← DTC Podcast
DTC Podcast
Ep 510: Inside Pilothouse’s YouTube Strategy: Segmenting Campaigns for Scalable Growth | AKNF
00:24:16
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:00]
Eric Dick
Brands have been running YouTube ads using high quality video. That's how things have been done basically up until recently. What we're seeing now is that that polished, slick, high quality video stuff, it's being overtaken by the scrappy, organic, user generated style content. Google reported that this is one of the most effective ads on YouTube. One trick that you can use to capture content like Creative itself contributes about 49% to incremental sales, whereas brand is contributing 21%. Creative is king. People are only going to watch an advertisement if you're providing value. There's two kinds of value.
- [00:53]
Dougie
You're spending real money to drive traffic to your site. But the truth is 98% of that traffic leaves without ever giving you. An email meta knows who they are, but you don't unless you use Instant. Instant helps brands identify anonymous visitors so you can send more abandonment emails, build stronger retargeting audiences and actually recover that lost revenue. Brands like Fate, the label saw a 4.5x boost in their abandonment flows. Massco increased Shopify revenue by over 15%. Third Love, Toys R Us and the Oodie. These are all massive stores that use instant to see an average ROI lift of 11.2x. They'll even guarantee you a 4x ROI or your money back. It only takes 15 minutes to set up and you'll start seeing results fast. If you're serious about getting more out of the traffic you're already paying for, now's the time to fix it. Get 50% off your first month at Instant One DTC. That's Instant O N E DTC. It's all killer, no filler. And we are back with our Google team. We've got Adam on creative, got Dougie who's leading our department and we want to talk about YouTube today. YouTube is a continually interesting topic that we haven't covered in a little while. High level. Dougie, what are some of the findings we're finding about the levers that really make YouTube ads work?
- [02:12]
Adam
Creative first and foremost is the number one lever. I think maybe a couple quick call outs on changes coming to the YouTube platform. Generally any YouTube for Action campaign. So any campaign that you're trying to optimize to a conversion action is going to be looped into a demand gen campaign. So it's, it'll serve not just on YouTube placements but different aspects within the YouTube platform as a whole. And generally I think we've started to push more into just organic feeling performance based content especially at top of funnel. So the new creatives we're launching are not the pretty commercials of old. They're shifting into engagement based relatable content that we're specifically trying to push into shorts placements which you can do a bit of through non conversion based bidding on YouTube campaigns.
- [03:07]
Dougie
Super interesting. I just did that podcast with not to name drop, but Mr. Wonderful Kevin O' Leary and he was specifically talking about TV ads but he was talking about in his experience on wonder ads, the scrappy lo fi creative is really overtaking some of the higher polished stuff which is cool to see on TV as well. Adam, what are you seeing from the creative side of things?
- [03:28]
Eric Dick
The exact same thing that the scrappy is taking over. So if you will, I can take you on a historical journey of creative YouTube past.
- [03:40]
Dougie
Waze World reference.
- [03:42]
Eric Dick
Yeah. Okay. We just aged ourselves. Let's continue a little bit. Yes. Okay. So for a while brands have been running YouTube ads using high quality video. Think like network television commercials, right? And they'd basically just take those and adapt them to run in YouTube shorts and they just do that by like cropping and using keyframes to move, move around the wider frame, right? Because they're cropping from 16 by 9 to 9 by 16. That's how things have been done basically up until recently and that served everybody fairly well. But what we're seeing now is is that that polished, slick, high quality video stuff, it's being overtaken by the scrappy organic, more like user generated style content that's like, that's very common in short form video. And you know that makes total sense. Like people that are posting on TikTok and Reels, they're just cross posting that stuff on YouTube shorts now. So that makes total sense, makes it easier.
- [04:47]
Dougie
You actually have some examples. I don't know if we want to get into them right away, but you actually have some examples that you could even say you could screen share. You could either if you're listening to us on Apple, you'd have to switch over to Spotify or maybe catch this on YouTube. But we could actually show a few examples of the kind of ads we're talking about.
- [05:01]
Eric Dick
Okay. So recently Google reported that this is one of the most effective ads just like full stop on on YouTube recently.
