Using YouTube for Product Placement

 Product placement is a form of advertising where branded goods are placed within a movie, music video, tv series or any other form of entertainment media. For example, In 'American Idol' or 'X Factor' the judges may be seen with Coca-Cola glasses at the tables.

'I Robot' would generally be regarded as a relatively serious film, But when you look at the obvious (and slightly ridiculous - yet effective) product placement for Converse in the above clip it is hard to take it seriously.

As we all should know. YouTube is practically built on advertising. So many videos are plagued with advertisements that you have to watch before getting to your video. Yes they are extremely annoying but companies pay a hell of a lot of money for them. It cost $ 175,000 (roughly €135,000) per day to keep ad's circling YouTube. The other way that companies like to get there brand out there by using product placement. This is by now means a cheaper way of advertising but it is just as effective

Think of the most popular YouTube channels you know. The likes of 'feddiew' and 'Epic Meal Time' always have some form of product placement. This can be done with subtlety or not. These YouTube channels can potentially get thousands of views every day. That's thousands of people seeing your product being used my people they respect enough to devote their free time to every single day. Worth the money.

Take notice of the product placement for McDonald's and Jack Daniels product placement in the above video.

This is one of the advantages of being a YouTuber. You can show off these products in whatever way you see fit.

YouTube help has a full page about product placement and can help any company  to apply for paid product placement. You can find this page here.
http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=154235

As if that didn't make it easy enough for any interested companies, YouTube has a list of the most popular YouTube channels in terms of views and subscribers. Using this, anyone can see what channels would give you the most publicity for your product. The vast range of channels give the opportunity for the companies to see for themselves which channel would suit their product and marketing style the most. Example? Many of Freddie Wong's viewers are interested in movie making themselves and would be very interested in the type of equipment he uses. So a move a company could make would be to ask Freddie to use their equipment to film and edit his videos.

YouTube can be used for free advertising.

In my previous post, I talked about members of the public searching for memorable advertisements because the ad caught their attention though humor or other emotional responses. It's no big secret that people do this. We've all done it. Think about it, how many times have we seen the Old Spice commercial? Or any Guinness ad..ever? YouTube has all of these famous advertisements. This is great for the consumer. We get to relive our favorite adverts as long as we have a half decent internet connection.

For example, my own favorite advert of all time is a Specsavers parody of 'The Lynx Effect'. Even though this ad doesn't appear to have much to do with Specsavers, it so hilarious and memorable that I will always think of it when ever Specsavers is mentioned.

So how does this benefit the company? I'm going to continue to use Specsavers as an example. The ad posted above was released in 2010 by Specsavers. Lets just say that they wish to air this ad on ITV1 during  a show that would attract roughly 2 million viewers, and the rate cost was £6.00 per one thousand viewers. Therefore, 2000 x £6.00 = £12,000 for 30 seconds. This number could be higher or lower depending on what channel the ad is being aired, the time of day, and the program that is on. This amount would have to be paid every single time the ad is aired. 

YouTube does not charge for this advertising. Well, it does charge for the adverts you see before videos you actually want to watch, but if this ad was to be posted as a video, it would be completely free of charge. 

This basically means that if an ad captures the attention of customers enough, they will search for the ad online and the companies can reach their customers without paying for repeated airtime. Essentially making it free advertising. 

Why use YouTube?

One of the basic duties of a communications professional is to respond to crisis and promising developments as quickly as possible. In recent years, this duty has become much more straightforward with the speedy spread of social networking, allowing them to respond to comments on their posts and shape their strategies around them.

If someone was asked what social networking site they thought is best for communications, Facebook would likely spring to mind pretty fast, (as it is generally known as THE social networking site). And Facebook is of course a fantastic tool, you might think that with its immense user base (over one billion as I'm writing this) it could be used to power an entire public relations or communications online campaign. However, Facebook is overrun with advertisements, promoted pages, constant requests to like pages and attend events, and oh my god, the religious debates. In my experience, people tend to get annoyed and block further notifications from certain pages and people.

Sometimes that doesn't even work.

Because of these little annoyances, people have slowly began to migrate to Twitter, a finely tuned, promotion spreading machine. Even through Twitter does not have the users Facebook has (roughly 500 million) it's simply a superior tool in public relations. The speed that information is spread throughout site is incredible. Add this to the fact that Twitter doesn't suffer from an overload of information which may hit you in the face as you log in, and you have a winner.

So why use YouTube?

The reason videos are so powerful for any communications strategy is that it provides a more personal touch, which is important. Nothing else on the internet is more personal than a video.

YouTube is not the only video sharing website, but it is certainly the best for communication professionals working on campaigns, as websites such as VEVO hold exclusive contracts and have a narrower target audience.

Creating a video is a very effective way of launching a public relations campaign, regardless of the client. If a video has the ability to touch people emotionally or if they relate to it it will stick in their memories for a long time. These emotional reactions can cause videos to go viral at alarming speeds. Remember how fast 'Kony 2012' went viral last year? This video was so powerful that it caused a sharing frenzy that lasted weeks by the time people began to scrutinize.

An example of a positive use of YouTube as a communications tool is the 'No Kid Hungry' public service announcement created in conjunction with the Food Network. It included a narrative from Jeff Bridges which was used to gain more publicity. 

Humor is powerful in any form of media. If there is one thing that might stick in a potential customers mind more than a touching speech and a warming gaze from one of their favorite celebrities, it's something that leaves them splitting their sides laughing. This is of course debatable, many people may feel that certain emotions effect their decisions more than others, but if I'm the customer I will always remember the funny one.

An achievement made by certain companies is that they have produced ad's so memorable that people actually went online specifically to see the ad again. A perfect example of this is the famous 'Guinness Dancing Man' ad called 'Anticipation' launched in 1995.

The user base and traffic of the website is phenomenal, and it's still growing, and it will continue to grow. Check out statistics on the sites traffic here. - YouTube Press Room Stats