Looking for golden performance marketing opportunities in Southeast Asia? Well, this region boasts two of the top 10 watch hour countries for YouTube globally. This raises the question, why do people in this part of the world love YouTube so much? In this session, Ben will explore this question, as well as go deeper on key data points that makes SEA such an exciting set of digital video markets.
Speech by Ben King | Country Head, Google Thailand
Ben King Speech Transcript
Guys, look when I got given the brief for today, to come and speak at an affiliate conference and speak about YouTube, I must say I was a little bit surprised.
Usually people don’t think about YouTube when they think about affiliate marketing or performance marketing.
But the reality is we’ve been doing a lot of work over the last sort of 2 or 3 years to make sure that we’ve got the right products for performance marketers. So I’m going to share a little bit about that with you a little bit later on.
But the reality is, it’s probably worthwhile starting right back at the very start, which is having a look at the size of the opportunity. Looking at the opportunity in Southeast Asia, looking at the opportunity in Thailand, specifically.
So I’m going to talk a little bit about Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, sort of share what uses are doing across YouTube. And give you a little bit of colour around the extreme usership that we get here in these markets is actually phenomenal.
The second piece is around the power of YouTube for marketers. Then thirdly, we’ll look at some of the solutions that are available across our platform.
Ten Years Ago…
But to start, you know, look ten years ago, YouTube didn’t exist, or 11 years ago, YouTube didn’t exist.
The guy called Jawed, he uploaded this video, he was at the zoo. And then 10 years later, we’re looking at a fundamental paradigm shift with regard to how people are consuming video and consuming entertainment, music, and content.
But not only entertainment, music, content, also things like how-to’s, reviews, so on and so forth.
Rewriting The Rules Of Broadcasting
It’s really rewritten a lot of rules. So it’s really written a lot of rules around broadcasting.
And just to give a really quick example. Adele uploads her Hello film clip. Within about 2 weeks, a multitude of creators have actually covered the song. And then they’ve actually attracted something in the vicinity of 30 million views in a couple of weeks.
Now the reason why it’s worthwhile noting is that it’s full democratisation of content creation.
I was speaking to a number of different creators last night. Uploading content, they’re gaining huge levels of viewership in this region and beyond. And as I say, it’s a full democratisation.
It’s important to note this difference or this paradigm shift given that 10 years ago, this didn’t really exist at all.
If you’re thinking about rewriting rules of consumption, it’s no longer a one-to-many, it’s a one-to-one. I know that’s something that you guys are very familiar with, this is not something new.
But the reality is users are consuming whatever they want, whenever they want, and wherever they want.
The reason why I think this is important is if you’re thinking about marketing, you’re thinking about performance marketing solutions.
This needs to be taken into account because the YouTube platform is a choice-based platform. And everything you do needs to be choice based if you’re thinking about performance marketing or even brand marketing as well.
Rewriting The Rules Of Celebrity
It’s also changed the rules around celebrity. Once again, really important for marketers to consider.
Now, this is a study that was run in the US. And it looked at how influential are YouTube creators or YouTube stars versus traditional stars.
It came back that YouTube stars were by far and away more influential than the traditional movie stars, pop stars, so on and so forth.
So, you look at PewDiePie, 33 million subscribers around the world. Michelle Phan, billions of views across her beauty related content.
So these fundamental sort of step changes, in some very traditional rules of entertainment and marketing and content consumption are very much core to YouTube’s growth and success.
And as I say, it’s important to keep this in mind when we’re thinking about marketing as well.
So I wanted to flip over to Southeast Asia and just share some data with you.
Vietnam – Watch Time #1 In Asia
So Vietnam as a market, based on a huge Wi-Fi penetration and ease of access of Wi-Fi, plus huge appetite for content and a diversity of content, whether it be local or international is actually number one in Asia in terms of watch time.
Number one in Southeast Asia.
It’s a top ten global market and growing and overtaking some mature markets with regard to total watch hours on the platform. 87 million people, obviously, penetration levels a lot lower than other, many mature Western markets, yet it’s still top ten.
