YouTube trounces automotive #SuperBowlAds every day of the year

Advertisers celebrate the Super Bowl because they know it’s the one day of the year that people will probably not be fast forwarding through their TV commercials. But as amazing as Super Bowl viewership is, and as incredible as the multi-million dollar commercials are, as a marketing vehicle the Super Bowl can’t hold a candle to YouTube, any day of the year.

According to Omid Kordestani Google’s interim chief business officer: “Everyday, people watch hundreds of millions of hours of video on YouTube, generating billions of views. Watch time is up 50% year-over-year.”

Last year the Super Bowl set a record with 111.5 million viewers. Which sounds like a lot, until you compare it to YouTube’s 4 billion views per day. That’s 40X viewers of the Super Bowl, every single day. Note that the 4 billion number was released by YouTube in 2012, the last time numbers were released. It has undoubtably grown since then.

And when it comes to YouTube, many brands will simply re-post their Super Bowl TV commercials. TV commercials are fun to see on YouTube, but no matter the high-production values, they don’t get as much engagement on YouTube, because they don’t engage the viewers in a two-way conversation. This explains why brands have to promote their commercials on YouTube with pre-roll views via AdWords for Video (TrueView) to get their viewcounts to go up to “respectable” levels. Ironically, it’s the low-cost, self-made fan videos about the brands — that cost advertisers nothing — that get the lion’s share of views about the brands.

We found in our recent Octoly YouTube and Automotive Study that on average in the U.S. and worldwide, official brand videos about cars only account for 10% of the views about the vehicles. This is compared to 90% of the views which come from fan videos about the cars. Furthermore, much of these views come not from YouTube stars, but from mid-tail and long-tail creators, who have lower subscriber numbers. Until now, these creators have been difficult for brand to coordinate with at scale, which is why we’ve developed a service to do so.

Super Bowl Ads vs. Organic YouTube Creators

BMW

BMW has the highest brand footprint of any automaker on YouTube — 5.2 billion all-time views (75 million last month), 96% of which are views of fan-made videos. For the Super Bowl, they went with an ad with Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric. This video cost a lot to produce, and the views were assisted by a significant paid pre-roll campaign.

A lot of money went into Gumbel-Couric. In comparison, on YouTube, independent channel “Driving Sports TV,” reviewed the BMW X5 in a very authentic test drive. It was viewed “just” 20,000 times, but at no cost to the company. To repeat, 96% of YouTube views about BMW come on videos like this, not on views made by the brand itself.

KIA

Kia has a great ad out with Pierce Brosnan which has more than 1.5 million views on a channel with 45,000 subscribers.

In contrast, Cameron’s Car Reviews has a very straightforward vehicle walk-around on the new Kia Optima. He’s not James Bond, and the video has no explosions but his video interests viewers so much that he’s received 50,000 views, about 4X his 13,000 subscribers with no paid media. Again, this was at no cost to Kia at all.

Kia has the lowest percentage of earned media (free fan videos) of all major car brands. The average share of voice ratio in the automotive industry is 90% fan videos to 10% brand videos. Of Kia’s all-time YouTube views of 544 million, just 55% are from fan videos.

Nissan

Nissan has the fourth largest share of voice on YouTube with 3.3 billion overall views. Ninety-four percent of those views (3.1 billion) come from earned media, while 6% (200 million) come from owned media. This year, Nissan launched a campaign to get YouTubers to hashtag videos #WithDad. They will be using clips of YouTube creator videos in their #WithDad TV commercial(s). YouTube is in fact a great place to find an license YouTube creator content for many purposes (in fact it’s one of the services we provide).

So Nissan is on the right track with this campaign. But these videos don’t seem to be car-related necessarily. And it turns out there are enormous numbers of creators who are not YouTube stars who are releasing videos about Nissan vehicles. One example is Juan Bagnell oF “Your Tech Report” who interviewed his friend, a Los Angeles-based actor who owns a Nissan Leaf, about his experiences with the vehicle while driving around town. Bagnell is a tech YouTuber, but his review abilities have transferred easily to discussing the Leaf.

The Power of Mid-Tail Creators

Instead of focusing only on YouTube stars, our software helps brands find and connect with mid-tail and long-tail creators who are talking about brands in ways brands probably aren’t aware of.

YouTubers are essential to the efforts of automotive brands because only one tenth of all views of video views are from the brands themselves — while 90% of those views are on videos created by independent YouTuber channels. So brands are only one voice in many about their products. They must give up control in order to get control, engaging with these YouTube voices who love their products. And while it can be tempting to just want to work with YouTube stars, it’s the mid-tail and long-tail YouTubers with authentic audiences who are doing much of the heavy lifting for these automotive brands across the globe.

Find Out Yourself

Have question about how your brand can engage with YouTube creators? Ask in the comments below. Or, to get a free report about your brand on YouTube, enter your YouTube channel here at http://octoly.com/brands.