YouTube Versus TV Is Really About Performance Versus Branding

When I speak with one segment of our client base, the fact that YouTube is TV is considered to be a fact, up there with “the earth is round.”

But when I speak to people in the ad community, buyers in particular, they’re not so sure.

Buying YouTube is still not easy for them. There are too many boxes left unchecked. 

The reason for this dilemma is simple: TV was designed to be a branding vehicle while YouTube was designed to be a performance vehicle. 

And while each has made some concessions in that regard, they can, especially to media buyers, feel like they are worlds apart.

Why It Matters

YouTube is all about performance, starting with the format: if an ad is skippable, then the only people who are going to watch it to conclusion are the ones who are actually interested. So you’re not wasting your impressions.

TV, OTOH, is all about reaching as many people as possible. Which is admittedly getting much harder in this era of massive fragmentation, but it’s not impossible and TV, with its sight, sound and motion, makes a much better reach vehicle than any other medium.

That’s the gist of the division, though it plays out in a variety of ways, from who does the buying (YouTube is only available via DV360) to who does the measuring to what exactly is being measured.

One of the bigger sticking points is guaranteed audiences. Which is an issue for advertisers who still want to use the medium for branding. Because if you are buying for reach, you need predictability and the guarantee of a massive audience. 

Traditional television distributors—broadcast, cable and streaming—can more readily offer that predictability as they actually commission their content. Meaning they strike deals with studios and production companies in order to get specific content, they know what they are going to be showing and that makes it easy for them to sell ads against that content and the audiences that watch that content.

Versus YouTube, which often has no idea what their creators are going to put out there and thus can’t predict what is going to be on and who is going to be watching it. Or at least not with the same degree of precision—YouTube would argue that they know who their creator’s audiences are and that those are the viewers who will show up. 

Then there is what each medium is promising.

YouTube, as noted, is largely sold on the basis of performance—people will see your ad and then act on it. We have the data to ascertain this and if you run your ads in the right places, you will sell lots of product, reaching only those people who might buy your product.

While TV has certainly been adopting performance and attention as metrics, it’s still largely a branding vehicle: hit enough people with your message enough times and they will continue to think good thoughts about your brand and you will be in their consideration set come purchase time. Plus even if people go to get chips when your ad is on, they still hear it playing in the background—all those impressions add up to keep your brand top of mind.

So there are those two competing theories (and it’s not as black and white as I am making it out to be for the purposes of this column) and then there’s reality.

Which is that it very much depends on the product and the product category as to which is the best way forward.

Meaning that TV should look to become more like YouTube and YouTube should look to become more like TV.

Allow me to explain.

If you are a brand that people purchase infrequently—a car, insurance, travel—then branding is going to be key. You want to be top of mind when someone starts shopping for a new life insurance policy.

Whereas a more frequently purchased good or service—a movie ticket, a DTC brand—is going to want to move the needle immediately. Thinking lovely thoughts does them no good.

And then there are the vast majority of brands who need both.

A fast food chain like Burger King will want performance metrics to move its new chicken sliders. But it will also want branding so that people have a reason to pick its chicken sliders over the ones from McDonald’s or Wendy’s. 

This is a huge blind spot the industry has in its race to embrace performance marketing.

So let me repeat it again: the only reason consumers will buy your product on the basis of a single well-placed ad is because they’ve seen enough branding ads to trust you. You’re not some unknown stranger, you are a trusted friend or, at the very least, someone they’ve heard of.

This is the same reason Instagram ads work. The first 200 times you see ads for canine toothpaste in your feed you skip right over it. But after six months or a year they’ve become a familiar presence and the AI talking dogs in their ads feel like old friends. There’s a vibe there, and you’re willing to trust them.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are the television industry you need to become more like YouTube. Meaning you will need to provide a route for brands that are only looking for performance. You have made much headway in this regard, only now you need to start thinking about whether formats like skippable ads made sense for you.

If you are YouTube, you need to be more like TV and create a path for advertisers to use your platform for branding. You too are well on your way, and products like YouTube Select are a big step in the right direction. But you also need to look into tactics like helping brands increase reach numbers, measuring brand lift, providing more direct sales options and otherwise using your data to allow brands to focus on their image.

If you are both, you need to listen to your customers and understand that the choice is not binary, that most advertisers will need some branding and some product and that providing them with the opportunity to run both is good business. It means expanding your infrastructure to accommodate both and likely educating agencies on the value of this new system, but the investment you make in that now will indeed pay off in the long run.