Google had built a humongous business with its search engine. So humongous that by the time I had joined in 2013, there was no need to ‘sell’ search. You simply had to turn up, and tell clients ‘how to improve’ their search performance. Not ‘why’ they need to use search. Just ‘how’.
Not so much with Youtube though
Google’s sales teams were just not equipped for nuanced brand conversations when there just wasn’t a CPC or a CPA to be optimized ,and instead you had to prove efficiency and effectiveness of the reach on Youtube. So Google assembled an impressive bunch of talented folks from CPG marketers and agencies to build the founding team at GCAS (Global Client and Agency services). Our only job was to focus on Youtube to move budgets from TV.
Simple enough.
Youtube was fast becoming the single largest channel in terms of reach. It had millennials and teenagers watching Youtube, its creators were global stars and there wasn’t a genre that wasn’t big on the platform. So, all this should have meant a simple sell, yes? Not really. Turns out that TV was not just a bad habit to break with couch potatoes. It was an even tougher habit to break with advertisers. There would invariably be a full house whenever Youtube had a pitch, but it would never convert to actual budgets.
What problem does this solve for your client?
Until I started implementing one of the oldest lesson in marketing – Painkiller, not vitamins
The truth of the matter was, brands were happy with the current solution – TV. It didn’t matter how good Youtube was. In order to force habit change, you need to work on a point of failure of the current solution. But when I dug deep enough, I found there were some problems brands were grappling with – TV plans weren’t reaching enough in some geographies, they weren’t reaching teenagers, they weren’t able to build consideration in some new emerging categories.For each of these vulnerabilities, Youtube had the answer. I would quickly do a pilot, prove that Youtube delivered results, build out a case study and amplify the results across the organisation(and industry) till it became part of the playbook. And so, one by one, challenge by challenge, we built the Youtube business slowly and then rapidly.
Eventually though, Youtube reach had far overtaken all of TV, and it was only a matter of time before the TV defences were breached. From the time we started and by the time we were done, Youtube had gone from 2% to 20% share of wallet across CPG.
Lesson learnt: Anyone who identifies exactly what pain you are going to kill will sell more than any fancy multi-vitamin you can create.
