YouTube recently announced a deal with Dell and AMD to live stream Lollapalooza during the first week in August and Austin City Limits in mid-September. The first day of the Lollapalooza festival will be put on YouTube’s front page, which sees 50 million people daily from the U.S. alone.
We re continually looking at how to bring our users exceptional content, said Dana Vetter, a YouTube, music marketing programs manager.
By looking out for content that users want and signing sponsors to pay for the event, YouTube is becoming more like traditional TV providers they long have competed with for time. We started out dipping our toe in the water with single events, said Vetter. Our first big event was an Alicia Keys program sponsored by American Express [in 2009]. And we started to realize we might be on to something.
YouTube has also streamed Bonnaroo in June 2010 sponsored by Ford along with Coachella Festival earlier this year, though Vetter says that a major difference between traditional TV content provides and YouTube is that they have no interest in producing this sort of content on its own. It s about facilitating programming rather than creation,” she said. “It s about finding a partner who has the content who can deliver a phenomenal Webcast.
While only a decade ago, AMD would have gone to MTV for this sort of deal, the company is increasingly looking at non-traditional sources of advertising and sponsorship.
The classic, half-billion dollar ad budget for traditional media is very difficult to break through, especially for the crowd that s under 30, said Leslie Sobon, vice president of product marketing at AMD. They don t watch commercials, they DVR or stream everything. You have to reach them in different ways.
This is very important to us, she added.
Source: AdWeek.com
