didn’t show up in the wrong place by intimately knowing the targeting, brand safety protections and best practices of each channel. Well, now those services are increasingly valuable.

LOSERS

Net neutrality

When the Trump administration makes further moves to undo net neutrality, as many anticipate based on current momentum repealing FCC consumer protections, Google’s ability to defend it in idealistic terms could be undermined by all the talk about serving ads on terrorist video.

Programmatic

It took a long time for programmatic to stop being a dirty word. Programmatic advertising was once considered the least controlled, lowest quality ad inventory at the lowest price. In part, brands could start to pull back from blind, untargeted buying without transparency.

YouTubers

YouTube has said that part of its solution is to implement stricter community standards, and that could mean more bannings and ad blocking from their videos, impacting their earnings.They could be quicker to cut a channel at the smallest offense now that brands are watching closely.

Advertisers still on YouTube – this is a tricky one to classify and it’s too early to say. We’ll have to see how the video platform reacts over time to increasing pressures to allow verification partners and data trackers access within the garden’s walls.

Why It’s (Still) Hot:

This topic will continue to be important to the brands we represent, aim to represent and even those far from us that are faced with the same decision to either stay the course or sit it out. There is a lot of money moving around on media plans, a lot of POV’s being routed and a lot of reps working overtime to reassure teams of buyers/planners that they are taking brand safety very seriously. Often it’s not the crisis that defines a company, but what they do in the aftermath. Some are hopeful that this is a definitive crack in the ‘walled garden’-  but even if it is not, we’re all hoping for a better, safer platform at the end of this tunnel…a world where once again clients can be irked by their premium pre-rolls showing up prefacing water skiing squirrels and dancing cat videos instead of terrorist rhetoric.

YouTube Brand Safety Issues Threaten Sales

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If some of you haven’t heard the news yet, a handful of HUGE brands have completely pulled the plug on spending with YouTube, amid a growing international controversy concerning ads running in tandem with extremist content on the platform. This content includes videos promoting terrorist groups like ISIS, hate speech, gory videos, and other unsavory content.  Brands refuse to re-instate spending until the video site could assure their spots wouldn’t run near offensive content.

Examples of advertisers that have pulled out domestically and/or internationally are big players like Verizon, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, JPMorgan Chase, Ford Motors, McDonald’s UK, and Johnson & Johnson.  To this point in time, YouTube (owned by Google) has been one of the difficult partners out there, who don’t allow 3rd party ad verification partners in to monitor brand safety.  Instead, they bring their own proprietary tools.  DoubleVerify circulated an email to clients on 3/23 stating that the issues of advertisers running next to unsavory content could have been avoided if 3rd party tools were allowed.

Why It’s Hot

This raises so many thoughts/questions about brand safety and how to handle situations like this from an agency perspective.  Our team has been singing the praises of 3rd party ad verification partners for a long time- they police sites and make sure that advertisers are truly protected.  So, I have to ask:

1.)  Are self-policers like YouTube worth running on?  Given this news, how much has their credibility been shattered?

2.)  Were the advertisers doing anything in regards to brand safety before, or was this truly the fault of YouTube not monitoring the content of their site closely enough?  With a pharma client we work on, YouTube has confirmed that we’ve run in safe content because we’ve been so stringent from the start…

3.) Are there implications for a brand (think, from a PR perspective) if they choose to continue to run on YouTube, given this news?  Should brands join the movement of pulling spend JUST to join the movement and make change happen, or should they stay the course (if they’ve been confirmed to be running on brand safe content only?)

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Google Takes on Cable!

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Google just joined the “skinny bundle” TV war with YouTube TV, a paid subscription service that streams a slew of premium broadcast and cable networks to your mobile device, tablet, computer, and anything with Chromecast.

Just $35 a month gets you six accounts and access to live TV from more than 40 providers including the big broadcast networks, ESPN, regional sports networks and dozens of popular cable networks. Subscriptions include cloud DVR with unlimited storage, AI-powered search and personalization, and access to YouTube Red programming.

YouTube TV joins a growing wave of services, including Dish’s Sling TV, Sony PlayStation Vue, and AT&T’s new DirectTV Now, with a similar web TV offering from Hulu expected soon. And like these other options, unfortunately, YouTube still has some holes with its offering.

