YouTube Ads: The Underestimated Channel Driving Real Growth Right Now

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: You cannot cut your way to growth.

Cutting your OPEX, cutting your media spend doesn't produce growth. It may produce profit in the short term, but it doesn't produce growth. And so now what we're seeing is brands that are leaner, that have made some of the hard decisions that are sitting and looking at their businesses and saying, okay, what now?

Welcome back to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. Today, we've got a couple of new guests who I'm excited to have join me. I think they've both made an appearance before, but I don't know about with me. I don't know the last time you both were with me, but today we are talking YouTube and I wanna lay a little context before I introduce Rachel and Tony and let them I.

Take it away as to why we are revisiting this again in a short period of time. 'cause we've talked about YouTube recently around some of the incrementality studies that came out that Andrew did a great podcast with Olivia from Haus about. And but I want to set the tone for this conversation related to what we're seeing in the market more broadly over the last, let's say 12 to 18 months.

And what you may start to see is a theme across the content on this show. We feel like we have watched brands. Go through an era of austerity where step one to right-sizing the health of their business for a focus on profitability was to examine, examine, and eliminate waste. That there was a very frothy set of underlying opex and media spend, that the immediate solution to getting to a healthier state for their business was to cut and to bring rigor to a system of measurement and discipline to their spending in a way that gave them a, a path to life to get back to default alive, where they're producing EBITDA and cash flow.

And that is a process. We feel like we've walked brands through there. There was a lot of emphasis last year on the relationship between marketing and finance and connecting those dots for the sake of that endeavor. But the challenge with that. As a strategy alone is that you cannot cut your way to growth.

Cutting your opex, cutting your media spend doesn't produce growth. It may produce profit in the short term, but it doesn't produce growth. And so now what we're seeing is brands that are leaner, that have made some of the hard decisions that are sitting and looking at their businesses and saying, okay, what now?

And in light of that, we feel a deep responsibility to our mission, help brands achieve predictable, profitable growth. To continue to revisit that last statement to look at growth. And so we've talked about 

marketing moments and we've had Krista from Kovas and we've talked about Bayer and we've talked about the baseball lifestyle guys, and we've highlighted how marketing moments and product development we think are a critical component of this.

But we don't wanna neglect the idea that there's also a desire for brands to spend more money in advertising for the sake of growth. That that is still an ambition is to increase the amount of ad dollars they're spending, not to just decrease them. And so one area where we think that the innovations in marketing measurement are unlocking opportunity to spend more ad dollars profitably is in YouTube.

We're seeing some real promising results here. So that's why we're here. So with that, Rachel, I'm gonna have you introduce yourself first to everybody. Who are you? What do you do here at CTC?

[00:03:15] Rachel Kwon: Hi, my name is Rachel. Happy to be joining today. I am the, i, I lead the paid search team at CTC, so I've been working with Tony closely on developing strategies across paid search at.

[00:03:31] Taylor Holiday: Awesome, and Tony.

[00:03:34] Tony Chopp: Tony Chop, the Vice President of paid media here at CTC oversees all things media and I think just generally speaking, like really excited to enter this new chapter of deploying more media dollars more successfully through, through this journey of incrementality. Um, and, and we're really excited to, to talk about like, so there's kind of three main areas that we wanna talk through with you today, Taylor, around. The YouTube thing, the first being like more specifically what we've observed through these incrementality studies and, and what we think that means for the measurement piece. And then we wanna talk quite a bit about the, the, the landscape of YouTube advertising and. Some of the complexities that are involved and, and why I think it's been challenging for brands. Um, and lastly, we, we want to touch on like how we're approaching this with CTC clients in a way that I. Sort of emphasizes test and learn and start small and scale into it and measure along the way. And, and all of it, all of it is wrapped in this, this this idea that Rachel and I have been kicking around for the last three or four months, which we're calling YouTube 10 x, which essentially represents an idea of can we find a way to 10 x an investment in a media channel, which to me speaks to. You know, we're not talking about going from investing 10,000 to to 20,000, so on and so forth. We're talking about your brand spent 20, $30,000 on YouTube last year. Can we spend three, four, $500,000 in media and, and really have a sizable impact?