Just to go through some other data points, number one video platform and number two search engine, that’s actually globally true.
Secondly, 35 million unique user, second largest TV channel in Vietnam if you were to think about it in terms of television comparative.
And then finally, obviously a huge range of content, whether it be TV or online content.
You ever think about Malaysia and similar to the way you would think about TV, if I was to do a cut on some of your call segments 18 to 44, 65% of the entire population could be reached on the YouTube platform, 75% for males 18 to 44.
Singapore – The Platform To Connect With People Under 35
If I was thinking about Singapore, total census for TV it’s around 4.1 million. YouTube reach is around 3.
But it becomes a completely different story if you’re talking about people under 35. If it’s under 35, YouTube reaches 1.55 million people, TV reaches 1.4.
The reason why I show this comparative is it clearly there is a movement towards one, online video. Two, choice-based viewing. And three, YouTube as a platform when it comes to users and consumers that are of this younger demographic.
Thailand – A Top Watch Hour Market Worldwide
Then finally, Thailand where we said today and the country that I spend most of my time thinking about, and in most of my time working on.
87% of Thais turned to YouTube first when they think of any video content. Our session usage is around 38 minutes. And Thailand as well, is a top 10 YouTube WH market.
Now, to put a little bit more color around that, you’re talking about a country with 15 million people in Bangkok and vicinities that are online every single day.
You’re then talking about 25 million people generally in the north of the country that access the internet only half the time. So one every two days, they actually have access and this is all built around affordability.
Yet, Thailand is still a top ten market globally.
So it’s actually phenomenal usage and phenomenal watch hours. There’s clearly a very large opportunity across Southeast Asia as it stands today.
SEA – A Mobile First Region
But the last piece of information I wanted to share with you is that it’s growing. You have a huge base of watch hours.
Now everybody knows this is a mobile-first region. Southeast Asia as a mobile-first region. So we’ll look at mobile watch hours or mobile watch hour growth.
In Vietnam, as I said, top 10 market still growing 132% year-over-year in terms of total watch hours on the platform. Malaysia 60%, Thailand 85%.
So the opportunity is huge in this area of the world. And it’s growing at an astronomical rate. These growth rates will not slow, we don’t believe based on improved levels of access, improved levels of affordability, every country having their various different challenges that we’re trying to solve.
The Power Of Youtube Marketers
So that leaves the second thing I wanted to talk about, which is the power of YouTube for marketers.
Why would you guys care, why would performance marketers care about a video platform?
Often, if we’re talking about affiliate marketing or performance marketing, we talk about search, we talk about programmatic, we talk about you know all of our display network offerings.
Reality is, YouTube is the second largest search platform in the world. And it’s the second largest search platform in most of the countries that were operating in.
Video Is A Primary Influencer
So we thought, look, how do we actually quantify how valuable YouTube is when people are making purchase decisions or when people are actually thinking about transacting or converting?
We ran an Ipsos study and this is actually global data. We ran an Ipsos study and it came back that YouTube is the number one social platform in helping consumers make purchase decisions.
So the video platforms that we had a look at, Facebook, Instagram, Hulu, Vine, Vimeo.
The reality was that consumers and users wanted a range of different content when they were thinking about their purchase decision. They didn’t want to just hear from a creator what they wanted to hear from the brand themselves.
And this is where it gets interesting that YouTube was able to really trigger action.
So, if we’re thinking about what does action look like, 40% of smartphone viewers actually said they visited a store or a website after watching a video of relevance.
After they watched a brand video of relevance, they actually visit a store or physical or our web store. What’s not up here is that 64% said that it influenced the purchase decision.
So the reality is YouTube is playing a really important role. And video is playing a really important role as people are starting to move through purchase cycles.
But I wanted to share with you one last point before we move to some of the solutions you guys could have a look at from an ads standpoint.
Massive Growth In Videos On YouTube With Shopping Intent
Four of the largest growing categories in the entire world are very relevant to e-commerce and very relevant to online purchase. So, categories like electronics, toys, beauty, fashion, and food. These categories are growing at a very, very high rate.