- [05:12]
Dougie
Sam.
- [05:43]
Eric Dick
The interesting thing about that is that is a small business local pizzeria shop that, that uploaded that and it, I think now it has over 7 million organic views and I think they've opened a new location since then. If, if you work at this place or you own it, please forgive me if I'm. I'm getting the story wrong. Maybe you can hit us up and straighten us out. But it's like Google themselves have reported that this is one of their most impactful videos like recently and it's super scrappy, clearly filmed with a cell phone camera and it's doing better than, you know, high value Productions that giant corporations.
- [06:21]
Dougie
Put zero call to action. Yeah, zero. Not selling anything. Just watching something that's compelling, it's got a driving beat. Makes you want to watch to the end of it. Super cool. Any other insights on why you think it's done so well?
- [06:34]
Eric Dick
I don't know why that like, you know, I. Things just catch sometimes, you know, that could just be one of those videos. But if we were to like break it down a bit, it is like it's. I've noticed myself when I'm scrolling on a YouTube, on YouTube shorts you can tell immediately when it's an ad and I don't even give it one second. I'm just like right. So I think now the way past that is to just come off super, super organic. Like you're native to the platform, you're not trying to sell them anything and maybe in fact don't try to sell them anything and you'll get a little bit more respect or at least have improved perceived trustworthiness, you know.
- [07:18]
Adam
Yeah. It's almost like we've talked about maybe ad blindness and people would be familiar with that term when we're talking about like display ads on the Google network. Right. But it's like when we're looking at content like that and content on shorts in general, it's almost like if you are too upfront about like, hey, I'm trying to pitch you something like it has a negative reaction. Right. Like Adam was saying, just passing along immediately if I know like, hey, this is someone trying to sell me something, I'm moving along. If I'm trying to be entertained or educated on something, then absolutely, I'm certainly more engaged. But yeah, there's almost like a negative reaction to content that is too focused on salesiness as opposed to just general entertainment engagement.
- [08:08]
Eric Dick
Yeah. Like a negative correlation between watch time and brandedness.
- [08:13]
Dougie
Maybe you have a couple other examples here of this of influencer style, short form creative. Because that one's, that one's good. That one's for pizza restaurant. It's not going to be. It may have 7 million views but only a tiny fraction of those are going to be in their town. Essentially. It really just has. It's kind of almost like brain rot content in a way, but I could it just having, you know, impact, blunt force impact on understanding the brand and, you know, understanding these people are very good at slicing your pizza. But what, what do you mean by this person on the street style video that you're also seeing?
- [08:43]
Eric Dick
Okay, yeah. So a little bit of context. First of all, let's establish like why creative is important. Recently Nielsen has come out saying that, you know, Nielsen ratings, you remember that from back in the day, the Wayne's world days. Yeah, doodle a doo. Right? So they've come out recently and reported that creative itself contributes about 49 to incremental sales, whereas brand is contributing 21%. So creative is king, basically. Right. So. And that leads me to believe that all of the moves that are being made by these larger companies are, you know, planned and strategic. And if that's the case, then what we're seeing is kind of a reverse of the way YouTube started out. So at the beginning of the story, I said we're using high production value content modified to go on YouTube shorts. But now we're seeing the inverse happen where they're, they're making network television commercials look like organic content shot on vertical video. And I grabbed a couple examples because I've been seeing stuff like this on like during nationally televised NBA games on network tv. And I took notice because I was like, oh, that's, you know, that could be on TikTok or something. So the style is that classic man on the street or person on the street where they're just like supposed to look organic. Like they're just interviewing somebody they ran into on the street and talking about a product just comes up. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I grabbed a couple examples of that just to show what's up. And maybe some of our listeners, viewers might recognize some of these.
- [10:30]
E.D.
I give you this designer bag if you can prove to me that you know your finances. Let's do it. How many subscriptions do you have? Probably just in Spotify. All right. It's saying you have 13 subscriptions, which is costing you around $270 a month. What the app is telling you all of this. It shows you all your expenses one place, and it can even help you create a budget, which I think need coming for me. But okay, don't worry about those 13 subscriptions you didn't know you had. You can cancel the ones you don't want right through the app and it can even help you try and get a refund.