Big networks like CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox, are on board, but several premium channels, like MTV and CNN, aren’t. You can add content like Showtime and soccer for an added fee, but some content comes with restrictions. If you’re a pro football fan, for example, you’ll have to watch games on your TV or computer because the NFL’s deal with Verizon made it off-limits to your mobile device. And no matter what you watch or what you watch it on, you may see ads.

The company won’t say when the service launches, but says you can expect it in the US in the “coming weeks and months.”

Why It’s Hot

While the offering is new, and we don’t know what they’ll bring to the table in regards to advertising opportunities, this is a smart way for YouTube to gain more ground with quality content and reaching cord cutters (especially ones that are on a budget!).  This is especially pertinent to one of our clients, as we’ve seen higher ROI on TV-like experiences vs. the traditional YouTube or other video buys online.  It will allow us to diversify where we find video content.

YouTube launches its own streaming TV service

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YouTube, the most popular video service on the web that recently announced it streamed one billion hours per day, is now launching a live TV service called YouTube TV. The offering will mix live-streams of broadcast and cable television programming with the wealth of online video found on YouTube. The service will exist through a new YouTube TV site and a new YouTube TV mobile app.
For $35 a month, subscribers get all four major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX — and about 35 cable channels, most of which are owned by their parent companies, such as ESPN, Bravo, the Disney Channel, and Fox News.
That price covers six accounts, so each member of the household can have a personalized account that offers recommendations tuned to their taste. roll out in the next few months. The service will arrive first in major markets.

Why It’s Hot
Some of the features included with a YouTube TV subscription are:
• DVR-style recording for your favorite shows with unlimited storage space in Google’s cloud.
• Works with Chromecast, Google Home, computers, iOS and Android phones and tablets
• Watch up to 3 concurrent streams at a time

YouTube is trying to reach a generation that is increasingly unfamiliar with linear TV and will never buy into traditional cable TV. Connected TV viewing grew by 65% last year and advertisers are eager to get into OTT because it promises the quality and engagement of television with the enhanced targeting of digital. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki calls it the evolution of television, and a bid to “give the younger generation the content that they love with the flexibility they expect.”
And marketers can’t ignore YouTube. YouTube remains the key online video provider, with its massive audience and wealth of information on the viewers who are watching, and with its parent company Google, which handles about 93% of all online searches, the potential of the platform cannot be ignored.

How I Got Ripped Ads

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In this Programmatic Insider article, John Matavelli recounts an excruciating experience with a 5+ minute, unskippable, programmatic video spot for “Ripped Abs”, viewed on his television set on YouTube via Roku. He goes on to share the details of his investigation into how such a terribly interruptive advertising experience could exist. YouTube tells him that the ads should be skippable, but there is a glitch. The “glitch” though, has not been quickly fixed, and angry tweets have stimulated a flood of suggestions to install an ad blocker. These have generated more angry tweets, claiming that YouTube has worked around the ad blockers. This is bad for all of us.

Image result for ripped abs cartoon

Why It’s Hot: More than half of digital media, like the referenced YouTube ad, is purchased programmatically. “Programmatic” enables marketers to reach people across many channels, with incredible precision, reach and efficiency. At its best, it delivers personalized, valued experiences that bring people and brands closer together. However, programmatic media appears across thousands of environments that we do not control, which makes QA challenging. Bad experiences are out there. We need to be vigilant about identifying and avoiding them.

We use a host of technologies to protect clients’ investments and the users’ experience, but they’re not foolproof. We each need to be immersed in media; experiencing ads just like the people with whom we want to connect. We need to constantly consider the line between attention-getting and intrusive, and stay on the right side of it.

 

Reverse Content Strategy

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Andrew Wong and James Thompson created an algorithm that seeks videos fitting specific criteria: uploaded within the past week, with generic file names (IMG1234 or WMV4321) as titles, and zero views. The result is a fascinating glimpse at the mundane, perplexing, and oftentimes ordinary events of everyday life. Try to not watch it for hours at a time.

The site only plays a few seconds of each video so it feels like flipping the pages of random books and reading a couple of lines before you’re off to the next one.

http://astronaut.io/#

Why It’s Hot

The concept goes against all good strategy best practices. Instead of surfacing the most-viewed, most valuable and well-categorized content, Astronaut.io shows us the polar opposite side of the spectrum. Nevertheless, the results are fascinating in a really odd, amateur and unpolished way.

