So many videos, so little impact
The challenges of measuring success and the importance of providing context.
If you read
's excellent newsletter, you'll know he's been doing lots of work and research into the perception of marketing, PR, and communications at the top level of businesses. One of the most consistent themes is that marketing and PR teams must do better at selling back the impact of their work. In other words - make measurement great.In my experience, it is still the minority of clients and agencies that put time, effort and resources (i.e. budget) into measuring the impact of their work. There's still a prevailing culture of "every campaign is a success because we say so". Not setting (or ignoring) pre-campaign KPIs and then cherry-picking the numbers that make a campaign look effective.
It's understandable behaviour - launching campaigns is hard work; no one wants to get to the end of an emotionally draining process and then tell their boss, "Actually, we failed, but don't worry, we've got lots of learnings, and we'll do better next time".
But if you want to convince the C-Suite that your marcomms is effective, you can't tell them every campaign was a hit. It's simply not believable - no one, not even Manchester City, has a 100% win record. Not every campaign or quarter will be an unmitigated success, nor should it be. Our approach to measurement and reporting needs more candour and less obfuscation to be convincing.
And if a lack of candour comes from every campaign being a success, obfuscation comes from an increasing love of metrics and numbers. We have more data than ever available, particularly if you run paid activity using UTMs or pixels. As a result, there's a tendency to fill reports with all the data. Look at my numbers, we say. My work is important because I have ALL THE NUMBERS.
But including all the numbers betrays a lack of confidence and focus. As
said at the GroupThink festival a few years back, focus on the critical KPIs and numbers. Focus on the numbers your audience will care about - and remember that different audiences want to see different numbers. The CEO cares about the bottom line and the investor view. The marcomms team want to know how to make future campaigns more effective. Tailor your reports accordingly.It's also vital that any numbers you do include pass the SFW test - "So f**king what?". We had an engagement rate of 3.5%. SFW? We secured 35,000 views on YouTube. SFW? Numbers desperately need context to tell a compelling story.
And yet, big numbers sound impressive. For a long time, in the early 2010s, the goal for a branded video was to be like the Samsung LED sheep - "go viral" and do a million views on YouTube. A million views sounded cool.
These days, a million views on YouTube is relatively common for the most popular channels - a cursory glance at YouTube's trending tab shows a whole bunch with 1m+ views. One million isn't the landmark it was. The most viewed videos on YouTube (almost all songs, BTW) have billions of views. The context, particularly on online entertainment platforms, changes all the time. A million views sound cool but are essentially meaningless when stripped of context.
Or, as Ethan Zuckerman puts in his post "How big is YouTube?", a million views "is a numerator without a denominator". The denominator provides the crucial context to answer the big question of SFW?
Ethan Zuckerman has been working on a fascinating project to answer that exact question of how big YouTube is. You can check out the headline stats over at tubestats.org. According to the team's estimates, there are 13.3 billion videos on YouTube - in other words, there are nearly as many videos as there are views of Baby Shark (the most popular YouTube video).
But the majority of these 13bn videos never make it over 500 views. In fact, the estimated median number of views across YouTube is 40.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of videos make it to that magical million views mark - something like 0.08%. But 0.08% of 13 billion videos is 10.4 million videos.
That sounds like a considerable number and makes that metric sound achievable - when it's not, not without a sizeable advertising budget anyway. Most videos don't generate any likes or comments, and the median number of subscribers to YouTube channels is 93.
It's also interesting to note that the number of videos uploaded to YouTube has been accelerating significantly. Planning, shooting, and editing high-quality videos on your smartphone has never been easier, and TikTok has only accelerated this trend. With the rise of Gen AI "text-to-video" services, we can reasonably expect this growth to continue to explode exponentially.
And while YouTube (and the other online video platforms) grow exponentially bigger, your target audiences' time and attention remain finite. That growth means even fiercer competition to get your videos and other online assets in front of the people you want to reach. And that, of course, means brands putting advertising spend behind their comms materials online.
If you're not paying to play in 2024, you're highly likely to end up with the long tail of YouTube videos, languishing on double-digit views with zero impact.
One of the many additional benefits of using paid social advertising to boost your assets is that it provides access to enhanced analytics and more in-depth data. As mentioned earlier, having more numbers isn't always the answer. But it can help - even more so if you're spending at a significant enough volume to unlock some of the brand lift studies platforms like Meta and YouTube offer to certain brands (I seem to be constantly getting these surveys on YouTube. Which probably says more about the time I spend on YouTube than anything else).
Measuring the impact of marketing and communications is an imperfect science. I've been to many talks and conferences on measurement, and I always go hoping to find some golden nugget of wisdom I've never heard before.
But that golden nugget doesn't exist. Everyone is in the same boat - making the best use of the tools and data they have available to tell a simple, compelling story about the impact of their work. But we can make improvements to our measurement boats.
We can ensure we have as much data as we need - which often means investing in third-party brand tracking or bespoke stakeholder benchmarking.
We can be ruthless in distilling that data and information down - only focusing on the metrics that matter for each audience instead of battering them with numbers.
And we can focus on getting the story right. This is what our campaign set out to achieve; here's whether we achieved those goals (or not), and here's why that is important for the business.
As ever in our world, it sounds pretty simple when I write it down on Substack. And it kind of is - it just takes time, effort and self-reflection to get right.