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Last rites for YouTube?

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Digital, Creative, Branwell Johnson, Latest reporters' blogs November 21st, 2008 by Branwell Johnson

One moment it was the possible saviour for agencies and clients, the next a real whipping boy for everyone, as demonstrated at the Thinkbox Televisionaries event yesterday.

Almost as thought they were getting revenge on the attractive sixth former who spurned them at school, telly wonks and allied advertising and media representatives stuck the boot into Youtube at the event, attacking its lack of revenue-generating capability and blaming the amateur nature of most of its content.

Apparently brands don’t like advertising around “edgy” content that isn’t produced by monolithic broadcasting organisations. One person called Youtube “a failed model” and Work Research’s Justin Gibbons hailed as revelatory the statistic that the BBC iPlayer had overtaken YouTube as the most popular online video viewing destination (conveniently forgetting that iPlayer does not carry advertising so is no use to clients).

The desire of the public to see professionally produced content in “big shows” was hammered home by speakers including Peter Bazalgette. But does this mean the game is up for the attractions of user generated content?

Hang on, it seems like only yesterday that ad agencies and clients were scrambling over themselves to encourage amateurs to create ads (or brand-related user generated content) via online competitions et al because they thought it would be more engaging to young people than highly-polished  all-singing, all-dancing TV ads. Didn’t Pringles and Doritos both serve up ads created by “civilians”?

And wasn’t there a swathe of TV shows that were basically created to showcase UGC clips? So is there now a huge retrenchment from the excitement and innovation shown on Youtube and other video clip sites? Could it just have been ad agencies and those familiar “new media” faces clogging up the marketing conference circuit became over-enthusiastic and bigged up the Youtube phenomenon too much?

I think not. Okay, there is still no easy sell to clients for YouTube but I’d suggest Google and YouTube are not out of the game yet as a major conduit for advertisers. Google/Youtube accounted for 44.1% of all online videos viewed in the US in July 2008, according to comScore, and you can bet the majority of viewers came from the oh-so-desirable under 24 demographic.

Next they’ll be saying social networking sites have no way of being monetised for advertisers and have been hyped far too much. As if!

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