[00:05:19] Taylor Holiday: And there's a number of things that make us believe that YouTube's a place where that could happen. Is that one, there just aren't many places with the available scale that YouTube represents. And I think this is really important as a channel to start to think about the relationship between your media mix and the available inventory in total, and how that sort of, you think about the relationship between all these things as your investment into the potential of a channel.

It's no different than thinking about the TAM of a product, right? Where if you go to develop a product you want to think about how, if it goes really well. And people love it. How much value could you capture out of that? And advertising sort of has a similar scaling factor to think about as you go to invest in should I effort towards solving this channel?

If yes, what does it have the potential to produce for me? And I think one of the things that's sort of under considered is that the upside of YouTube is just so much volume. There's so much available inventory there if you can get it right. I think this idea of where is there really meaningful, profitable, investible growth?

Many brands that the problem that when we discover them is that on meta in particular, they're actually out beyond their marginal frontier. I. And so the problem with that channel in many cases as the next tranche of growth lever is that they're already spending out past the efficiency. Now there are solutions to that problem.

It doesn't mean that they're stuck there and can never, therefore never increase fed, but it just means that it's not immediately obvious that there's a huge 10 x opportunity of investment in that place. Whereas in YouTube, they're usually very under considered in that spot. And so the opportunity does exist to produce that kind of results.

And for us at CTC, we've done forever. And Rachel, you lead Search, which is the name of the department that in theory historically, YouTube has sat under and we used to sort of. Look at every Google ad product as search, but we're making a choice now to sort of bifurcate this idea to say, no, no, no. Search and YouTube are really different ad products in terms of what they're trying to solve.

So maybe you can talk a little bit about that distinction of how we're taking YouTube and creating our own focus on it and why that's important for us to do as a service provider. What is different about YouTube versus search and how brands should think about the role they play in their media mix?

[00:07:34] Rachel Kwon: I think this goes back exactly to what you just referred Taylor, which is it's being very underserved and the reason is because I'm sure a lot of listeners here have tried YouTube in the past or maybe trying right now using all different tactics and best practices possible, but. In return, I'm pretty sure they faced a lot of disappointment on the platform numbers coming back really low than expected and thinking, okay, it's better spent somewhere else. And then they basically may have closed the door and only spend like minimal amount. And that's why we're here where we see a lot of our clients spending about less than 5% of their total media dollars towards YouTube and. I think we're really um, during our early like exploration in YouTube, we found that YouTube is effective at driving revenue, but also the piece that we're missing is it's really effective at reaching new customers. So that's the part where I really wanna start becoming more aggressively. And this. Incre measurement piece comes in place because, because of the platform numbers that are under reporting on what the actual impact is coming from YouTube. We wanna make this right and start really, you know, really serving, utilizing this YouTube piece as we start to explore more and get through this journey.

[00:09:01] Tony Chopp: Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Can I, I just wanna add two things to that. I think that, that, I totally agree. The reason, the reason why, there's two reasons why it's different. Number one is the measurement piece for sure, and if you think about it, everything else in the search landscape, we use brand search as an example, as an extreme example. Super bottom of funnel, super high intent. And when you look at it in platform, the US on brand search looks phenomenal. So, if you're operating under a, this sort of basic assumption, which I'm. Obviously people are more sophisticated than that. But look at, in platform return, make decision, it's really easy to go and look at search, particularly brand search and go, great, that looks good.

Or even non-brand search or or shopping ads. So YouTube is different because the measurement really needs to be treated differently. The second piece is, and I'm gonna actually pop up a slide here 'cause I think this is a great segue.

[00:10:01] Taylor Holiday: Can I just add one thing to the measurement thing while you're doing that? Is that, 'cause I think this is really important is that when, when YouTube for us was lumped into search, it sort of tends towards like comparing it to branded search, categorical search shopping, P max. You look at them all in the same dashboard you're going to, whether you sort of logically understand it to be that way or not, compare them to one another.

And what we're really trying to emphasize is that these things cannot be measured the same. Like first, like Tony, there's a, there's a stat and maybe you're gonna hit it. So I don't wanna preview about what percentage of YouTube right now is consumed on television.

