When I was leading the Media and Entertainment vertical for Google, something big was happening in the market. Streaming. Yes, broadband internet penetration had skyrocketed and every legacy media company wanted to be the next Netflix. So they all launched their streaming apps.
Great! But you still need to get people to subscribe to your service. And fast.If you are a marketer working for a streaming company and your CEO is under pressure to show subscribers numbers every quarterly call, there’s only one thing you can do. You turn to Google.
Youtube drives streaming
But what if people aren’t searching for your streaming service? Then you gotta go where they are. And where is that? That’s right, Youtube. The world’s #2 search engine,the largest streaming service in the world.Yup, that one. If you wanted to reach people most likely to subscribe to your service, there were few places that were more likely to work than good old Youtube. However, thanks to the complex world of attribution, it was difficult to track a user watching a trailer on Youtube and then track them to connect it to an app install. So, even though there was enough anecdotal evidence and correlation connecting Youtube spends to subscriptions,it couldn’t be measured on paper(or excel). This led to under-investment in Youtube, and frankly was frustrating. No global narrative addressed this specific challenge. So it was up to us to come up with something that was pithy, effective and could influence C levels. In short, we needed a single line to capture everything I just explained. So I came up with one:
“Video drives Video”
That’s it. It was basically a reminder of a basic human truth. It was not a product sell. It was an idea. If you want a message to be sticky, make it an idea, not a brand message.Clients got it immediately. In fact, some of them used it in their own sales collateral to sell their own inventory! That meant the entire industry was parroting our line, and eventually we started hearing the line back from our own clients!
That led to this: a public acknowledgement of Youtube’s central role in driving growth for OTTs!
The results were fabulous. > 100% revenue growth on Youtube. And we grew sales for every single quarter faster than the previous one!
What did we learn: The best pitches are always the shortest ones – One slide, one line or one graph!
