YouTube For Brands Case Solution

2. Analysis

SWOT Analysis

• Strengths: The strengths of YouTube emerge from the fact that it is globally the largest video sharing website with Billions of views increasing every day. The platform provides massive reach to the audience and allows brands to exhibit their message at an incredible scale. The website is also backed by multi-language support, which allows users from various ethnicities to understand and comprehend the content. Further to this, the website has global accessibility, which widens the horizon to reach audiences through advertisements and allows the exhibition of a large volume of content to many people within a short time. Suggestions and sharing options allow viewers to give a virtual word of mouth to other users (Dehghani, Niaki, Ramezani, & Sali, 2016).

• Weaknesses: The weakness of YouTube from the viewpoint of advertising includes the common perception of advertisements to be intrusive in the content displayed on the website. Most of the time, viewers bypass the skippable advertisements or are forced to view the unskippable ones unwillingly. In addition to this, the advertisements may increase viewership but cannot guarantee sales, and it is extremely easy to receive negative reviews about a product or a service being offered. YouTube also requires extra marketing tactics and techniques to bring additional traffic to the website, which then views the advertisements posted. Additionally, for the advertisements to be seen, the videos must be able to do well, or they will eventually get hidden under the content (Pikas & Sorrentino, 2014).

• Opportunities: YouTube is available in more than 60 languages, which provides a strong motivation for the marketeers to use the website as a replacement for TV advertisements. The website allows adequate moderation through communication with the users, which makes the brand message more effective. The website is used by over 50 countries to post content which produces a massive volume of content and advertisements offering products and services which may be replicated or improvised as per the local needs. The adoption of the internet and the use of the smartphone has enabled the site to grow and reach new audiences from all age brackets, which implies marketing can be targeted to every age group, ethnicity, and culture (Gupta, Singh, & Sinha, 2017).

• Threats: The emergence of other platforms which offer longer content like documentaries, movies and TV series like Netflix and Amazon Prime are the biggest threat to YouTube as these platforms have reduced their dependency on advertisements by introducing the mechanism of paid viewership. Such a website allows the users to cut through the noise and view content they wish to see without watching the advertisements. Further to this, inappropriate posting of content can also damage the reputation of the brand. Another threat lies in the fact that online broadcasting of content allows the users to copy the content and present as their own, which may put brands into a difficult position within the competition (Pashkevich, Raj, Kellar, & Zigmond, 2012).

YouTube for brand promotion can be a powerful tool to target a large audience through a single, widely-accessible channel. However, the content and brand message delivered must be short and precise enough to gather attention and interesting enough to retain the viewership throughout the advertisement to achieve the purpose of marketing. The emerging new platforms which offer video content through paid subscription are becoming widely popular, especially amongst the younger generations as the content is targeted and easily accessible as per their likings (Whitney, 2019). In addition to this, the advertisements which are displayed on YouTube are often skipped before being complete as they are not completely relevant to the person watching the content. An advertisement for cooking oil is hard to attract a 14 years old boy watching his favourite soccer star being interviewed (Moon, 2014).

3. Solution Alternatives

There are several ways through which brands can make their advertising effective on YouTube. YouTube offers numerous Ad templates which can be customized according to the message which the marketers try to convey. Some of these advertisement templates include display ads, overlay ads, skippable video ads, non-skippable video ads, bumper ads, and sponsored cards. Brands which are attempting to raise brand awareness could display and engaging video or a discovery ad. For brands looking for targeted response and leads to the website could make use of sponsored ads (YouTube Creator Academy, 2020).