By Caesar Vallejos
Eagle News Service online correspondent
BARCELONA, Spain (Eagle News) — Top executives from leading brands that drive the growth of the digital age led by Google, YouTube, Twitter, Jukin Media and Gleam Futures acknowledge mobile as the primary platform that has been fuelling the social video phenomenon.
In the “Social Video Phenomenon” track of the Mobile, Media, Innovation and Experience Summit at the Mobile World Congress held last February 24, 2016 at Barcelona, Spain, Google Managing Director for Branding and Consumer Markets David Black said that, “of the 100 top global brands, all of them advertised through YouTube for the last year. For brands, this is a real phenomenon.”
According to Black, consumers now have greater choices than before. He even cited that for millennials in the US, the top stars on YouTube are bigger to them than the stars of TV or Hollywood. “What is interesting is that the stars on the mainstream are now coming on to YouTube,” he added.
Youtube innovation
“Innovation is thriving in YouTube and brands really are in the heart of that,” he said. Four out of the top 10 trending videos last year were brands videos. “There are paid media to amplify it, but the power of on-demand is driving the growth that’s seeing amazing results,” he explained.
With the phenomenal mobile growth, Black said that marketing is really about “how you reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.”
“When you are planning campaigns, think of the new meaning of www: what they want, when they want it, where they want it.” Black emphasized.
For brands to deliver the reach, impact and results, Black suggested for brands to “run paid media effectively, take TV campaigns run more issue, build YouTube campaigns because it will deliver something that’s native to the platform, and then begin to collaborate with great content partners to deliver more sophisticated things.”
Twitter as a live connection to culture
From a text-based platform, Twitter has also made its big change to video. “Video consumption has grown by 200 times for the past 12 months,” Twitter Vice-President for Global Brands and Agencies Jean-Philippe Maheu said.
Maheu mentioned named the two biggest trends affecting users that have a major impact for brands. The first is the change in device connection from desktop to mobile, which accounts for 100% of the growth in digital time spent by consumers. The second biggest driver is video.
“Mobile video is the biggest focus of Twitter. It is a mobile video platform with a very unique positioning in the market place. Twitter is your live connection to culture. When something happens in the world, it happens on Twitter. In many occasions, it drives culture and influences events,” Maheu explained.
He stressed that there are many movements around the world that happened in the past two years driven by Twitter.
According to Maheu, TV networks, to drive their profitability, are now looking at other platforms such as Twitter to augment and amplify their reach and success of content.
His past organization was looking at TV as the stimulus media, which is the media that creates the conversation. “But TV doesn’t generate the conversation, it just triggers it. The conversation happens on social platform or real life. Most these conversations are on Twitter and on Facebook,” he explained.
He also announced that the latest app that Twitter bought was Periscope, a collection of live broadcasts around the world.
Immediate engagement
For Jonathan Skogmo, CEO of Jukin Media, “the immediacy of the engagement from the audience to Snapchat is amazing. We are talking about 800,000 opens within three to four hours on a single picture posted Snapchat from big talents like Marcus Butler (UK’s most popular Vlogger). “The engagement you see on Twitter and Instagram is also enormous, but still the majority of those huge audiences that we’re getting on mobile is YouTube,” he said.
Be where your audience is
As the pace of innovation just keeps accelerating and gets better and better everytime, YouTube suggested to “be where your audience is. Consumer behaviour is changing fast. YouTube is now where the world comes to watch.”
Twitter, on the other hand, is “enabling the younger generation to think and create together. In the past we have the makers and the thinkers. Today we have people that think and make things together. The ability to give these tools to the younger audience is fabulous.”