When utilized correctly, YouTube is quite the sales force to be reckoned with. On a recent conference call with ERA’s Internet & Emerging Media Council, certain members discussed how some direct response products have found success simply from videos being uploaded to YouTube.
Creative YouTube videos are a great way to drive incremental sales, if even on accident. If you’re Chris Brown, a singer recently convicted for felony assault against ex-girlfriend Rihanna, how do you get a year-old single onto the top 10 most purchased songs on iTunes? Oh, by being an integral part of a wild fire-spread YouTube video. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen this “Forever” wedding video.
While perusing iTunes when this video hit viral fame a few weeks back, I noticed that Chris Brown’s “Forever” was listed in the top 10 purchased singles. A web hit featuring one of his songs couldn’t have come at a better time for this artist whose image is tarnished in the press. I too, drank the Kool-Aid. I watched the video and loved it, logged onto iTunes and purchased.
Consequently, aside from user-generated content, YouTube also plays host to professional content, sometimes to the chagrin of the content creators. Monty Python’s producers found their content all over the web illegally, however they decided to be proactive and take control of their content in these channels, which turned out to be a very good idea. According to a recent release:
The Pythons created a YouTube channel in November 2008 just to stop their content from being released illegally on the Internet. “We felt the time had come to deal with the ‘YouTube problem.’ On the one hand, we were surprised at the number of clips that had been uploaded to YouTube in clear infringement of our copyright, and while we didn’t want to be spoilsports, it was getting pretty much out of control and we could see no real benefit. So I arranged a trip to meet the YouTube guys on the Google campus in San Jose and discovered that they had a program that would enable us to have our own Monty Python channel on YouTube where we could put up clips from the movies and TV shows of far greater quality and order that might also encourage viewers to want to see whole movies or TV episodes via links to Amazon and iTunes and expand our Monty Python fan base,” says Monty Python producer John Goldstone.
When Goldstone launched Monty Python’s Channel on November 14, 2008, he took advantage of YouTube’s click-to-buy program. The Python’s DVDs quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list and DVD sales increased 23,000 percent. “The click-to-buy ability was exactly what we were looking for to make the link from video to the right Amazon page much more effective than the URL by the side of the video description. We are only now beginning to address premium advertising, which is only possible when you can show the size, composition, and consistency of your viewers,” he says.
I guess the moral of the story would be that while YouTube may be struggling to support itself with a successful advertising platform, it currently sits as a lucrative marketing channel for the opportunistic, inventive marketer.
Pat Cauley is Electronic Retailer magazine’s eMedia editor.
In my 
Marketing the experience of ownership is critical in making the sale, whether it’s products in a store, catalog or website. With plenty of evidence to show that desire, more than product features, drives consumers, we need to further explore the creative opportunities to capture website visitors’ imagination in ways that will increase sales.
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