So YouTube is much more than just an entertainment platform, much more than just music or entertainment and views are really sort of kicking off around some of the key shopping periods throughout the year.
Clearly people are coming to the platform to research and find out more.
The last piece of information I’ll leave with you is that 1 million channels globally, actually have review content on the platform.
As I said, this is clearly a very large category and it’s growing pretty astronomically for YouTube. So that leads to the last thing that I wanted to talk about, which is performance marketing solutions for YouTube.
Performance Marketing Solutions On Youtube
As I say, it’s a unique scenario to come in and talk about YouTube at an affiliate conference. Because generally, people don’t look at performance marketing and YouTube as being fully aligned.
Reality is, there’s a lot of different things that you can do and a lot of things that we’re working on. So, I’m going to talk about 3 things.
First of all, always being there. Secondly, always being chosen. And then thirdly, always being optimised.
So, as I said before, and as I sort of opened up, YouTube as a platform is very much a choice-based platform. Always being chosen is absolutely critical when you’re thinking about the ad formats you’re looking at.
If you think about YouTube as a platform, it’s changed the way that people are consuming. People are consuming wherever they want, whenever they want, so on and so forth.
So always being there and always being hyper-targeted is incredibly important.
Always Being There
As I said, this all circles back. So first of all, always being there.
Look, I don’t need to spend too much time on this. You guys know this I’m sure, very, very well but the venn of the marketing world was very much a flight based type set up.
They’re thinking about traditional brands, certainly not the affiliates but traditional brands, CPG brands, carriers, finance all the rest of it. It was very much promotional based.
And if you’re thinking really conceptually about this, the green being converted users, the blue being users that are considering, yellow being users that are aware of a brand, and the black being wastage.
Flights at world your wastage is incredibly high. It’s obviously large splash, limited targeting, so on and so forth.
Reality is now, we can be always on and we can be incredibly precise. So we limit our wastage. And obviously driving a lot more of our conversation towards people who are aware or considering a product.
Leverage Signals, Beyond Search, To Target In Market Consumers
So Google’s triggers, they’re very, very diverse in how we actually go about developing our segments. There’s a lot of things that we look at.
It’s not just logged in data. There’s huge amounts of data that we’re actually packaging up and allowing advertisers to target.
We have age, we have gender, a lot of that is logged-in, some of that’s inferred. And we have interest, source. So how people are actually entering websites, duration, frequency, recency, search, Gmail, YouTube.
And then obviously, engagement with our ads.
We package all of this up, we allow a different segmentation to our advertisers. And this allows you to be much more precise in who you’re speaking to, as opposed to being flighted and a very large splash.
The thing with YouTube is there’s so many different ways that you can target. We would really recommend just thinking about 3 simple things when you’re targeting.
Discover Your Potential Audience And Target New Buyers
Very simply, first-party data, obviously people who have engaged with your platform.
The second piece is then all about similar audiences. So how do we actually take all of your data and then we find similar audiences across the platform. And as I said we’re looking at many different triggers when we’re building these out.
Then finally, how do we talk to people who are actively researching. W call in-market targeting.
Now, we talked about YouTube being a very, very significant research platform. So we have very large segments that are relevant to all the different categories that you might be interested in.
Always Being Chosen
That leads us to always being chosen. I’m going to talk for about 5 minutes or 10 minutes about ad formats and then quickly close.
But there’s really sort of two different ad formats that I wanted to talk with you about. First of all, Choice Based Ad Formats, but then also Vertical Solutions.
So just to go through them really quickly to apply and then we’ll dive into a couple, and provide some examples.
We have our standard or probably the most common ad format on YouTube, which is TrueView. Everybody’s probably aware. It’s effectively a choice based ad format.
First five seconds you cannot skip, after five seconds you can skip. If your user skips, as an advertiser you don’t pay.
As I said, choice based advertising is critical for our platform on YouTube. It’s a choice based platform.
The next is effectively search for video, TrueView discovery ads.
If somebody searches a relevant keyword, you can surface your video as a thumbnail. If they click, you pay if you don’t click you don’t pay.
Then finally, and this is not actually a choice based ad format, it’s a bumper ad. Bumper ad is a forced view, 6-second ad.
And the reason why I put it in the choice based ad formats is that we’re having huge, or we’re seeing advertisers experience huge success in maximising the impact of their campaigns by coupling bumper ads with their choice based advertising in TrueView and TrueView discovery.
So I’m just gonna quickly show a couple of examples and talk through it very briefly.
Vertical Solution Standpoint
From a vertical solution standpoint, I’m just gonna quickly talk about app promo. Now, I think it’s fair to say Google was maybe a little bit behind with regard to some of our app promo products.
There was a reason why we’re a little bit behind. We’re thinking very carefully about how do we make sure that we can allow CPI or cost per install activity to run across all our platforms, whether it searches Android Play or YouTube, in a really meaningful way.
And we’re seeing some incredible results, which I’ll share soon.
And then finally, TrueView shopping, which is a very, very new product. So effectively servicing product and shopping details from a Google Merchant Center in a way that’s not disruptive to a user experience.
So quickly, on TrueView, I’m not gonna talk too much about TrueView at its core, the reality is most people probably know what it is. And if they’re using YouTube, they’re definitely using the TrueView ad format ads of display.
Convert Engagement To Action With Interactive Features
What I wanted to talk about is actually driving action. Or all the options that we have available, which can really sort of drive the direct response actions that you want.
If you want to click through into a deeper level of experience based off YouTube, you can obviously have companion banners.
We have call to action overlays, which is pretty clear what they function as. We have learn and buyer, which is cards. And I’m going to show a branding execution with regard to cards just to sort of demonstrate what it looks like.
Then finally, the close of sale or end caps, they’ll be coming very soon.
I guess the reality is that 41% of people, when given the opportunity, actually do act and go through, and take action as a result of an ad.
So it’s important to sort of incorporate a lot of these different functionalities, if you’re thinking about a TureView campaign.
I’m going to share with you an example of what Burberry, I know it’s a pretty random example to show at an affiliate conference.
But I wanted to show what they’ve done with regard to cards because it is very applicable from a direct response standpoint as well.
Burberry Goes Backstage And Beyond With Cards
So I think I need somebody to click a video for me. I don’t have the power to up here.
Alright. Okay, so I’m just going to talk over the video because there’s no sound intentionally. But Burberry… Just leave it down, that’s okay, it’s just music in the background.
So, basically, Burberry, was running a campaign for a women’s wear Spring collection show.
They had a 3-minute wrap up video, a 3-minute highlight video. And what they wanted to do was actually incorporate a whole range of different or diverse content, whether it be web, video or social.
So they actually surfaced a lot of the different cards over the top of the 3-minute video. Allowed users to then sort of plug through into the social media platform. Plug through into deeper content on the YouTube platform.
Or plug through into their different web content that was off their platform. And the results were really quite remarkable.
So the highlights video had average view rates of around 15% over and above retail benchmarks.
Mobile CTR was 6x of desktop, which obviously talks to the mobile experience. If you’re thinking about this part of the world. Obviously very important to get that right.
I know this is a completely different execution to what may be an affiliate or a performance marketer might be looking at. But this functionality can be used to deepen engagement.
And obviously, drive direct response activity for our different performance marketers.
Bumper Ads
So moving to bumper ads, I just wanted to show you, and we will have volume for these, if that’s okay for when I play them.
I just wanted to quickly show you a couple of examples of bumper ads. The reason why I wanted to show, as I said, and this data just came across my desk yesterday.
I just printed it out, I wanted to share with you.
So bumper ads are about 3 to 6 months old. So beta-ed it for about 3 months. We’ve been really rolling it out aggressively for another 3.
And all the activity that we’re looking at or all the activity that we ran studies on, when coupled with TrueView, our clients were able to maximise reach by around sort of 78%.
Obviously, huge levels of reach at much higher efficiency. And as I said before, these are the forced views, 6-second only, it’s a brand new format.
Now, lifting ad recall, 9 out of 10 cases, awareness lift 7 out of 10 cases, and then consideration lifts 4 out of 10 cases.
We’re seen across campaigns that were running bumpers in affiliation with TrueView.
So I’m just going to show 2 examples. And you’ll see very, very quick, very punchy, very much attuned to the platform. But then also pretty efficient from a creative production standpoint as well.
Can I just show those two videos back to front? I’ve got one from Pampers and one from Coke.
Example: Pampers And Coke
So pretty quick, right? I mean, the facts are that people don’t have huge attention spans on digital platforms. We all kind of know it, right?
Let’s either make it choice based or make it short, that would probably be our biggest recommendation.
So if it’s not choice based, make it very, very short. And bumper ads allows you to do it.
Moving into the vertical solutions. So we have TrueView App Promo. As I said, we moved a little bit later into app download or CPI activity than maybe some of our competitors.
We’re trying to get it right across all of our platforms. We have Android Play, one of the most commonly used platforms in the entire world. Over a billion users that are currently across Play.
We want to get that right, wanted to move it across YouTube, wanted to move it across search, as well.
Reach Higher Quality Users With TrueView App Promo
App download activity, we’re seeing hugely impactful results. So 2x more likely to download your app on YouTube.
We have YouTube users that have a higher lifetime value. Very significant high lifetime value, when tracked back.
Just to show you a quick example of what Nordeous are doing, just one example from overseas.
They had a very simple goal, they just wanted as many CPI, I beg your pardon, as many downloads as possible, at as an efficient CPI as possible.
What they did is they reused existing video creative. They pulled it across into YouTube, they targeted sports fans specifically. And, they were very, very tight on their targeting approach and they saw phenomenal results.
So 40% lower CPI, across new YouTube and Android and iOS campaigns.
A little bit higher across iOS compared to Android and then a 5x lift in install. So clearly some pretty good results. And we expect this product or this ad formats to continue to drive better results as we continue to develop. It’s been live for around a year.
TrueView Shopping
And the final thing that I want to talk to you about from an ad format standpoint is TrueView Shopping, which is a brand-new product and effectively surfaces product and shopping details out of your Merchant Center.
It’s actually really simple to set up. You pick your TrueView video, general brand message, featured product line, whatever it may be. Link it to your Merchant Center account.
So link your TrueView or your AdWords account to your Merchant Center account. And then, the rest will be taken care of for you.
A lot of the products that you have within your Marchant Center will be surfaced in an automated fashion, based on video user, so on and so forth.
So with that I’m just gonna move to one quick case study, sorry, and then I’ll move to the optimisation piece before we close.
But Sephora had huge results across TrueView Shopping, 80% increase in intent to shop, 2-minute average view time for videos. So clearly very, very significant uptakes.
But you know the core of their strategy was to make sure that they were surfacing the right products to their users in a way that didn’t disrupt their user session.
They felt like it achieve that in a very powerful way.
Always Being Optimised
So finally, always being optimised. Look, it’s pretty simple. There’s a lot of metrics that you should be looking at.
First of all, brand metrics and impact engagement by segments and then creative execution. All of them sit within AdWords, all of them sit within our interface in our platform.
And they’re all very, very trustworthy and reliable in the data sets that we’re looking at. Obviously, improving effectiveness mid-flight is very, very important as well.
So guys with that I’m just gonna close with the 3 points from today. Obviously, YouTube here in this area of the world is an incredible opportunity.
Huge watch hours, huge usership, and growing very, very quickly. It’s obviously a mobile-first region of the world and the mobile watch hours span between sort of 60 and a 130% per market.
With regard to purchase consideration, YouTube has proven to be a very, very effective platform.
And then finally, it’s not just about branding, there’s a variety of choice based and vertical specific solutions for performance marketers.
And we’ll continue to roll out more and more products as we move towards a deeper level of sophistication on direct response advertising on YouTube.
And for all 20 of you, I hope that was useful.
Thank you for your time, I am now all done. Five minutes early.
Thank you.