[00:10:31] Tony Chopp: Oh yeah, I got it. I can't wait.

[00:10:32] Taylor Holiday: I'll, okay, I'll, I'll, 'cause I think that it's just really important to understand the consumption of the media and how that affects measurement so dramatically when you think about this channel.

But … 

[00:10:41] Tony Chopp: No, no 

[00:10:42] Taylor Holiday: hand it back to you. Describe what we're looking at here for those of us who are just on audio as well.

[00:10:47] Tony Chopp: Okay. So, I'm call, we're calling this the four dimensions of YouTube advertising, and every time we go at this slide, we come up with another dimension. So. It's four now. And this is, this is my Sora image which has been a fun exploration as a side note as well. But, so this is, again, this is a thing that is very different in the YouTube product versus the everything else in, in the search platform.

So I. So the, the dimensions of YouTube advertising are as such, there's bidding, so there's conversion based bidding, cost per view bidding, and in true Google fashion, they give us 15 different options there. Um, there's the layer of audience targeting. I. And there's subsets within that. There's the Google defined audiences like InMarket and a fitted affinity and custom intent.

And then there's also customer based audience like remarketing customer file, et cetera. So there's another dimension. There's a another dimension of. The customer states who is a new customer versus a returning customer, and how do we think about the structure of the campaign related to that? Now, SOA didn't pick up my, my fourth dimension here, which is creative, which is a whole nother vector of how we need to think about YouTube advertising that isn't as applicable or relevant on search. And then. Rachel, we came up with a fifth one here we were talking about recently which was the, so the ad format, there's all these different ad products that can be, can be deployed on YouTube. So like, I mean, for me, honestly, practically over the, over the past bunch of years, like it can feel like a little four d like you're sort of lost in space. Like, where do I begin? And so somewhat disorienting and overly complex is as is the Google fashion and confusing and and a really big part of this endeavor for Rachel and I has been to help outline a path through this maze because every single one of these vectors can, can impact the end output. What, what are y'all's thoughts on that?

[00:12:47] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I, I, I think what you're describing. Exactly right and and the main thing I wanna highlight is there's this complexity to this that has to be approached in a unique and novel way that this ad product, I think what we're sort of looking at is we have under considered its potential impact across lots of dimensions and so much of the advertising conversation, I think.

For the last few years has honed into a very narrow set of dimensions, new customers, short-term, click basis, immediate, ROI. And that has been the singular focus for so much of the use. And now what we're seeing is brands have bigger businesses with more complex distribution and have need more consideration for how the ad product might impact the totality of their business.

And so what you're describing is a tool that has a potential to open up impact on a broader set of places. 

[00:13:36] Tony Chopp: We're approaching each of these dimensions. Distinctly, but I wanna talk about the bidding first and foremost, the bidding dimension. And I wanna relate it back to like a specific setup that we have working right now. 

So for all of our YouTube exploration that we're doing with clients right now, we're starting with th three independent campaigns. One is an awareness campaign. A second is a consideration campaign, and a third is a conversion campaign, and we're doing different things with the bidding at each of these stages, I. Uh, and I want to call a distinction to a a sharp distinction between the awareness campaigns and the two the two others that are, that are consideration and conversion. The distinction is and where, where we've seen a lot of our clients to exploration and even where our exploration was in years past was. To follow sort of our normal mantra, which is we fire up an advertising campaign, we use conversion based bidding, right? The awareness campaign here that you see at the top here, the fascinating takeaway connects back to the point that you were referencing earlier in this conversation, Taylor, which is different bidding equals different device distribution. It dramatically. So, the screenshot on the left for those that are just listening is showing the ad delivery across devices, and it's about 70% mobile. And it's using TCPA bidding, it's using conversion based bidding. Um, and it's about what, what do you wanna call that? Maybe 3% delivery onto TV screens. The screenshot on the right is so fascinating to look at. This is the, this is the awareness campaign which is using not. Target CPA or maximize conversion or any conversion focused bidding. Instead, it's using cost per view and the distribution is, it couldn't be more different. In this case it's 40% TV screens. And when we think about when when we hear these stats about like how much of YouTube is consumed not on phones and computers, what's been fascinating is we haven't really seen that as much in our data until we started to explore. Awareness, bidding it. It's just so cool to look at

[00:15:58] Taylor Holiday: So this is so important because this is where we have to understand how much the optimization setting that we create in our campaign design affects the ad product that gets utilized. So if you ask Google to optimize for conversions, you're going to obligate it to delivery in the place where it can see conversions.

