Welcome to The Polar Report, a curated view of what’s happening in the world of Digital Monetisation, Audience Development and Measurement. This week we dive into YouTube implementing new tagging features, Creators becoming just as valuable as paid media, YouTube’s bid for NFL Sunday Ticket and Nielsen's Four-Screen offerings.

Monetisation

YouTube to allow creators to earn by tagging products

The digital era continues to grow at an enormous rate and nobody wants to get left behind in the process. YouTube has always seemed to be one of the front runners when it comes to growth in digital media, and they have always supported their creators by providing them with opportunities to monetise their content. YouTube has recently expanded these monetisation opportunities by implementing a new feature which will allow creators to earn money simply by tagging products.

The idea is not unique; Instagram has a similar feature and introduced it around the same time as YouTube, although it seems as though Instagram incorporated the feature at a much larger scale.

When it comes to the goals of most, if not all ecommerce companies, driving sales is among their highest priorities. A feature like this will allow for companies to add sales conversion trackers such as UTM tags to YouTube videos. These links will allow ecommerce companies to determine how many people brought their product specifically after seeing it in a YouTube video. There are slight issues with this measurement as it is not always 100% accurate since some people will not buy instantly, and instead will remain in the consideration stage. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing as effective marketing can be used to convert these consumers later on. Regardless of this, anything that provides more data to the sales and marketing teams will be valuable to them, particularly when it comes to using this data for ad campaigns retargeting previous customers.

This new YouTube and Instagram feature speaks to the diversification of many large social platforms. On the one hand you have Amazon, which started as an ecommerce business and then expanded into video content, while YouTube appears to be doing the opposite. YouTube seems to be trying to develop an online shopping arm of its own that is built within the platform itself, with the addition of product tagging being the starting point.

Full article on Digital Information World

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Are Creators Becoming as Valuable as Paid Media?

It is safe to say that we are currently in what could be described as an influencer era, especially with the likes of TikTok allowing for creators to appear on For You pages and gain viewership and followers at an extremely fast rate. The sheer scale of creators’ reach to an engaged and interested audience makes them an attractive target for marketing spend, perhaps to the extent that marketing teams will change the percentage budget allocation they give to different marketing formats.

So is influencer marketing becoming just as stable an investment as paid media on platforms such as Google? The referenced article states that some brands believe ‘influencer campaigns are starting to generate the same ROI that paid media saw during the COVID-19 pandemic’. So how interested should advertisers be when it comes to influencer marketing? Extremely.

Yet this is not to discount the value that paid media on platforms like YouTube has. As audiences migrate between platforms and linear TV drops in popularity with viewers, it is important to note that YouTube has a significant audience and in particular is present on CTV. Any ad placements that can reach viewers on large screens in their living rooms are always going to be important to advertisers.

Brand teams will need to be convinced of the value of paid media before they allocate ad spend to it, which is completely fair. And while influencers can be used to effectively build positive relationships with consumers, a diverse marketing strategy across multiple platforms is equally important for achieving reach.

Full article on Ad Exchanger‍

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Audience Development

YouTube bidding for NFL Sunday Streaming Package

YouTube has joined the bidding war for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. At the moment there are several streaming services in the running, with other major players such as Apple, Amazon and ESPN+ (Disney) all bidding for the top spot. It is expected that the winning bid will be upwards of $2.5 billion per season.

The NFL Sunday Ticket generally works out at around $300-a-year package deal, and although it does not include national and local games, it still provides customers with around 13 extra games a week that they normally would not have been able to watch. Previously, in the US this service was only available from a satellite TV provider called DirecTV. Their most recent deal took place in 2014 for the sum of $1.5 billion per year. However, as the deal comes to an end this year, DirecTV are unable to fork out the large sum to re-sign with the NFL.

The fact that this package is even up for grabs is a clear indication that linear TV is not where it used to be anymore. TV companies such as DirecTV are unable to afford to host big names like the NFL as their audiences are migrating to streaming services such as YouTube and Amazon.

Streaming services landing sports deals is nothing new. Amazon recently landed a deal for streaming rights for UEFA football matches in the UK. We have also seen Disney’s ESPN hold onto their media rights to Formula 1 in the US for the next three years. Although there is speculation as to whether or not YouTube is as genuinely interested in this NFL deal as opposed to other companies like Apple who have declared that winning this package is a “priority”.

With YouTube seeing its rivals pick up media rights to sporting leagues such as UEFA and F1, acquiring the NFL would certainly be of competitive value to them. There is no denying that if YouTube wins this content it will bring them a large amount of premium content with a good brand reputation. This in turn will bring in high viewership, leading to opportunities for high-value monetisation packages to take to advertisers.

Full article on Ars Technica

Measurement

Nielsen ONE is now capable of Four-Screen Ad Deduplication

Nielsen has announced a new Four-Screen Ad Deduplication product capable of letting media buyers compare their reach on YouTube across mobile, desktop, CTV and their linear audiences. The purpose of this is to reduce overlapping buys for media companies, with this newest product allowing for comparison between CTV and linear. This move by Nielsen appears to be a clear statement of their authority in cross platform measurement.

Four-screen Ad Deduplication will give media buyers and advertisers a greater level of comparability to linear TV than ever before, with a far more extensive view of their multi-platform campaigns allowing for a better understanding of who they are reaching. Chances are this will lead to advertisers spending much more efficiently than they ever have before, and CTV is only going to get more popular.

The pandemic had a big impact on the exponential growth of CTV, and many had high hopes for what CTV could bring to the table since before the pandemic hit. Even now we are still seeing TV viewership decrease and CTV viewership rise. This has led to CTV becoming incredibly popular amongst advertisers as it allows them to reach highly engaged audiences, who are in most cases sat down in living rooms with family. This popularity is proving itself with the rise in ad spend and a projected sum of $30 billion expected to be spent on CTV ads by 2025. This all leads back to the importance of effective measurement, which is something that now may be possible with the help of Nielsen One.

Full article on Ad Exchanger