The Power of Six Reaches YouTube

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YouTube released a new pre-roll format this week known as Bumper Ads. These pre-roll ads are similar to traditional TrueView Ads on the channel, except that they last just six seconds. The new format is optimized for mobile, where users have shorter attention spans.

Not only are these ads optimized for mobile viewership, but they also present an opportunity for brands to test which format is most successful and engaging. Recently, Audi and Atlantic Records launched Bumper Ads that featured select shots from its longer TV spots.

YouTube has found from early tests that these short-form pre-roll ads perform best when paired with TrueView ads. They are a great complement to the traditional ads as they are optimized for mobile and drove strong lifts in the upper funnels of ad recall and awareness when targeted towards those who had previously seen TrueView preroll ads. The TrueView ads have been found to perform best in lower funnels.

Why It’s Hot: These shorter pre-roll ads could be a great solve for advertising on mobile, as they cater to the short attention spans of mobile users. It will be interesting to see how brands use these Bumper Ads to retarget their key audience on mobile. There is opportunity with these ads to develop smart re-targeting strategies to reach users effectively and across platforms.

 

The Battle Continues: Google Reacts to Facebook’s Latest Video Announcements

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This week, just one week after the F8 conference that was so highly focused on Facebook’s commitment to video, Google has made two large announcements concerning its digital video tools.

This week, YouTube and Oracle Data cloud announced that they would begin tracking sales data for select CPG campaigns to connect the power of YouTube campaigns to in-store purchases. Google announced that early tests showed 61 percent of skippable YouTube ads (TrueView ads) generated significant sales increases.

This Gatorade TrueView ad generated $13.05 in sales for every dollar the brand invested in the ad and also generated a 16 percent lift in new buyers who viewed the ad versus those who did not, according to Google.

Also this week, YouTube released its 360 degree feature to creators and brands—kicking off with a T-Mobile sponsored stream of the Coachella festival. This releases comes just a week after Facebook’s announcement of its 360 video and live content hub, demonstrating the growing trends and interest in publishing live content to users.

On the other side, Facebook and Instagram released a beta program this week for interactive video ads, which would allow users to explore products deeper or even be directed to quizzes simply by hovering over a CTA button in the corner of the video. On mobile, the interactive features are available by swiping on the video and going to a landing page. This new format has proven to increase engagement rates significantly.

Why It’s Hot: As YouTube and Facebook go back and forth to claim dominance in the digital video space, both are opening up new features to brands. There is now more opportunity for brands to livestream content to viewers as well as more engaging videos. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see which platform can out-innovate the other, and what new capabilities are most effective for brands.

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/google-wants-prove-its-video-ads-drive-offline-sales-brands-170903

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/youtube-takes-facebook-360-degree-livesteaming-brands-and-creators-170893

www.adweek.com/…/brands-can-now-create-interactive-video-campaigns-facebook-and-instagram-170889

 

Humor and health do not mix. (Or maybe it’s what we need!)

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Sickness, disease, health in general, is anything but humorous. Attempting to make a joke or take health lightly is an approach all of us — especially brands — know can be a dangerous strategy. While no Biopharma company would get near humor as a marketing strategy, another sector of healthcare is attempting to break the mold.

One sector of healthcare has evolved from minor-league marketing to full-fledged competitive strategies that boast of new doctors, new equipment, new specialties. You see it on billboards, local TV, even on the radio with the same strategy: ” Our hospital is the best at  (fill in the blank)!”

Yet humor has been used to differentiate many brands — and the current hospital strategies seem functional at best. One hospital network in the Northwest, GroupHealth (recently purchased by Kaiser Permanente) used humor in a recent TV and YouTube campaign to acquire new patients — and it worked!

Why is this hot? In the ever-changing healthcare marketing landscape, hospitals were always the laggards. Traditionally, they did not as a category advertise they just let patients come to them. Now, to be competitive they are becoming more innovative than Biopharma companies in many ways — even innovative in using acquisition strategies alien to their “culture”. And using humor is almost heresy! Yet, it works. GroupHealth set themselves apart and has been successful.

The maturation of any sector is always interesting to watch — the marketing learning curve for healthcare as a whole is occurring in fits and starts. In this case, one hospital is starting to break new ground. Laughter is healing.