[00:16:17] Tony Chopp: as a result of clicks.

[00:16:19] Taylor Holiday: That's right. And, and this is really or very short view windows, right? But the thing about the television piece, and this is why the Amazon extension of the distribution is so important in the measurement impact or retail in a consideration for this product, is that the pathway to the realization of the purchase for the TV view.

It's not that it doesn't occur, it's that it's non-direct and linear on a click basis to a website. And so in that case, you're going to under consider the value without a more complex measurement system. So how, how then, Rachel? 'cause I don't know that we would say that the answer is that TV is somehow better.

Like it just means that you, you want views on tv. So how do we think about the consideration of when. The TCPA or the conversion bidding matters versus awareness, and how do we help brands consider those different optimization and products relative to their individual state?

[00:17:15] Rachel Kwon: I think it comes like the full funnel strategy. Obviously going back to the basics, like if the objective of the or s campaign is basically your reach or like views, try to increase. Like build the list for the consideration conversion stage. I'm sure like we would, it all comes to objective of like what we're trying to get to, like what we are trying to accomplish using that stage of those audiences and for awareness. Like the reason why we were saying CPV is because we wanna get more views. It's not, the focus of that campaign is not going be driving conversions. We're. The consideration and conversion stages to perform better because we're feeding it. Using that awareness campaign that's getting more cheaper views, you know, and finding new customers that's gonna get funneled in to the consideration and conversion like stages.

[00:18:10] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. So this is, so, it's such an interesting architecture. The purpose of the top end campaign is. Just think about it. What are we doing? We're bidding for views. So what do we get? Tons of views. 

Super cheap.

[00:18:26] Rachel Kwon: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:27] Tony Chopp: We get what we asked for. Taylor, to your point about tell tell the platform what you want, they give it to you and, and we see it.

So the, the cost per view. So another interesting distinction between this bidding the the conversion based campaigns, have a much higher cost per view than the CPV bidded campaigns now, on average, at least a quarter of the costs. So if your cost per view on a conversion campaign is, is 40 cents on a CPV campaign, it's gonna be 10 cents May we've seen lower, so dramatically cheaper views. And then we get to the vector of. Audience and how we think about structuring that through this lens. 

So when we think about audiences, let's, let's put, let's put three categories of audiences out there from the, from the Google standpoint. So we have Google audiences demographic, interest based in market. Affinity intent. I, I pray for the day when Google gets past this into the meta stage of broad audience. But right now we're, we're in the Google landscape and the YouTube landscape. We're four or five years behind. It's sort of interesting to think about the trajectory of the two. Anyway, you have all the Google audience categories and then you have. Audiences. So your customer lists your website data your video views, which is a super important part of this puzzle. And then there's a third category which is referred to in the Google landscape as optimized targeting. You can think about it as an expansion or lookalike. So, so the way we're connecting these dots is when we think about these awareness campaigns, uh, we're, we're using, let me see if I can screen share this to make it bigger. We're, because we're not optimizing for conversion here, we're optimizing for views. 

We're also pairing that with Google's audience solutions. So we wanna set up ad groups under this awareness campaign for demographic targeting, interest segments in market custom intent affinity, and all of these Google, these sort of wide open top of funnel audiences go into this awareness campaign.

Okay. And what, what we're doing is we're looking, we wanna run all of 'em and look for differences and look for takeaways, and look for learnings that we can use to feed into the future stages. So connecting the dots to the, to the next stage and why it's different, the consideration phase. Now we're gonna bring in a. 

Your audiences, your Customer lists, the website data and remarketing audiences. And, and a really important piece that we were, we're bringing down the funnel with us to Rachel's point earlier, is the video view audiences. So using the video view the awareness campaign bid intentionally for awareness, for maximum views at the lowest cost, widest reach paired with Google's widest audience targeting. Into the next stage of consideration paired with conversion bidding and bringing in your audience layers into that campaign. Really, really fun.

