Jumpstart Automotive Group

The growing popularity of YouTube amongst Internet users has made it impossible for automotive marketers to ignore advertising opportunities on short-video destination sites.  Automotive marketers: It’s time to go back to the drawing board; YouTube is here for the long haul. 

A press release from comScore, highlighting recent data on video viewing, underlines a growing upswing in usage and solidifies YouTube’s presence in the space. According to the release, in January 2008 approximately 140 million Internet users viewed online video. Google sites, particularly YouTube, ranked number one with 78.5 million viewers accounting for 56 percent of the total U.S. internet audience.  These viewers watched a total of 3.25 billion videos on YouTube, spending on average 2.9 minutes, and consuming an average of 70 videos. (See press release).

With that 56 percent of the total U.S. internet audience only projected to increase, how can OEMs continue to pass on this audience?  The aforementioned volume and duration of viewing is a strong indication of the growing inclination that consumers have towards the online short-video format.  As such, I cannot stress enough, it is imperative that automotive marketers recognize this as an opportunity to reach their target audience, sooner rather than later. 

Online video as an advertising tactic and a web site feature are not new ideas to the OEM’s and their respective agencies.  Why then, do they occupy such a minimal space within online video?  Much of the hesitancy stems from a number of questions that these marketers still have: What is the best possible practice for leveraging advertising opportunities available on short-video destination sites? Should it be about purchasing ad space on short-video destination sites, or about presenting product as content? The only way to determine the answers to these questions are to experiment with the opportunities. 

As they continue to ascertain the true value of short-video destination sites, automotive marketers are neglecting the opportunity to be a direct and impactful presence on the YouTubes of the web. Despite the fact that the OEMs are increasingly employing video on their own websites, you are rarely able to query any content produced by OEMs on short-video destination sites. By doing so, they are indirectly dismissing the opportunity to capitalize on any form of viral advertising that sites like YouTube can generate.

A wide-spread usage of short-video online on YouTube.com (and other destination Web sites) represents an important opportunity for the OEM’s to increase their online presence and boost branding.  Automotive marketers should utilize this opportunity as a starting point to test advertising and branding opportunities available on YouTube and its competitors. Doing so will undoubtedly have some associated costs; however; two factors make these costs worthwhile: 1) re-usability of videos and 2) lower CPMs on short-video destination sites than premium sites.

Here you will find a sample list of tactics to utilize when leveraging consumers’ usage of online short-video:

• Ensure that video search engine’s spiders can crawl the Web pages containing video.
• Know the demographics of short-video destination sites. Age and gender are probably the two most important demographic attributes that differentiate the users of short-video destination sites. YouTube recently started to offer demographical analytic tools to its users.
• Promote video sharing by making informative and interesting videos about the vehicles.
• Evaluate different targeting options available. In addition to content and demographic targeting, advertisers can also do buzz targeting on YouTube.
• Associating your brand’s Web site to the related user-generated videos submitted to YouTube and other short-video sites (e.g.; videos from auto shows etc.)