How Automotive #Influencers Can Beat TV Commercials on YouTube
Here at Octoly, we recently published the first major research paper about “YouTube, Automotive, and the Power of Earned Media.” One of our most important findings was that the majority of automotive brands were not doing a good job at reaching out to YouTube creators at scale.
Unfortunately, some marketers still think of YouTube as if it’s just like television, only on a smaller screen. These brands simply repurpose their TV commercials and run them as pre-roll ads that appear before the videos people click on, with the idea that viewcount is the only metric that matters. But what this approach ignores is the very basic fact that YouTube is a social media platform — it’s actually the world’s second largest social network, after Facebook. YouTube is about engagement and conversation, not one-to-many broadcasting. YouTube creators learned this lesson long ago, but YouTuber best-practices apply to marketing as well. Simply put: When people watch YouTube videos, they don’t want to be talked at, they want to have a two-way (or many-sided) conversation.
This is why, as viewers, we usually skip automotive pre-roll ads that talk at us instead of with us, in much the same we skip the same commercials when we see them on television (using a DVR instead of a YouTube “Skip ad” button). OK, sure, we do sometimes painfully wait through 15- or 30-second ads when we can’t find a way to click off. But does this compelled viewing also compel us to like these brands and buy the products? We have yet to see any data that proves this to be true.
Best-Case Pre-Roll and Challenges
Here’s a best-case example of a pre-roll — a hilarious Subaru-branded video with 2.2 million videos:
We’d estimate from their engagement rates (likes-per-view and comments-per-view, etc.) that about 80% of these views (about 1.8 million) of these views came as a paid pre-roll ad. And we might logically guess that of the 400,000 or so organic views, most came from people searching for dog videos. Which is fine, because Subaru owners probably have a higher likelihood of being dog lovers. But it’s an open question as to whether a funny video like this will convert viewers to car buyers, and whether the high-production costs justify the ROI.
YouTube is About Engagement, Not Just Views
YouTube is an engagement medium, and marketers in other categories, particularly video games and beauty, have already realized that connecting with YouTubers who talk about their brands is a very successful strategy for communicating with potential customers on this social video platform. Powerful YouTube brands like NYX in the beauty category and Minecraft in video games have adopted their own approaches to supporting and celebrating their fans on YouTube — NYX’s FACE Awards is a yearly contest driving millions of authentic views, and Minecraft’s packed conventions always include extensive training for independent YouTubers. As a result, those fans are better able to speak about the products they love, further growing the overall brand footprint on YouTube through authentic videos from advocates native to the platform.
In our automotive study, we tracked 60 different automotive brands across the world, including a ranking of 50 mainstream brands plus 10 additional super-luxury and exotic sports cars. The research tabulated all videos and views on YouTube that mentioned an automotive brand. We then divided the views into two buckets. The first bucket was “owned media,” which in our study we defined as both organic and paid views of videos created and promoted by automotive brands or their ad agencies (including pre-roll ads). The second bucket was “earned media,” which was any mention by anyone else.
What we found, across the board, was that earned media — consisting of views made by fan videos and automotive journalists — accounted for an average of 90% of brands’ share of voice on YouTube. Frankly, these results were not a total surprise — we had expected to see data like this in some form. Why? Because we had been running similar numbers for verticals like video games and beauty/cosmetics, and those groups had even higher ratios of fan views to brand views. However, as opposed to those other verticals, we had been seeing very few instances of automotive brands harnessing the power of the YouTube community in a comprehensive, strategic way.
This lack of an overall creator engagement strategy might be due to another of our key findings, namely that, with a few exceptions, there were not as many great independent creator YouTube channels that focus on automotive news and reviews. Yes there are some exceptions like FastLaneDaily, SaabKyle04, and SubaruWRXfan (whose channels cover ALL automotive makes and models, not just those in the channel titles), as well as mid-tier creators like Bob Flavin of The Next Gear. But most of the views we tabulated originated either from a wide variety of channels that usually focused on some other topic, or didn’t focus on automotive on a regular schedule.
Mid-Tier Creators: Effective, Targeted, Overlooked
Here’s a review of the Renault Captur by mid-tier automotive creator Bob Flavin of The Next Gear as he takes a test around Dublin. He has “only” 15,000 subscribers yet this video was viewed 42,000 times (almost 3x his subscribers) by enthusiastic, interested, perspective buyers who clicked on it on purpose, rather than having to video forced upon them. And his review is quite thorough and compelling as he covers all the features in an authentic conversational style:
Automotive Vlogging Is Expensive, Time-Intensive
Why aren’t there more automotive-centric YouTubers? It’s hard to pin it on just one reason, but it’s probably due to a combination of the logistics, time, expertise and financial factors that make automotive reviews more complicated. So there ends up being fewer YouTube-native channels in this category. Yes, many views (but not nearly a majority) come from traditional media sources who post to YouTube, such as Motor Trend and KBB. But on YouTube, it’s usually the single-creator format that has the most resonance and authenticity for fans.
However, YouTubers who have already learned the platform while creating channels in the video game, electronics, or beauty categories turn out to be great at reviewing cars as well from an anecdotal, non-expert perspective. These YouTubers can be adept allies for automotive brands in creating engaging experiences. In this video, Juan Bagnell of “Your Tech Report” interviewed his friend, a Los Angeles-based actor who owns a Nissan Leaf, about his experiences with the vehicle while the two took a spin around town. The video was inexpensive to produce, and yet the video was viewed five times as many times as the channel’s subscriber count.
One Brand Cracks The Code: Ford Fiesta
One automotive brand, the Ford Fiesta, found a way to create a YouTube-centric campaign that engaged creators and fans. If you’re in the YouTube world, you probably heard of Ford’s 2013 #FiestaMovement. With a campaign that included 100 ambassadors and hundreds of enthusiast-driven videos, Ford built their earned media footprint on YouTube to a degree only seen in the categories of beauty, video games, and consumer electronics. This was a campaign across all social media, but YouTube played an essential part.
Check out our next post, where we talk about how the Ford #FiestaMovement campaign drove more than 200 million views of fan-created videos related to the campaign.
Find Out For Yourself
Would you like to know how your brand can better engage with YouTube creators? Get a free audit of your brand footprint on YouTube by contacting us here.