[00:21:34] Taylor Holiday: So, I notice in this then, okay, let's talk. Oh, Rachel, you gonna add something? 

[00:21:37] Rachel Kwon: No, I was just, I was just gonna say very sequential, very like strategic in terms of like considering the funneling of the audiences.

[00:21:46] Taylor Holiday: Okay, so now let's talk about something, 'cause I noticed something in the syntax of that, if you wanna pull that back up. 

It says, uh, Austin DMA. So I wanna talk about, I don't think that we're suggesting, and I would never want someone to hear that we're saying that the goal of this campaign should be measured in the price of the view, right?

In any way, shape, or form. And actually the relationship between these campaigns is then actually being measured. Distinctly from actually anything that the platform reports itself. And so how are you looking at, and this is a question for either you can grab it. How are we looking in assessing this specific campaign?

So for a client of ours, StoryWorth, that's got a product that has these key peak buying moments, we've got this Austin DMA thing set up here. How are we actually looking at and assessing the impact of these campaigns together?

[00:22:35] Tony Chopp: So, I mean, the answer's, the answer's incrementality, right? So, so all of this is paired with incrementality and I think the, the call out to the DMA thing, what, what's really interesting about YouTube and the way we can test it is for many brands, for almost all brands, it's, it's a new channel, right? 

So when we do like. When we're testing and trying to find incrementality reads on Meta or Google or, or some large impact channel that's already running nationally, um, we have to go through different types of tests that are essentially holding out the media from a region. But YouTube's different.

We're not running the media in any anywhere already, or maybe we have a little bit of it. So the opportunity here is in one of the, one of the key sort of testing points for us that we're leaning into is. Focus this media exploration into a tighter region, whether that's a DMA. Or a city and we got, we have a bunch of data science that we, that we bring in either through CTCs incrementality tool or in our partnership with house or measure to, to make selections for these, these regions.

But it, it's an advantage for us to deploy the incrementality testing to measure, to answer your original question, Taylor, around measuring the efficacy of the total investment. It's an advantage to us to be able to isolate that investment into a specific region and look for impact that way.

[00:24:00] Taylor Holiday: This is really important because I think this actually illustrates one of the challenges with incrementality, especially on a channel like Meta where you've been spending a long time. Advertising nationwide is that even if you turn it off on a Monday, there was a bunch of spend happening in and around that dollar in that channel for a very long period of time across a very broad set of users.

Whereas in this case, this is like a fresh start in the sense that there were no Utah dollars being spent. And so we can isolate the spend into a specific region versus having to hold it out in some other places. And so. That testing modality, actually, I think in, in a lot of ways is cleaner for expansion into a new channel.

And so by designing the right budget allocation against the the against the rest, the right testing region we can then set up, you know, synthetic controls for other areas where we aren't spending, compare the impact to make sure there's no other business issues occurring and really find out.

What is the value of these media dollars over this period of time using these different optimization settings, this combination of use and awareness. What if we just go conversions? What if we just go awareness and we can play with the impact? And we don't even have to just do that on just.com. Ideally, we are looking at four dimensions.

To use Tony's term here of revenue realization, we're looking at. Amazon revenue. We're looking at.com revenue, and we're looking at new and returning customer revenue in both places, and we're trying to understand what is the halo across all of these elements to get the true return on invested capital in that region that we can then scale out and apply more broadly from there.

So that's where you get to real powerful sequencing. Go ahead Rachel.

[00:25:33] Rachel Kwon: I was gonna say, that's a really interesting point, Taylor, because I mean, we are looking at incrementality on YouTube, but it, we have to remember that. The more of the overall business performance is gonna be affected on other channels as well. Like it's not solely looking at YouTube in the beginning will be the case.

However, we have to remember and know that it's gonna impact across the business, like from different channels as well. Positively if it's actually working.

