Cannes day 4: YouTube’s online curriculum, programmatic punishes the loyal and catching up with Gen Z

YouTube launches online curriculum

YouTube is introducing an online curriculum that will train agencies in how to produce content for the platform and help them advise clients on how to bring content to market effectively. The amount of content produced by brand has gone up 40% year on year on YouTube, with the top 100 brands launching 3,000 channels and 853,000 pieces of video which have been viewed 60 billion times.

Speaking at an event on the YouTube Beach, YouTube’s CMO Danielle Tiedt said the move was a reaction to the “explosion in content that is happening everywhere”.

“Video is everywhere and is an increasingly big part of everyone’s story. As a marketer we want to help you break through in video. Just putting up a video is no longer good enough,” she said.

YouTube has already been working with some brands. Through a partnership with MEC, the two worked with Nestle on its Maggi Stories campaign in the Middle East which has since been expanded onto TV and globally. It also worked with Vodafone on its ‘I’ll show you the world’ campaign.

Tiedt said there are three things that work for marketers – first is trust, second is using innovative formats such as 360 video and third is tapping into content creators on the platform.

Programmatic punishes those with a loyal audience

Martin Clarke, chief executive and publisher at MailOnline and Dailymail.com says programmatic “has been a really good revenue driver” especially in the US, where the business is investing heavily on growing the media brand.

Speaking on one of the Daily Mail Yachts in Cannes, Clarke added: “Programmatic on balance has been a plus for us because it pays much better than the old network rates.”

However, he said the current programmatic model wasn’t perfect and that it “punishes you for having a loyal audience”.

“We’ve always had a direct and loyal audience, coming in via the app or website rather than via Facebook or Google.”

Clarke said almost 60% of its UK daily traffic comes directly from its homepage or app and that in the US it’s almost 40%. “Unfortunately they’re not as monetisable as casual visitors – the programmatic advertisers are not really interested in that person once they’ve hit them once or twice on their journey.”

He also dismissed ad blocking as a major issues and said: “We don’t find ad blockers a particular issue at the moment. The proposition on desktop is not growing at all and the number of ad blockers on mobile is almost nothing…we’re not freaked out by it.”

Speaking on one of the Daily Mail Yachts in Cannes, Clarke added that the online business is making “steady progress” and would make money “sooner than you think.”

Why marketers need to “catch up” to engage with Generation Z

Brands and marketers need to “catch up” with Generation Z and work out how to engage these “highly sophisticated decision makers” argued Mimi Turner, marketing director at The Lad Bible.

Speaking at the Teads and Marketing Week panel on advertising and Generation Z, Turner hit back at those agencies and brands who are dismissive about the younger generation

“People talk a lot about Gen Z and their really short attention span and I think that’s exactly what grown ups say when they don’t understand something. [They are] highly sophisticated decision makers, and marketers and brands need to catch up with that.