 

Social Media Platforms Exploring their Roles in Presidential Debates

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On Sunday, NBC partnered with YouTube to host the third Democratic Debate in South Carolina. This isn’t the first debate of this election to include a partnership with a social media platform, as the previous Democratic Debates were hosted by CBS News and Twitter, as well as CNN and Facebook.

In 2012, YouTube brought us the first live streaming of the Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates on YouTube through ABC News’ YouTube Channel. While streaming, they also included commentary from other partners such as BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, and Univision.

For this debate, it appeared they tried to integrate further with questions from their pre-filmed questions from their YouTube stars and Google Trends search data was shared before commercial breaks to inform viewers as to what people were searching for, as it related to the debate. As of Monday at noon, the debate had received 1.5 million views on YouTube, but YouTube’s role was largely criticized.

The Google Trends data fell flat in how it was shared, as a slide before and after commercial breaks, and it seemed to only draw attention to the fact that Twitter was not a part of their Google empire, as it would have been a much more natural fit.

The questions by YouTube stars were forced as well, and fit only as a plug for YouTube itself. At one point, they aired a cartoon to explain climate change in a lead up to a question, which many critiqued on Twitter (again, a more natural fit).

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Why It’s Hot: 

Every social media platform is trying to push to own real time and live streaming is getting bigger by the second. This effort by YouTube is an attempt to further it’s position in that space, but their integrations seemed a bit forced.

As all the major platforms push to be an outlet where people can be connected to real events in real time, it’s vital they consider the strengths of their platform and how people naturally use them, rather than half hearted integrations that only show they don’t fully grasp how their service is valuable to consumers.

Netflix signs social media star for scripted series

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As a recent “cord-cutter,” my family and I have found more programming on Hulu, Netflix, SlingTV, Kodi, AmazonPrime, ChannelPear than we could watch in a lifetime. Good programming, too. Many of the Golden Globe winners earlier this week were not from network TV programming but from Prime, Netflix, and others.

YouTube is also part of the cord-cutting phenomena. My 6-year-old son can attest to that as he watches Minecart Dan talk about Minecraft playing strategies for hours at a time. We have to rip the tablet out of his hands. Dan and others rack up millions upon millions of views and make big bank with advertisers and content companies.

Well, it appears that social stars and over-the-top programming such as Netflix are joining forces. Netflix just signed a deal with YouTube star Miranda Sings for a scripted series. It will be Netflix’s first scripted series using a social media star, and one of very few examples of social stars crossing over.

Miranda has more than 5 million followers on YouTube and averages around 1.5 MM views per video. Some of her videos have received as many as 17 million views.

The series will be called Haters Back off.

Why It’s Hot

It further shows how the lanes between social and mass market TV are continuing to blur. As more and more people cut the cord and use their ubiquitous access to broadband to stream whatever they want, the paradigm of who the content creators are and what platforms are in demand and being used continues to be in flux. Advertisers will need to keep pace with these changes if they want to continue to reach their target markets.

 

Revlon pivots from me to us and owns LOVE

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Revlon has had it’s ups-and-downs over the decades — in fact its stock had dropped precipitously over the last decade. Like many in the beauty industry, they used the same cliché beauty/make-up advertising. The focus always was: me. Even Maybelline’s new campaign — ‘No maybe’s” which celebrates a woman’s individual beauty, still uses all the cliché beauty ‘cues’ we are used to seeing.

Revlon deploys a new focal point: us. With the “REVLON Love Test” (https://youtu.be/F9JrNEHj558)  they have re-positioned beauty in terms of your relationship, not just yourself. They went from “me” to “us”. A brilliant, simple and genuinely charming strategy. Their YouTube channel has a core campaign video of several couples (below), and works hard at being genuine. Then Revlon goes a level deeper into each individual couple experience. The video below has over 7 million views in one month.

Why is this hot? Not only is it a smart creative strategy pivot from a self-centered view of beauty to something bigger than self, but they coordinate multi-channel campaign with real finesse: a highly engaging Web site (loveison.com), they offer several ways to draw you in and keep you engaged with the brand: a photo share that may be shown in times Square, a sweepstakes, a love test, and more.

Revlon loveison 2

Revlon love test sweeps 12.4

They just donated $1 million to a charity.

Revlon 1 $$ for lovie is on

They treat this seriously with a nice splash of silly. Very human — meaning genuine, authentic and emotional — and very smart marketing.