[00:26:01] Tony Chopp: Well, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that's what, so yeah, I think. A hundred percent Rachel and also a hundred percent Taylor in the sense that, okay, so Zoom backing up a step what started this whole thing was, what started this whole thing was CTCs. Mo expansion into incrementality measurement, that, that all began last year. Okay. And then we started to do some incrementality tests on YouTube, and we started to see some things that looked really compelling. Right. But, and we're just measuring the.com impact. To your point, Taylor, like we, we haven't, I, I'm not aware of a full study that we have that roles in the Amazon impact, but that's, that's where we're going for sure. And, and then. To add support to what we were seeing at the end of Q2 that like, Hey, YouTube. It appears to be under reporting and platform from a click basis. The house study came out in early March that you mentioned earlier that an Andrew had that great podcast on. So we have eight or 10 incrementality studies that we, that we did.

They did 200. Um, and what was fascinating is how, how close both of our conclusions were. Uh, and I, I actually have a slide for this that I think . Might be helpful. So this is attempting to represent like the difference between what, what we see and measure on platform. For YouTube, and this is just a, for example, like, say YouTube reads two to one in platform. So all our incrementality studies at CTC came back at about 150% incremental. So the, the impact was 150% greater than what was showing in platform. And the, that was from approximately eight, eight or 10 incrementality tests that we, that we had run at the time. So then we got the. The house report that came out in March and theirs was almost identical. So it is really fascinating that both of our data sets kind of came back with this same read. And to add one more point here in all, in all the incrementality testing that we've done. What we see this really common theme, which is the platforms overreporting, their impact. It's, it's true 95% of the time, there's only two spots where we've seen the opposite be true. One is super tight click only attribution on meta seven day click attribution on meta under reports.

The impact, the only other place where we're seeing this to be true is YouTube. And I, and Tailored is sort of. I bring it back to your point, all of this is based on looking at.com revenue and not including like a broader halo impact, including Amazon two. And so you could imagine this, this chart, if we had the Amazon, sort of the full rolled up view, the incremental impact we, we would anticipate would be even higher than this.

[00:28:59] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, and I think, I think this is the, where we have a hurdle to overcome with customers is that the inverse being true, which is this idea that everyone's default assumption is that the platform overstates impact, right? So when they go to the platform and they see such understated results, it's actually like in their heads, worse than that, right?

So, so, so to get them to detach. And, and MTAs don't really help with this problem, right? Like there's, so whatever measurement tool they're using to get them to detach from the idea that that result is actually overstated to, to suggesting that no, it's, it's actually probably understated. And we need to go and find out by how much, and here's a bunch of results that prove that it's understated.

It's like that's the first step of belief that you actually have to get through to work to get them into a place of testing. Now I think that this is where. We're trying to help brands and, and this is what I think the goal should be to do all the time, is have thoughtful, informed hypotheses that represent potential for large growth design, a clear mechanism for assessing an investment and a return in some short window, and then scale from there.

And I'm not sure there's a clearer, simpler, cleaner hypothesis that's data-driven. Plus a very simple testing exercise into large scale impact than YouTube. Right now, there's enough evidence that has been published that this channel does provide incremental impact beyond what the platform reports that the testing budget required isn't, in most cases, massive.

Now, depending on the brand and the media mix and the size, all these things caveats there, but the investment relative to, again, the third part, the total scale of impact, if you get it right. I'm just not sure, and this is why we're pushing on this so much. There's a better thing to go try right now than this.

[00:30:47] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that the total scale of impact, like, I don't know, you and I have these conversations all the time, Taylor around like. Is, is this worth going after, right? Is it worth the investment of time and energy and resources to like, to pursue? And I think Ra, Rachel, you and I were 

talking the other day and we both, I was like, pull up your, pull up your screen time. You know? And mine was absurd. It was like four hours a day on YouTube. I think that that whole idea of like, the audience is there, they spend the time there. The, the channel is, is different than surge. It requires a different tactic. There's more vectors. It's tougher to measure. Um, but it's, it's worth it. 

And, and that's what we've been seeing over the last six months.

[00:31:34] Taylor Holiday: I have a question that we haven't talked about a lot that seems to get most of the oxygen as it relates to the other channels, and that's creative. 

So let's talk about the distinction and where you think brands should begin between, one of the things that I think makes a channel easiest to test is the portability of creative from already existing assets.