- [11:01]
Dougie
So a bit, it's got a call to action. You can tell it's scripted still. It doesn't feel fully authentic, but it's just done on a dime.
- [11:09]
Eric Dick
Yeah. Basically like shoestring budget. Right. So that was an example where it's still in the horizontal format because it is running on tv, but you can see, like, the format itself, like, where everything's positioned. I haven't seen this out in the wild on the Internet, but I would be very confident in saying that they cropped this down to a vertical aspect ratio and ran it there, too. So I. I understand. I can see the value in going with this style of content as like, a first, like, toe dipping for these. For these style of brands, like, these bigger brands to try this stuff, because it does do double duty. You can get horizontal or vertical out of it. So I've got another example here. This one is from our friends at bluechew.
- [11:56]
Dougie
Still not sponsoring the podcast. They sponsor so many podcasts, they can't afford us.
- [12:01]
Eric Dick
I actually don't know what they do. I've never had a need to find that out.
- [12:05]
Adam
But it's tariff, since we're a Canadian podcast. Right?
- [12:08]
Eric Dick
Yeah, that's right.
- [12:09]
Dougie
Tariffs would be too high.
- [12:11]
Eric Dick
Okay, we'll let this one fly here.
- [12:13]
Sam
You know what Bluetooth is? You could boost your numbers if you took it.
- [12:16]
Dougie
Never heard of Bluetooth.
- [12:18]
Sam
Yeah, you know Bluetooth?
- [12:19]
E.D.
Yeah, it sounds like chewable tablet things, like, for the.
- [12:22]
Sam
Like the erection and everything. Yeah. Oh, girl. How do you know her, man? Come on. And it made you like him more, right? Absolutely. Or you could.
- [12:29]
Dougie
Where do I get Bluetooth?
- [12:30]
Sam
Oh, you want to know where you can get it now? Well, you can go online and get your first month free, actually, so.
- [12:34]
Eric Dick
Okay. I mean, can't say no to free month.
- [12:36]
Sam
Would you date him if he took a Blue Chew? I would have to go with the yes. Look, you're in it, my boy.
- [12:41]
Dougie
Beautiful.
- [12:42]
Eric Dick
That's.
- [12:43]
Dougie
My initials are E.D. but I don't know what this commercial is about, I think. I don't know what else to say. I can see it's got the vertical integration there. It's using the bars on the side for extraneous information. Again, you can tell it's scripted. You can tell. And that's the thing. Like, if you're worried out there that you've got to come up with fully authentic, you know, totally real content, it's still a little scripted feeling you can get away with it. It sounds like.
- [13:06]
Eric Dick
Yeah, it's more. It's more of, like, a visual cheat than it is, like, an actual genuine encounter. You know, they're they're, they're trying to make it look the part, although it isn't. And 100% I agree. Anybody who's seen advertisements before can tell that that's scripted. But, you know, a lot of people who shop online are younger and maybe don't have that much exposure to stuff and this stuff's more effective on them. Yeah, I'm pretty old. Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, that's why we both have hats on, because we don't have nice hair.
- [13:40]
Dougie
Like Doug, look at that hair.
- [13:42]
Eric Dick
I know.
- [13:43]
Adam
I think worth falling out with that too is like not the hair part, but the, the creative. If big companies are doing that scripted work, and to some degree it's working like there's even more strength in being able to put together that content organically. Like, I think all three of us would agree, if you could get an organic, non scripted version of that video, it would absolutely outperform the scripted version. If you could get those people to say roughly those same things in an organic way, you'll have a much more engaging piece of content because you will expand your authenticity outside of just the people who are maybe too young or too old to fully comprehend that this was a structured ad. Right?
- [14:33]
Dougie
Yeah, I think. And it is, it's a subtle difference. It really is. Like they are, they're having fun. There's interaction going on there. It's. It doesn't feel as scripted as, as a lot of content might, I think maybe just a bit jaded. What else are we like? So when people are trying to make ads like this, what, what are the aspects that they should be trying to include in them?
