Net.Finance 2008: Jon Kaplan of Google – YouTube and Financial Services

Before I post about Jon’s interesting session, I’ll note that it’s important that marketers considering using this channel read my post on YouTube Video Optimization as there are many highly unique search engine optimization techniques that can improve your success in this area.

Jon Kaplan’s talk starts here: Youtube was founded at a dinner party in 2005. There was no easy way to share video files.

Online video viewing in the mainstream

Americans stream of 10 billion online views monthly…

Explosion of Content = connection of people + democratization of the tools of production + broadband penetration + falling cost of data storage

Sharing is the new viewing – 150M unique users globally

Demographics: 2/3 of YouTube users are over 35, 37% earn above $75,000

800 content partners attended YouTube Videocracy in February

Four ways to think about marketing in 2008
– Target your audience with video profiling
– Integrate your brand into the user experience – on YouTube and Beyond!
– Leverage your offline assets and ones YouTube is creating
– Think about measurement differently

Video Profiling – Building Tools for Effective Targeting – using traditional demographics in the search by audience features…

YouTube’s Creative Standards – 20 million home page views a day

Animated flash overlay is the current YouTube ad format – NO Pre-rolls are shown
Promote Your Video: Video Search capabilities

Integrate Your Brand into the Experience – HP example

It’s all about interesting content: Turbotax

It’s about all about educational content: Vanguardinvestments brand channels

Launched test of video ads in the 1st Quarter of 2008

E*TRADE – pre-seeded SuperBowl commercials – 2,000,000+ views on Youtube.

American Express sponsored fashion week

YouTube Global Gathering

Metrics – the social side of YouTube
– Users can rate videos
– User can comment on videos
– User can add videos to their list of favorites
– User can share videos with friends
– Users can subscribe to their favorite channel

New metrics will accompany this, Google Trends data – admitted that this drives need for Adwords campaigns. Discussed other metrics in terms about how the video was measured and then closed with questions.

Audience question: Should YouTube provide statistics for videos with completed views or the average time of engagement with viewers so that more accurate measures of engagement could be provided?

Answer: That’s a good question. Said several things about exploration of new areas. Did not say yes we’ll add it or no we’ll never do that. It will be interesting to revisit this issue at some point.