• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, October 13, 2014

A new report, “Earning and Owning YouTube,” looked at 160 million video users to determine their preferences and behaviors from 10 billion social engagements. Tubular Labs canvassed a 365-day span of brand performance among automobile, beauty and luxury, consumer packaged goods and the gaming biz. 

It showed that even big---and even giant--brands don’t always get it right.

It’s so broad it's hard to even make a broad conclusion, but I’ll try: The study shows that big brands can lead YouTube users to their videos, but that engagement is much, much harder.

For example, this report says that while automakers do get hundreds of millions of earned views, the engagement rate is 0.835%, below the 1% threshold that  YouTube says is the mark of advertising that is doing “well.”

But that’s way better than engagement from their owned media, which comes in at a horrible 0.151%. 

This report says there’s no lack of content. The five top car sites, based on the number of visits, not car sales, are Toyota, BMW, Honda, Porsche and Ford, and all but Porsche created over 1,000 pieces of content for their sites over a year's time-- and Ford published over 2,700.

For the mostly young viewers, these sites and ads get views, but not much involvement. Porsche and BMW made big efforts. Porsche has the new “911 Secrets,” which quizzes viewers about what they know of that popular Porsche model; BMW has “BMW Stories” and “BMW History” that also go beyond the typical car site stuff. Honda Stage, in which it presents branded music content on several sites include Vevo channels, is new, and this report says, promising. (But its early results are dismal.)

The others automakers are mainly just putting a lot of TV commercials on the site. And this report says: “It’s incredibly difficult to achieve superior engagement on YouTube, if the platform is mainly used to archive pre-existing footage.” That doesn’t fly, as any number of other reports explain to advertisers that sometimes see their sites and YouTube channels as warehouses for old and current commercials.

I have an explanation for the low engagement, though. Having made the mistake of engaging on auto sites, I learned, you really pay the price. Cars are seriously expensive, so when a YouTube user shows interest, sellers pounce. And so you learn: Don’t engage! Don’t look like you’re interested. It would seem, particularly among very young viewers of these videos--for whom car buying is more aspirational than real--that watching is as far as most of them want to go.

The report has some other observations that, if not surprising then at least amplify existing knowledge with some facts. It’s a great read. 

For example, many beauty fashion brands have better earned “footprints” on YouTube than than owned channels. In part, the reason for that is the “extreme volume” of videos produced by fans of various health and beauty products. “The primary challenge facing brands building their own presence on YouTube,” this Tubular Labs report says, " is the difficulty in matching the genuineness that YouTube content creators bring to their audiences.”

That’s not as true for luxury brands, but as this report notes, those well-known YouTube beauty vloggers pack a lot of clout: “Screen enough videos on YouTube and you’ll start to see why talent like Michelle Phan -- who built a presence focused on how-to and tutorial-based makeup videos -- have skyrocketed in popularity.

"The tutorials business on YouTube has certainly dominated the category. In fact, most beauty content is formatted as vlogs featuring makeup and product tutorials and 'hauls,' where a vlogger reviews products from mascara, foundation, and liquid eyeliner, to flat irons and other hair products...

“Of the top creators in the category, Zoella, Bethany Mota, Michelle Phan, and MissGlamorazzi have generated roughly 2 billion views across their videos,” the report says. ”They are also more trusted and considered to be better authorities in product and the tutorial space than the brands themselves.”

There’s a lot in this report that is flat out fascinating, but no more than the story of the candy called Kinder Surprise. I’d bet you never heard of it. But in the last year, it’s gotten 3.6 billion earned views, which, is more than all of the earned- and owned-media views of the other top CPG brands combined. It has ZERO owned views.

The report explains: “The 3.6 billion earned-media views it generated came from some 68,000 brand-related videos uploaded to YouTube between September 2013 and September 2014. This means that Kinder Surprise fan videos averaged close to 53,000 views per video.

"A chief driver of this viewership is the SurpriseToys channel, which features 'unboxing' videos of Kinder Surprise candies. Some of these videos have racked up more than 50 million views, with the channel in total having accumulated nearly 500 million views since launching in 2012.”

What is happening here? Well, Kinder is a candy for very little kids. These videos are being watched by kids with their parents. That’s why the engagement rate is so low--only 3.1 million. But still. Here’s a sample, from the Baby Big Mouth channel.

pj@mediapost.com