YouTube’s Brandcast extravaganza returned to Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion last night and, quite frankly, it was some show — with top-notch entertainment and a “bright” propositioning for the platform.
[Update 13/9/24: amended audio interview, changing “brash” for “bold”]
“There’s only one YouTube,” declared Melanie Silva, managing director for Google Australia and New Zealand at the start of the night, a gambit that over the course of the night, a variety of internal execs, creators bussed in from overseas and B&T Power List-ers Chris Brown, CMO of McDonald’s, and Laura Nice, co-CEO of OMD, sought to bring to life.
Let’s quickly recap the major announcements:
- The average Australian adult watches 75 minutes of YouTube every single day.
- YouTube reaches 97 per cent of Australians.
- New AI-powered Video Reach Campaign non-skippable ad formats combine six-second bumper ads with 15-second non-skip ads. The format is optimised for delivery on Connected TV.
- Demand Gen will be accessible via Display & Video 360 from October.
- Creator Takeovers give advertisers the chance to “take over” a Creator’s channel and roadblock all advertising.
- Partnership Ads, powered by BrandConnect, will let advertisers use authentic creator videos, repurposing existing branded content as advertising.
“I’m really excited for the direction that YouTube’s heading in,” Kandiese Villella, Mindshare’s national head of performance, told B&T after the show.
“Last night it was clear that what YouTube is offering in the [linear TV] space is still important to them but they’ve really recognised the opportunity of creators and started to emulate that in a lot of their formats and offerings… It was all really intriguing. The future for YouTube is quite bright.
“It was a real reflection of the state of media planning that we’re heading into in 2025. Every publisher is being squeezed and put under scrutiny to some point. It was a reflection of our cost of living crisis and inflation.
“YouTube has the capacity to be all things to all people. ‘We’ve got the reach, we’ve got diversity in formats, we’ve got short-form, we’ve got long-form, we’re cross-device, we’re the biggest screen in the house and the smallest one in your phone, we’ve got creators’. It is a laundry list of reasons why YouTube is the place to invest your digital dollars in a single publisher.” added the B&T Women in Media Award winner.
James Dixon, co-founder and chief digital officer of Atomic 212º, said that YouTube’s focus on ROI — a key theme at last year’s Brandcast, too — left him “impressed,” especially compared to last year’s upfronts from the “linear crew”.
In particular, Dixon said that YouTube’s claim that it delivered 23 per cent better ROI than its “closest competitor” and delivered 2.2 times better long-term brand impact than rivals were “bold” statements.
Noting that YouTube listed Analytic Partners as the source, Dixon said that he “want[ed] to interrogate them”.
“My feeling was that they are bold and brilliant statements. But I want to dig deeper. I think the networks should hear those and interrogate them. I do like the Mutinex mROI report which shows TV as the strongest channel, which isn’t far off what YouTube is claiming to be, they’re claiming to be a living room experience now. I loved the boldness, I just wanted to fact-check the sources. But I don’t think they’re far from the truth,” he said.
As with Villella, Dixon noted that YouTube’s approach at Brandcast was to show that it was more than a match for linear, social and other digital video platforms.
“There’s only one YouTube. They’re trying to say ‘We are everything, we are the best. We are TV, we are social, we are live content, we are big sports — they had a bit of a play there — and we are niche weird stuff. I quite liked it. When I think about YouTube, it isn’t TikTok or Meta. And it isn’t linear broadcast, it’s the best of everything. It’s curated, highly individualised content for anything that you might want to do, plus the big format of the living room and the ad formats.”
There was, however, one major concern shared by Villella and Dixon — YouTube’s Market Mix Modelling (MMM) position.
“Our suite of first-party measurement solutions from brand lift to search lift, help you measure and optimise for the full value of your YouTube investment. But with so many channels to measure, a lot of marketers are turning to MMM, as you’ve just heard from Laura [Nice] and Chris [Brown] so they can optimise more holistically,” said Caroline Oates, head of YouTube and programmatic sales AUNZ, on stage last night.
“However, MMM have never completely evolved for the digital world, so we recently introduced an open-source MMM called Meridian. It empowers the industry to develop best-in-class MMM and ultimately drive better business outcomes.”
“I do agree with that point, that MMMs haven’t moved into a digitised world,” said Villella.
“But [you need] a state of vigilance and to do good comparisons of the MMMs that are on offer from third parties… There are options, like Mutinex, that offer the third-party view versus investing in something from a publisher.”
Dixon, meanwhile, said that Oates’ point “stood out” to him and that it was “wrong”.
“They were definitely pushing Meridian over others. It is open-source so you can unpick it all, if you want to.”
Regardless, Brandcast certainly impressed Villella and Dixon. Villella said that it had her “considering” her media plans “a little bit differently” but noted that “diversification” is important and “monopoly is not the way we need to proceed into 2025”.
“It has the possibility to be all things to all people,” added Dixon.
“But the brand then has to think about the content and most brands don’t have the capacity to do three-minute content [like Woolworths] so it’s potentially a really high-performance media channel. But it will only perform as well as your content and most brands are struggling to generate and develop fresh, many-format content… I feel it’s a great channel, with lots of potential but it will only deliver that potential if the brand commits to it and does the content for it. It won’t immediately change our media planning.”
One thing’s for sure, though. With the major TV networks reducing the scale of their upfronts this year, YouTube’s “bold” and “bright” forecast for the year ahead is compelling.