- [14:52]
Eric Dick
Well, here's one. One. One trick that you can use to capture content like this that feels more organic is to actually go do a man on the street bit or a person on the street bit and talk to people. You'd have to get whomever you decide to use, you'd have to get them to sign a release, but you could get genuine reactions that way. And in order to get the. This is, this is the hack. In order to get the correct sound bites, you ask leading questions, right? You're having a dialogue with the person you're interviewing. And we can always cut out the leading questions. But the one piece of coaching you have to give to the person you're interviewing is that, okay, so we're just going to do this off the top, but whenever you respond, just rephrase my question at the beginning of your answer. And that's a perfect sound bite. You can lead them with prompting Questions to pretty much say anything that you want.
- [15:43]
Dougie
Love it. Person on the street all day.
- [15:46]
Eric Dick
So the two main differences between, like, what's traditionally shown on network TV and this is like, the visuals and the tone. And visually, these ads look like a regular person made it. Right. And we talked earlier a little bit about it might increase the perceived trustworthiness, theoretically, of the brand or product. And tonally, they're more casual, conversational, you know, using informal language. They're not clearly, it's not a hard sell, you know, like that kind of thing. So if you keep those things in mind and use that tip that I gave you, you should be able to make content like this very cool.
- [16:24]
Dougie
And how are these ads actually still familiar to what you might see on tv?
- [16:28]
Eric Dick
Well, you pointed out a couple things earlier. I think when we watched the first one, there's still a clear CTA, right. And then, you know, CTAs are well known. But more specifically, in the first five seconds of an ad, it's great to have a hook line, something that peaks out the interest of the viewer. So, you know, talking about Ed or.
- [16:49]
Dougie
How many subscriptions you might have to change the topic.
- [16:52]
Eric Dick
Offering somebody a bag if they know about their finances. Right. So it's immediately like a little contest or a game show that's happening as soon as we kick off.
- [17:02]
Dougie
We all are subscribed to more things than we realize, probably.
- [17:05]
Eric Dick
Yeah. I still can't unsubscribe from the DTC podcast. I'm hoping to help me out there.
- [17:09]
Adam
You can't?
- [17:10]
Dougie
No, it's impossible.
- [17:13]
Eric Dick
Yeah, but okay, so in the first five seconds, you know, you got that hook line. It's always a really good idea to show a human face because we are still animals. We respond to other human faces looking at us, even if it's on a screen. So they do that. And the other part of that first five seconds is to try to mention the brand or the product in there. So if people do change a channel or swipe, at least you got a little bit of awareness out there and that bit of time that they were watching. So these still adhere to those, but they visually look organic. Tonally, they're not. Right. They're. They're not 100% there to the organic tone because clearly staged, but.
- [17:54]
Dougie
But they're both funny. I think that was the other thing I think we did. We did a podcast with Motion a little while ago, and they did a big report across all of the creatives that they were managing and found that humor was a huge aspect to Things working better. So even just in that first one about the subscriptions where there's the one subscription she doesn't ment and it like bleeps it out and it's like, oh, what was that? And it's a little, I kind of giggled thinking what it might be. And I feel like, and especially in the ed ones as well, there's, there's a nice, you know, humor tone that runs through it that really kind of like helps connect you.
- [18:23]
Eric Dick
Yeah, I've been beating that humor drum to anybody who will listen for the last few years because, you know, and people are only going to watch an advertisement if you're providing value. And to me there's two kinds of value. There's entertainment and then there's like relevant information specific to that person who's watching the ad at that time. So that could be like a very specific like problem solution statement, you know, at the beginning of the thing. So this person watching it knows like, oh, that's I've got that problem. Let me learn more. And the other way entertainment is like the easiest way that I think of entertainment is humor. Right. So by adding humor you increase watch time and you can get people to listen to the rest of your spiel. And if you sprinkle humor in throughout the thing, you can carry them all the way to watching a 30 second ad, a one minute ad, that kind of thing, because it's entertaining. And I say, I've been beating that drum for so long because sometimes that's, that tactic is in opposition to the way brands feel about their branding. You know, it's like we just want to communicate. We're a health brand, everything's green and, and you know, we use the word aerovetic. I don't even know what that word means. You know, tell me a joke and I'll keep watching. That's how I feel about it.