So if I think about the, the sort of the, the form factor that is driving most of meta, it's gonna be more short form, vertical video than it is going to be longer form 16 by nine content. Do I need. Long form different creative for YouTube. Can YouTube shorts provide me the inventory that makes this level of impact?

How should brands be thinking about the creative requirements to make this channel effective? And how distinct or unique do you think they need to be than what they're probably already running in TikTok Meta, maybe Apple Oven as an example. Rachel.

[00:32:28] Rachel Kwon: I think regarding that, that kind of will probably show the slide later on, but it goes to the ad format, so. In terms of using some creatives that we're already utilizing on like meta and other channels, I think that will be perfect fit for basically the awareness stage where we have to get more reach and where a lot of times are being consumed watching shorts, like skimming through shorts and stuff.

So like, I think that's where it can be used. But I personally think that landscape sites that's more portable for, I mean, usable for YouTube's use is. Is suitable for running consideration or conversion stages of campaigns because that would, the objective of those would be to drive conversions.

And I've noticed shorts, we, of course, we can get a lot of like, reach and like views on like using shorts. However I've noticed in terms of the performance and driving convergence, it was showing much higher numbers on when we were serving landscape formats. Audiences. But Tony, you can.

[00:33:36] Tony Chopp: Well, yeah, so I think there's, there's some trade offs in this question. The portability of the content that's being created for, for meta is, is really important. So to be able to not necessarily need net new creative to get started, I think is absolutely a part of the story that we're, we're trying to carry through here.

And, and to Rachel's point for our, for our top level awareness campaign YouTube shorts, grab, grab your top content from meta. And your, your UGC your unboxing your creator content, and bring it over into an awareness campaign in YouTube and have it run as shorts per makes perfect sense. That's, that's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is if you, if we are in fact pursuing a 10 x investment on YouTube and we believe the, the scale, we know the scale's there. We believe the results are there. You're gonna need vertical horizontal video to get there 'cause you're missing out on a bunch of the inventory without it. So I think the answer to your question, 

Taylor, is it's like a, it's like a both end. It's like a yes. End the shorts product. The awareness buy is gonna make some for some interoperability with the content that you're producing. And it would be imp prudent to think, to think that you're gonna crack YouTube without wide content.

[00:34:59] Rachel Kwon: Also adding onto that. I think it, it really depends on the objective. Are we trying to really expand the reach or is it like the performance that we're trying to see? And then once the clients, I mean we, you know, assess whether what the goal is, what the objective, primary objective is for the client is, then we can, you know, start pushing more into awareness or consider pushing more into consideration if, and at that point, if we need more creatives. To fulfill that, then that's how we would've to start working on those, towards those goals. 

[00:35:31] Tony Chopp: I got one other thing to add to this. 'cause I think it's interesting. So some of the projects that I've worked on. In this dynamic of like awareness campaigns and using shorts and interoperable content we've had significantly more content that we've pulled from meta into those awareness campaigns as shorts because of the, the vertical video. And we've had efficacy without having piles of content. Wide content. So we've gotten, maybe got gotten maybe we've made the pathway easier for, for ourselves and for our clients by not having to produce a bunch of distinct YouTube content that's wide by leveraging this top of funnel strategy to push people into the deeper down.

[00:36:18] Rachel Kwon: I think it's just important whether like the goal is the awareness than, sorry. Yeah. Awareness. Then it's more better to use the shorts because our goal is reach.

[00:36:32] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I think, I think this is where in my head, the best thing a brand could do is be thoughtful about how these tests overlap with production planning in their marketing calendar. So let's imagine you're sitting here right now and you have a new product launch coming out in June that you're, you haven't yet gone and done the shoot for that.

You're gonna go produce your content. Is that in that media planning process? Isolate that you want to create content for a test for YouTube as part of that production workflow for that period. In isolation. Design the test design the budget, plan the assets in accordance with that moment to create the impact and see the efficacy.

So then you can actually. Take the time to say, okay, we cause, because the worst thing you can do is go run a test and feel like that the result might be a byproduct of that you had the wrong creative for the medium, right? And so I ideally, you would have a confidence that you're walking into that. Now, some brands are sitting on libraries of this stuff.

