Fact is...No one watches Ads on YouTube....

I love the end of year Best of Series that comes out for advertising. 

Ad Week has the Top 10 watched Ads for 2011 on YouTube

Now before you click remember the following:

• There are 250mil consumers age 14 and above in the US.
• Views are not Uniques. The are total views. 
• A major national brand will pay millions if not billions to reach 100 million plus people more than once.
• A Superbowl Ad runs $3 million+ for a 30 sec spot to hopefully reach 60 million or more people at one shot.
• Major Brand Advertising Budgets run from $25million to over $1 Billion per year.
• There are hundreds and hundreds of ads created each year and put on TV and YouTube.
• Often in my opinion up to 50% of the YouTube views for advertising spots are by people in the Advertising/Marketing/Media Business.
• Views are accumulative. Meaning over the course of 1 year (or less) so most of these were not viral.
• Lastly views are world wide. Not US. So now think 2 billion consumers.

With all this information now when you see that the number 1 ad which was the VW 'Force' ad which was cute, entertaining, 'DOESN'T SELL THE CAR!', but also a Super Bowl ad that cost $3mil+ to air, reaching 45 million views should be easy. In fact in my view it underperformed.

Many of the other spots were more organic in their boost but they all aired on TV.

The number 10 spot for Adidas if you click has 4 million views. So in 1 full year they accumulated that number of views. So if this spot aired 7 weeks into 2011 it only had 88,888 views per week which is almost zero divided by 250mil or 2bil.

Summing this up since YouTube is world wide, and we have no idea about unique views, the FACT is:

NO ONE WATCHES ADVERTISING ON YOUTUBE

What is Wrong with Advertising Trade Publications?

Continuing my What is Wrong series....I came across this today in Ad Age:

What Have Chevy, Pepsi, Sony and Verizon Gotten Out of 'X Factor'? A Look at Their Social-Media Lift

Now I have been having fun watching Tom Moradpour and Shiv Sigh on the Twitter live Tweeting during X Factor the last 2 months when my Twitter time coincides with the show. I joke with Tom about being a good company man and asked if his bonus is tied to his Tweeting, which made him laugh.

 

Now it seems the sponsorship has garnered Pepsi a bump in Social Media Chatter. Being a Pepsi fan I am happy about this. But the reporting proves why Advertising/Marketers have such a hard time proving the money invested shows a direct pay off. There is no mention if Pepsi sales are up due to the extra chatter from the X Factor. I am not saying there isn't. But why doesn't Ad Age ask this question?

 

I am used to sites like Mashable being softies and side stepping the nit and grit of business.Just like People Magazine side steps the same tough questions when they cover Celebrities. But no one takes Mashable seriously. At least none of the smart people.  But Ad Age is the premier Advertising Trade Publication for Print and Online. The only other Trade Publication I have full respect for is Media Post. The rest have very shoddy reporting standards.

 

And it does a disservice to the industry to not hold us accountable for growing sales or at least showing some sort of correlation with what we do. When Pepsi came out with the Refresh Project and bowed out of the Superbowl someone who I will not name who works at their Agency of Record told me the purpose of the Super Bowl spots is to have people talk about your brand. I called Bullshit on that and still do. The purpose is to sell and if you refuse to sell don't take the business. So last year after the spots with people assaulted by Pepsi cans I called for Pepsi (and still do) to find a new creative shop because they are being hurt by their current one (sorry and I respect the incumbent but they are failing their client in my view).

 

So who pushed for the X Factor sponsorship and is this turning into sales? That is the important missing link for this campaign and for the reporting by Ad Age.

What is Wrong with Social Media

I am writing this because there was a nice opportunity for Facebook to show that Viral is real and that people Share. But they blew it. And I wonder if the reason is because the reality would tarnish the view of Social prior to their coming IPO.

Yahoo News had this article:

40 Most Shared Stories on Facebook for 2011

They gave a few numbers. The top two were shared almost 600,000 times. Not bad. But I bet there were 79million stories (articles) in 2011 and with 800 million users 600k as number one was shared by 0.075% of their user base.

And when I look at Shares on Social this is incremental views for media. Meaning the majority of their readers will not come from Social and a prime website for news needs a few million readers per day. So this proves that from Facebook at least a prime news property will maybe get a boost of thousands of readers. Not enough to move any advertising dollar needles. In fact whenever I look at the LIKE button shares for major news sites rarely does that number exceed a few thousand and normally is in the hundreds.

What is worse is Facebook published this list and gave NO SHARE COUNTS! Why is that Facebook?

Most Shared Stories

And that is what is wrong with Social Media. All fluff and no substance. This was hyped by Facebook. Yahoo picked it up. And it has ZERO MEANING TO ANYONE! It tells me nothing really about whether or not I should view Facebook as a platform that shares content enough for me to include it in any marketing strategies other than buying Facebook Ads. And this to me is further proof that Facebook really is just a big Display Ad network no different than Yahoo.

And the icing on the cake? This post by Facebook has 892 Likes and only 1392 Shares. VIRAL? I think not. Sharing even? I think not. People do not share on Facebook. They just post and read. And that is the a fact.

BTW please share this on the Twitter ;-)