Industry Study Shows Significant Shift To YouTube By Top Global Brands

Examining how the top 100 global brands, as ranked by Interbrand in its Best Global Brandsreport, have made YouTube a critical part of their marketing and business strategy, the report analyzes the videos produced by these brands. Over the past five years, the top brands have gone from just a few dozen YouTube uploads in 2005 to more than 10,000 cumulative video uploads in a single month last year. These 100 brands alone now account for 9.5 billion collective YouTube views and more than 2,200 channels containing 258,000+ videos. We anticipate that by 2015, they will likely invest in the production, marketing, and distribution of over one million new YouTube videos. But brand marketers have work to do: the study uncovers that over 50% of their videos get fewer than 1000 views.

“Ignoring YouTube is no longer an option for marketers. It is quickly becoming the marketing channel of choice for the world’s top brands and the agencies that support them,” said Bettina Hein, Founder and CEO of Pixability. “Leading brands are using YouTube to build an engaged audience and drive business results. Marketers who put the best practices unveiled in this report into action will drive more successful video and digital marketing campaigns.”

Understanding that video marketing is just as important as video production, these brands offer valuable lessons. The report pinpoints seven core best practices for brand marketers. Three of the best practices include:

1. Be a well-oiled, consistent, video content machine: The most successful brands have 50% more videos per channel compared to the least successful ones. The best-performing brands publish high volumes of content on a regular schedule. Top aggregate brands publish approximately 78 videos per month. Leading media brands produce even more: close to 500 videos per month.
2. Apply an “Always On” strategy to video marketing: The most successful brand marketers on YouTube integrate their online video strategies with their traditional, offline marketing strategies. 17 of the Top 100 Global Brands use less than 50% of their channels. Continued advertising results in sustainable channel growth and subscribers.
3. Don’t get caught in the overproduction trap; lesser quality video works well, too: The best YouTube marketers produce a broader range of video content. Videos do not need to be prime-time quality, because those with lower production value can be just as effective.

“We’ve used our software to help many of the best companies in the world drive quantifiable business results with YouTube,” said Andreas Goeldi, CTO of Pixability. “We knew that the data collection for such a large set of videos was a monumental task, but our software quickly delivered audience, usage, and performance data in every dimension. We found significant disparities between the top and bottom performers in this elite group, showing that some brands get YouTube and others just don’t.”

The best performing brands based on this study applied a methodical approach to creating and tailoring their video content to the needs of their customers — driving consistently high viewership. The report also found primary publishing and social media trends differed by industry. An example being that viewer sentiment is starting to show distinct trends by industry. Home and luxury segments have the highest sentiment, while financial services and consumer goods have the lowest.

For a comprehensive look at all major findings, the seven core best practices, and how video usage differs by industry, please download the full report.

Methodology
Starting with the list of companies identified in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report, Pixability collected data from YouTube channels owned and managed by these Top 100 Global Brands. Pixability software collected a list of 2214 candidate channels. A group of analysts then verified each channel according to the criteria listed above and reduced the list to 1378 verified channels. All individual metrics per video were added by channel and then by brand to get to the total values used in the study. The raw data was used as an input into Pixability’s Online Video Grader software. The data presented in the study represents full and exact counts of the metrics described above. No sampling, estimates, regressions or projections were used. The complete methodology, including exact data harvested for each channel by Pixability’s YouTube marketing software and the resulting Grader scores from Pixability’s Online Video Grader software is included in the report.

The report authors, Andreas Goeldi and Rob Ciampa are both YouTube-certified. For more information about the report, please email us at youtubebrandstudy@pixstage.wpengine.com or call 888-PIX-VIDEO (888-749-8433).

About Pixability
Pixability is a YouTube-certified marketing and advertising software company that works with brands, e-commerce firms, agencies, and innovative organizations to drive business and awareness with online video and YouTube. Using its powerful, proprietary, cloud-based video marketing software and online video and community analytics databases, Pixability’s certified and seasoned team of YouTube professionals has worked with more than 500 customers, 10,000 YouTube channels, and 2.5 million business and brand videos. Pixability’s complimentary Online Video Grader (onlinevideograder.com) provides any organization with immediate metrics and analysis of YouTube, web video, video search, and social video effectiveness. For more information, please visit pixability.klikz.us.