Which brands are winning the social video shootout during Euro 2016? (post 2/2)
In our previous post we tackled the TV advertising approaches of brands during ITV’s broadcast coverage of Euro 2016. After coming to terms with England leaving the Euros twice in one week, we’re now going to turn our (short) attention to their social video strategies and confirm where the social platforms picked up most of their brand points.
Vine and Instagram are still playing in the reserves
In total there were 29 brands out of 142 analysed who created strong football themed TV content assets. All but one brand (Apple were the outlier) posted at least one version of their TV ad on a social media profile, indicating that social video as a compliment to TV is starting to come off the subs bench and make the first 11.
What became evident came through clear in the results after extensive analysis. is that the majority of brands who are comfortable creating 30 second + TV ads, are not creating unique or ‘recut’ content for their Vine and Instagram accounts.
After an explosive start when it first hit the scenes in 2013, Vine has not established itself on the pitch for the the majority of analysed TV advertiser brands as a viable platform for social video during the time frame this research was conducted. Burst has been tracking brands on Vine for over three years and the sports sector and football sub sector is one of the most popular* on our platform. The volume of brands who chose to experiment a few times with the platform at the height of it’s buzz, to then never return, is enough to bring Payet to tears again.
Walkers Crisps are one brand in particular to have used Vine within their product campaign. They continue to utilise Vine to support their marketing efforts, averaging over 100,000 loops per video. Given some well deserved pitch time, Vine could have been a super sub for some of the brands who worked hard to build a hardcore following of Vine football fans.
*Football has the highest average brand Burst Impact Score for engagement metrics across all the non US sport commercial sectors we track on a daily basis.
Just one in five brands posted campaign video content to Instagram during the date period analysed. In truth, only one non-official sponsor brand we analysed, delivered the kind of unique Instagram experience that has become second nature for brands posting filtered images. That brand was Beats by Dre, transferring in four Euro 2016 football star brand ambassadors. Each representing four different nationalities and potential consumer markets for the brand. Featured below is a video we understand was posted exclusively to Instagram. It includes interview snippets of French star Antoine Griezmann, additional ad shoot footage, with a local language audio track, packaged up within 15 seconds, generating close to 50k views at the time of writing. Tres bien.
Twitter is made for match days
Of the three platform social super powers we analysed, 75% of brands looked to Twitter to fulfil their short-form social video needs. Two in five brands posted short campaign video clips on YouTube, with that number rising to two thirds on Facebook.
The classification of what is short-form video varies widely. We define it as video that is typically from 6 to 60 seconds. What’s seemingly undisputed though is that consumer attention spans are getting shorter, now less than a goldfish at 8 seconds. Only a handful of videos were under this threshold, confirming the marketing mindset of starting big and spinning out shorter content assets, is still prevalent.
Tweets have been the mainstay of real time social content and it was the betting companies again that have put in the hard graft during this tournament. All five betting brands with football related TV spots posted simply executed real time videos featuring teams, goals and popular scorers. The only non betting brand to put a wager on real time video engagement was Carling, through a Jimmy Bullard inspired range of timely GIFs.
YouTube still has the biggest fan base, but brands are handing the armband to Facebook
We selected ten proven tactical content variations and analysed how often they were picked across each social platform. The results confirmed YouTube was the most popular platform in terms of variation and volume (25 brands and 64 variation combo’s across the 10 content types). The main use cases were full adverts (21) as well as content featuring current and ex-footballers (14).
Facebook went toe to toe with YouTube across several categories, scoring higher on bonus social ads (10 to 7), behind the scenes (3 to 2) and creative game highlights (3 to 0). The brands that didn’t post their TV ads to YouTube were using Facebook as their main video content hub, using Twitter as their vice captain pick. 8 brands posted more content to Facebook than on their YouTube accounts. With Facebook’s own proclamations that it’s platform will be “all video within 5 years”, we may see more brands taking a ‘Facebook first’ approach when brands start lining up their marketing strategies for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Twitter also had its moments in the spotlight. Twitter outperformed both Facebook and YouTube for bonus social ads (11 compared to 10 on Facebook and 7 on YouTube) and real-time videos (5 compared to 0 on all other platforms). Matching Facebook across several content variations, most brands see the two competing platforms as an essential cohesive campaign unit that increasingly has social video in the engine room. Add up all the variations we analysed and it actually outscored Facebook (54 to 53), thanks to its strong appeal for real-time and uniquely creative short videos.
Extra Time Insight
So that concludes our 2 part blog on TV advertising. Always keen to provide maximum entertainment, we’ll be bringing you an extended look at our favourite campaigns, as well as a roundup of who scored big on short-form video during the tournament.
Full infographic and downloadable link
