How to Bring More Data Science to YouTube and Creator Media
Tinuiti's Odlum on mini ad-ecosystems
I am constantly writing about the challenge facing agencies and brands when in comes to YouTube. Is it TV? Social video? Search? Commerce? Do you fund it from all of those respective budgets, and measure it using all their respective metrics?
Sean Odlum, Chief Product Officer at Tinuiti, says it may not make sense to try and “bucket'“ YouTube.
“You kinda gotta treat it as its own thing,” he said. “Years ago, we had debates [along the lines of] ‘what is this?’ Ultimately we decided, it’s YouTube. It is hard to categorize because it is so protean.”
Which ultimately means that almost every part of a media department or marketing group will likely touch YouTube in some fashion. And that it probably needs its own sets of metrics and measurement tools.
At Tinuiti, that need has led the agency to develop the YouTube Intelligence Suite, which aims to help brands optimize YouTube campaigns while using all the traditional marketing tools they are used to, such as MMMs.
“I wouldn’t say there is a YouTube playbook,” Odlum said, as we sat down in Cannes at the PayPal Ads Studio (thanks PayPal!). “[For media planners] there is this vast bubbling ocean, so where do you start?’ A lot of brands and agencies struggle.”
“You don’t want to just brute-force it—spray dollars everywhere and eventually learn. You want to start intelligently and then learn iteratively.”
The problem, Odlum and his team have found, is that “brands have largely defaulted into demand generation campaigns because they’re easier to measure.” However, “you can really build your own content ecosystem around these trusted experts.”
Check out the full interview here: