5 Reasons Brands Should Use YouTube This Holiday Season

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By Rich Raddon

The time has come. Black Friday is around the corner and the biggest shopping season of the year is upon us. Although brands and consumers are used to the traditional direct mailers and TV spots, Black Friday – and shopping in general – has gained a significant presence on YouTube.

According to our data, Black Friday-related videos on YouTube are about much more than crazy mobs of shoppers fighting over flat-screen TVs. Whether it’s a Beauty Guru doing a haul video about the amazing makeup deals she found, or a consumer-electronics influencer unboxing the latest must-have tech, YouTube is changing the way consumers understand and evaluate the year’s biggest day for holiday sales.

For retailers and brands that haven’t already considered the impact YouTube could have on their holiday sales, here are five reasons to start now:

1. YouTube Dominance

According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more 18-34 year old adults than any cable network, and it is now the second largest online search engine. For brands, that means free access to a platform that reaches some of the top shoppers – millennials – better than any TV channel or mailer.

2. The Power of Fans

Even if you are not on YouTube yet, your fans are, and they are creating content on behalf of your brand in droves. At Zefr, we discovered that an incredible 90% of a brand’s activity on YouTube is coming from fan-uploaded videos. This phenomenon is so important, we actually released an ebook called the “Anatomy of a Fan” because it is imperative that a brand finds, understands, and leverages the “earned media” it gains from these communities. A fan video can be anything from a haul video where a YouTuber reveals their favorite products from shopping at your store that day to a Sneakerhead (a massive YouTube fan community) posting about the shoes they are collecting. Because customers often trust consumer opinion more than branded content, these videos are pure gold for brands.

Read more…

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

Creator Showcase Ft. Jack And Jack, Zach King And Brittani Louise Taylor

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Jack and Jack

Top Viners Jack and Jack (no, not brothers) will be sharing how they create content on the snackable mobile video platform. Although young, Jack and Jack have worked with numerous brands to make fun videos for their 4.7 million followers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TICd0uR1hc8

Zach King, aka Final Cut King made a name for himself on Vine, YouTube and Instagram with his knack for creating video magic through his clever use of editing. Zach spoke at our last summit and dispensed some fantastic knowledge for brands about leveraging mobile platforms. We’re elated he’s returning for his second [a]list summit to talk more about mobile prowess.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fjk6S69Umd8

Brittani Louise Taylor

You’ve probably seen Brittani’s work on YouTube by way of her massively popular parody videos like her take on Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” below. Brittani doesn’t just have 1.2 million+ followers on YouTube, she’s also a major Instagrammer as well, with 190k followers there.

[a]list summit on Dec. 3rd at the W Hotel Hollywood is chock-full of mobile entertainment’s luminaries:

  • Kristian Segerstrale, COO of Super Evil Megacorp
  • Peter Levin, President of Interactive Ventures & Games at Lionsgate
  • Robert Brill, Executive Director of Programmatic Media at ION
  • Maria Pacheco, Senior Director Marketing, Mobile at Dreamworks Animation
  • Andy Hess, Evangelist at Epic Games
  • Wally Nguyen, CEO of mNectar
  • Bill Rehbock, General Manager, Content Marketing at NVIDIA
  • Dorothy M. Ferguson, Global Marketing Director, Gaming at Plantronics
  • Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, Senior Marketing Director at App Annie
  • Austin Murray, Founder and Chief Business Officer of Text+
  • Ross McCray, CEO of VideoAmp
  • David Hayes, Head of Creative Strategy at Tumblr
  • T.J. Marchetti, CMO of AwesomenessTV
  • Stephen Blackwell, CEO of SpinMedia
  • Marcus Gners, COO of Lifesum
  • Jon Bauch, Partner at Anthem Venture Partners
  • Andrew Stalbow, CEO of Seriously
  • Christian Galvin, VP of Sales at Fiksu
  • Gladys Kong, President and CTO of UberMedia
  • Noah Eichen, Director of Original Content at Ayzenberg
  • Chris Younger, Principal and Director of Strategy at Ayzenberg
  • Jim Louderback, Managing Director at Boomfeeder
  • Kevin Winston, Founder and CEO of Digital LA
  • Mike Vorhaus, President of Magid Advisors
  • Julian Hollingshead, VP, Strategy and Client Services at Ayzenberg

For full agenda and tickets, visit alistsummit.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top Trailers Of The Week: November 26th

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Welcome back to another edition of Top Trailers For the Week, where we highlight the best clips from TV shows, movies and video games. This week is so jam-packed with excitement, you may need to scarf down two Thanksgiving turkeys to make up for the energy.

Yesterday, we posted the news that Universal Studios has released the first trailer for Jurassic World, the latest chapter in the popular Jurassic Park franchise. Featuring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, this film revolves around a much larger theme park – and a bigger, genetically created nightmare that awaits those that visit it. The film opens in the U.S. on June 12th.

The Peter Pan legacy has been told in movies various times, including with Steven Spielberg’s Hook back in the 90’s, but this time around, director Joe Wright is aiming more for a fantasy-based touch with Pan. The story revolves around Peter’s relationship with a young Captain Hook (Garrett Hedlund), as they do battle with the dreaded Blackbeard, played in over-the-top fashion by Hugh Jackman. The movie arrives in theaters next summer.

The first downloadable content for Activision’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been confirmed, and will release for Xbox consoles this January, followed by a later release for PlayStation systems and PC. Titled Havoc, this new add-on pack will bring a Zombies mode into the fold, where players team up together to face off against hordes of the undead. A new weapon, the AE4-Widowmaker, will also be introduced with the pack.

The latest game footage for Batman: Arkham Knight has arrived, showing the Dark Knight doing battle with a mysterious army inside the Ace Chemicals plant. Using every tool he has in his arsenal, Batman battles these forces both on foot and in a heavily fortified Batmobile, which can transform into tank mode and really do damage to enemies. The game will release this June for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Forget the imposters. The official trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrived with flying colors the day after Thanksgiving, providing a glimpse of what director J.J. Abrams is bringing to the franchise come December 18, 2015. Featuring incredible shots of a new lightsaber, Stormtroopers, X-Wings and, yes, the Millennium Falcon, the movie should have no trouble drumming up the hearts of fans — not to mention millions in sales from new toys and other merchandise. Suddenly, we’re kids again.

CREATIVE: McDonald’s Creates The World’s First French Fry Security System

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McDonald’s Canada is looking to inspire laughs with a new app that defends the franchise’s much-beloved fried potato product. The Fry Defender is, yes, a real app which you can download here.

The YouTube video campaign feels like nothing we’ve seen from McDonald’s before, looking to target millennials in a way that feels curiously similar to something that Burger King or Jack in the Box would employ. McDonald’s brings the digital campaign to life with an interactive website and Tumblr, corralling the campaign with the hashtag #stopfrytheft.

3 Reasons Why YouTube Gadgets Don’t Work For Brands

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By Jessica Klein

For the most part, brands can find success on YouTube in the same way as regular creators — by making compelling content and wisely populating their channels with playlists and strategic annotations. Custom “YouTube gadgets” may seem like one of those smart channel additions, but, according to a recent white paper from Tubular Labs, “Are YouTube Gadgets Worth the Investment for Brands,” they seem to hurt rather than help.

In case you didn’t know, gadgets often substitute the usual YouTube landing page for brands that use them, making the overall layout look unique and highly brand-specific. Perhaps viewers get deterred by the unusual image Whether that’s the cause or not, these statistics, gathered from the 23 most-subscribed brand channels with gadgets and the 23 without, should help brands figure out why gadgets are doing them wrong.

Read more…

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

 

CREATIVE: Holy New Trailer, Batman!

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Today Warner Bros. released the first in a three-part trailer series for the highly anticipated Batman: Arkham Knight. This first chapter, “Infiltration” highlights several new gameplay features while introducing the game’s title antagonist, The Arkham Knight. Batman is shown doing what he does best: flying, sneaking, punching, and this time driving his way through hordes of enemies to rescue innocents and halt Scarecrow’s evil plans.

The trailer ends with a teaser for the next installment in the series, coming 9 AM PST on December 2nd, and this little taste is sure to have Arkham fans hungry for more.

Meet Snapchat’s New Ad Format

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While it’s only been a month since Snapchat has unveiled their very first ad with the sponsored promotion for the film Oujia, Snapchat has

looked into other ways to monetize the of-the-moment platform. From reaching out to publishers for content to making way for what advertisers feared would be a swath of untargeted ads, Snapchat knows it has marketers champing at the bit.

Now we have a look at other brand possibilities after last night’s AMAs. While other brands were busily commenting on the proceedings on Twitter, it would be Samsung that would sponsor a stream of posts on Snapchat, giving a fun insider look at the event.

Snapchat is calling the product “Our Story” streams and had introduced them back in June as more of a story curation tool. In this execution, “Our Story” provided a second screen-like experience to the television broadcast.

Now that we’ve seen them in action, the product has obvious benefits for TV brand advertisers and other marketers who want to be part of the conversation around other major events.

Beyond Samsung and the AMAs, Snapchat illustrates the use of “Our Story” around a hugely attended music event below.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pZeDPfHiBC8

Google and ‘Interstellar’ Want You to Take Part in Time Capsule Doc

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By Jessica Klein

Google Play continues to promote Christopher Nolan’s new sci-fi epic “Interstellar,” this time with a “time capsule” video project that’s currently seeking submissions.

Along with Paramount Pictures, Google Play wants people to send in videos, photos, poetry, artwork, and more that filmmakers David Brodie and Angus Wall will turn into a short documentary. Nolan himself will select the submissions for the film.

This comes as part of Google and Paramount Pictures’ collaborative efforts to showcase “Interstellar.” It follows a Google+ Hangout with the movie’s stars and some YouTubers a couple days prior to its theatrical release.

How to Enter

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

A Look Behind ‘Atari: Game Over’

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The story is familiar to countless gamers and marketers: Atari, once a pioneering behemoth of the video game industry renowned for innovative consoles like the Atari 2600 and games like Pong, saw their fortunes come crashing down in epic fashion in 1983 when holiday-season platformer E.T.’s abject critical and commercial failure brought the entire company, and video game industry, down along with it. The game was such a catastrophe that unsold copies were sent to a landfill in New Mexico, never intended to see the light of day again. It stands as an oft-repeated cautionary tale for publishers and manufacturers determined to avoid committing the same grave errors with their own products.

A new documentary filmed by X-Men: The Last Stand and The Avengers co-writer Zak Penn for WIRED titled Atari: Game Over will premiere free for all Xbox Live users tomorrow (November 20). Penn, a self-proclaimed nostalgia buff who “grew up on Atari”, traveled to the site of the infamous landfill for Atari: Game Over, overseeing an excavation operation that successfully recovered intact E.T. cartridges and refuted past rumors that the landfill had been sealed off with concrete.

Penn’s documentary, aimed at informing gamers about the infamous implosion from an all-new angle, features interviews with Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and other figures instrumental in the company’s rise and fall from gaming glory. “They thought, ‘Hey! I’m a nerd. There are girls here. They’re talking to me — it’s good!’”, Bushnell says in one such interview, recalling Atari’s party-happy corporate culture designed to attract cutting-edge talent. The freewheeling workplace environment gave rise to a cast of executives and engineers who would “do what they want to do,” according to Warner Communications ex-co-COO Manny Gerard, breeding what amounted to a double-edged-sword as programmers encouraged to innovate powered Atari to skyrocketing levels of success in the late 1970s before inadvertently leading them to ruin in the form of a less-than-glamorous landfill when their outsized ambitions fell short.

No matter how you might feel about the ordeal, Atari: Game Over seems poised to offer a never-before-seen window into a time-worn tale.

Biz Stone Tries Again With ‘Super’

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Brands had been making quick use of Jelly, the last app from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, but sadly the crowdsourcing Q and A app wasn’t so catching. But now, we have Super.

Super brings a new, fun way to share photo content with your statement, opinion or recommendation by choosing from a few prompts. You can post anonymously or sign your name, however you wish.

The app garners a lot of inspiration from other opinion-sharing apps like Whisper or Secret and the juxtaposition of text and fun colors harkens back to the app Yo.

We’ll certainly be waiting with bated breath to see how brands use Super and whether or not it has sticking power. Until then, Stone is managing his expectations and treading carefully.

“I’ve decided not to come up with some slick and pithy marketing description for Super. I’m also not going to proclaim that it’s the most innovative thing ever or that it’s going to save the world. It’s not, it’s just fun,” said Stone in a post on his publishing platform, Medium.