- [19:44]
Dougie
And it's gonna apply to everyone. Like, whereas you have to be hyper specific with the, you know, solving someone's problem, providing them value in that way. If you can make them laugh, maybe if they end up in that bucket where your product is hyper relevant to them, they'll psych, you know, subconsciously remember that you gave them a chuckle.
- [20:00]
Eric Dick
Well, yeah, if your audiences and targeting is on point, then then your next step is to make sure that you're getting them to watch the ad. Right.
- [20:08]
Adam
I think on, on that note, the other interesting thing to pull out of these kind of organic engagement Y style videos, if we think of that pizza example, like, yes, you're not selling the pizza place in that example, but if I were an advertiser and all of a sudden I had all this wide reach, and we'll pretend that it wasn't just for one singular location, I'd be retargeting to video ad viewers and then I'd start to be saying, hey, we're Sarpino's Pizza, the fastest pizza spot in the West. Get your delivery in five minutes. You're tying that thread to that initial engagement touch point and you're still providing a value prop. And then you can kind of get more branded from there, but you're getting people's eyes on you and getting those hooks in with that organic content and then you're naturally drawing that connection to your retargeting efforts to get them further down the funnel. And in that bluechew example, I'm thinking, okay, here's what people on the street are talking about in my retargeting ad, or kind of within that same vein, just trying to tie a more consistent thread. You're not just kind of hitting engagement for the sake of engagement, you're getting that engagement and then you're thoughtfully bringing that person further down the funnel with appropriate content. And you've got a plethora of people to target now that you've got this expanded reach from that engagement based content.
- [21:26]
Eric Dick
And one way that you can program that path is using ad sequencing. Right, Doug?
- [21:31]
Adam
Yep. So I think right now we're doing a lot of kind of top of funnel shorts targeting again this organic engagement style work. And then we've talked about it on a previous podcast. We're not necessarily looking for a conversion off that initial touch point. We're trying to get views in, get people engaged. Then we're retargeting those views and having them sequence through a particular set of videos aligned to what they should care about in the brand and pushing them to become brand aware, then consider the brand. And then ultimately that's when we're trying to deploy some of Those Demand Gen YouTube action type campaigns where we're trying to push people from a website visitor to become a website product purchaser.
- [22:12]
Dougie
And those are a lot more likely to happen on pre or mid rolls, I imagine, than on shorts. Just because shorts are such a high consumption environment.
- [22:19]
Adam
Yeah, that's correct.
- [22:21]
Dougie
Nice. Well, I look forward to seeing this continue to grow and I'm eager to see some of the creatives that we roll out with clients along this line. Any other sort of final best practices or thoughts that we have for people trying to tackle this YouTube approach.
- [22:33]
Adam
The other thing from a measurement perspective, and I know we've had a bit of a conversation on this in the past, but for advertisers that are trying to do it leanly, what we've been using are Google BDI CDI reports. So understanding okay, how how brand aware in certain states within the US is my audience. If they are not very brand aware, but there's not a high category demand for the product that we offer, then we don't necessarily want to use that as our primary geo to target. So we're identifying locations within the states. Especially if you're on a lean budget, you can't just blast the states and hope for the best. We're picking smaller segments of GEOs. We're aligning, okay, which of these GEOs have high category interest but low brand awareness for our particular brand. And then we're trying to move the needle on not only attributable performance and conversions and pushing people from view to click to purchase, but we're also measuring kind of brand saliency via brand search volume over time since launching those efforts.
- [23:35]
Dougie
Nice. Gives you a rubric for understanding how you're doing 100% well, thanks for coming on the DTC Podcast today, guys. Adam, hope to have you on again soon.
- [23:43]
Eric Dick
Thanks for having us.
- [23:51]
Dougie
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer.co. and if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC Podcast. We'll see you next time.