When we think about some of the eight and nine figure brands that we work with, they have Dropbox folders just overflowing with assets in every form factor that you could possibly imagine that aren't being utilized. And so this isn't really the hurdle. So this is where the individual state of each brand really matters in thinking about the test design and the planning process, but.

You wanna feel really good that you're putting your best foot forward into that medium to be able to analyze the result in a way that you're not going to second guess yourself of whether or not that was the right creative for that channel or not. Understanding that if a result comes back, what you're looking for is promise.

Knowing that if you were to iterate and improve on the creative going forward, you can likely get to better results as well. And so, I think all of those things have to be part of the consideration process as we go. Alright. Anything you got any last slides, Tony, for us? Anything else you wanna make sure that we hit on as we wrap this up?

[00:38:22] Tony Chopp: No, those, this, the, the incrementality, the measurement piece. The what, what we're bringing, what we're bringing to CTC clients. As far as like the strategy piece is instead of like, there's a million different options. We, we have a pretty clear, like, this is the way we wanna structure it. We want awareness, campaign consideration, conversion campaign.

We wanna use different bidding. We wanna think about how we move the audience through those, um. So like the strategy we, we have, we feel, we feel good about. It's gone through quite a few iterations. I'm sure it'll keep evolving. And then just like the, the logistical piece of how, how we're approaching this with brands that we partner with is is, is sequential.

Just, just like the, the media has a sequential nature. The idea of how we're like operating, we're we're taking brands through this journey of you know, small media investment into, into a really tight, demographic or pardon me, really tight geographic area. And then working on piecing that investment up and pairing it with incrementality as, as we go along the way. All, all the whole thing wrapped in this thesis, this question, can we, can we help our partners move their media investment on YouTube 10 x year over year? So.

[00:39:34] Taylor Holiday: Rachel, any last words? 

[00:39:36] Rachel Kwon: I. Like it really depends on the strategy. Like YouTube, like we all know and that this is a reason why we're talking about this right now. We know there's value based on all the testing that's been ran by house or measured or CTC, so like I think it's important whether this is a long-term strategy or short-term strategy.

Of course, incrementally incrementality read is gonna be important for us to give us like positive signals of a. Is this worth it? Is this worth for our business? But we also have to remember, this is a, as we've seen on the view based campaigns, this is a long-term strategy that we have to be patient on and keep testing and also refreshing our creative so there could, I don't think there's any wrong creatives.

To be honest, but it's more so like, who are you serving in front of? Like is, are you actually speaking to the audience that you're serving in front of? And if that long-term strategy and, and the, the short-term strategy that you're trying to achieve, it's met, then I'm, I'm sure we can meet that 10 x you two with that patience.

[00:40:45] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, that, that's a, it's a great call out is that if you look forward to the future of your business and you have plans to broaden distribution. Do you see a point of potentially diminishing returns in the core growth channels that you're in? Then this is like a level one business imperative to solve this problem.

There are just not that many channels that represent the kind of scale and broad based impact to a an omnichannel business, then YouTube. And so to decide like, Hey, as a business imperative over the next 18 months, we're gonna solve for growth in this channel. I think it makes. All the sense in the world for brands to pursue it.

And again, I sit here having been one of the primary voices about cutting and efficiency and me rigor of measurement. And I feel like many of you heard that and have participated in that, whether it was for me or other people in the industry. We moved that way and now we sit here going, okay, but what about growth? 

Where do we grow? How do we grow? And that's an endlessly important Question for businesses, and this is one of those bets to make. This is one of those places to look at and go, okay. Thoughtful, disciplined with measurement, rigor, planning, clarity, let's go for it. That kind of action is what a business should be looking to take over and over and over again.

And this is one of those opportunities. So we'd love to help. If you're looking for a partner to help design the test, measure the test, deploy it. We think we're gonna do it on a. Price that's gonna be as as, as competitive as anyone in a structure that will make it really work for you. So if you're out there, you're on Amazon in.com, you've got broadening distribution, you're hitting a marginal frontier on meta, this is an opportunity for us to, to talk.

So, come see Rachel. Come see Tony. We'd love to chat. And if with or without us go explore it, go see what you can do. Thank you everyone. Hope you're watching on YouTube.