A Birthday Present for the Small Guys

On Monday YouTube celebrated its 7th birthday. Social media age must be similar to dog years because it seems like the site has been around for much longer than 7 years. It is hard to remember a time living without "Chocolate Rain" or "Evolution of Dance." To celebrate, YouTube announced it will offer small-business video advertising.

YouTube has a rich history that started at a zoo and has only advertised to larger companies in the past. This new program is very appealing to small companies because it presents them with a large, captive audience.

The company launch its first video on April 23, 2005. The clip that started it all, titled "Me at the Zoo," features co-founder Jawed Karim at, you guessed it, a zoo. The video is only 18 seconds long, and features Karim telling the viewer why elephants are cool. The simple video has been viewed over 7.7 million times. Watch it below, whether you think elephants are cool or not, it's a part of social media history!

YouTube starting placing advertisements before videos in March 2006, less than a year after its launch. Prior to this new venture, ads on the site were primarily bought by large corporations like Lionsgate, Coca-Cola and Progressive.

The New York Times reports that many smaller businesses already participate in search advertising on Google, (who owns YouTube) were they are able to bid on certain keywords. The program, AdWords for video, will be similar to the search engine advertising for small companies. They will still bid on keywords, and will only pay if their commercial is watched.

The New York Times article presents a clear example of how the program will work.

"A baker who makes a video ad about his bakery, for example, can buy words like “baking,” “cookies” and “cake,” and his video ad will show up when someone does a search for those terms on YouTube." - Tanzina Vega

Mashable broke down YouTube's most recent statistics for marketers.

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• More than 4 billion videos are viewed every day.
• More than 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on earth.

 As much as these numbers are exciting for large companies, they should make smaller companies salivate even more.

I think that this is a great idea for both YouTube and small businesses. YouTube presents the opportunity for a business to reach an audience that matches a Super Bowl. Also, an audience is more captive if they are going to watch a YouTube video than they are watching broadcast television or from streaming sites like Hulu.

If advertisers needed any more incentive to try out the program, YouTube and Google are giving it to them. They are offering $50 million in free ads to 500,000 companies.

The Sound of Money

Lady Gaga rocking Diet Coke cans for curlers.
Image taken from Vevo.com

Product placement has been in music videos dating back to the 70's when Don Mclean's "American Pie" featured Chevy cars, and even earlier. Unlike the music in "American Pie," the trend of product placement in music videos has yet to see its day of death. In fact, new media have helped propel the industry forward. Some of the world's biggest artists are making large amounts of money for featuring products in their videos. The trend has even led to some artists venturing out to start their own agencies just for that reason.

Many artists plug brands into their song lyrics (try to think of a country song that doesn’t have a brand of truck, tractor or beer in it) but now artists have the option to make a large sum of money from placing the brands in their videos. The death of the music video nearly came when MTV decided to disregard what the “M” in their name stood for and sprung for reality show upon reality show (I’m talking about you Jersey Shore). But social media has come to the rescue for the music industry and artists. They are back to creating cinematic-quality videos.

“The music-video marketplace has heated up in recent years with artists like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Rihanna re-embracing the medium as an art form and Vevo emerging as the most-viewed channel on YouTube (and No. 3 video property on the web, according to ComScore).” – Andrew Hampp

Speaking of Lady Gaga, she has become one of the latest product placement innovators. Beyond the Spin found that her 2010 video for “Telephone” featuring Beyonce has a total of 9 different brands placed throughout the video. They aren’t subtly placed either, each one gets at least one close-up. Watch the video below to see how many you can spot, or just check out the list along with a rough time of the spot.

1:34- beats earphones.
2:06- Virgin Mobile.
2:17- Diet Coke.
4:15- Virgin Mobile
4:24- HP Envy ‘Beats Limited Edition’ laptop
4:28- Plenty of Fish dating site.
4:44- Chevrolet.
5:37- Polaroid.
6:24- Wonderbread.
6:36- Miracle Whip.
8:31- Polaroid

The most recent statistics pertaining to music video product placement are from 2010, the same year as Gaga’s video. Product Placement News reported that the analytics firm PQ media, brands paid an estimated $20 million on music videos in 2010, up 7% from 2009. The trend is expected to grow in continuing years.

A recent example is Jennifer Lopez’s new video for “Dance again” featuring Pit Bull. It placed several kinds of alcohol and the star’s very own perfume. J-lo isn’t the only star using music video product placement for their own gain, music producer and DJ David Guetta has decided to take a different approach to the new trend.

Guetta sees the opportunities that social media video sites, like YouTube, offer that MTV could not because of placement restrictions in conjunction with the network. Guetta created My Product Placement, an agency that connects brands with artists to promote music and their products all in one. The agency is an off-shoot from My Love Affair, a company that Guetta, his wife and former ad executive Raphael Aflalo formed together.

David Guetta image from davidguetta.com

“With the social-media revolution, we saw artists like David [Guetta] become like media," Aflalo says. "They have a lot of fans on YouTube and a lot of followers on Twitter. So we thought maybe brands could help artists promote their paid music, and use their image and brand of artist to be more effective in their own marketing.”

Guetta already has artists like Katy Perry and Lady Antebellum on board, he also has upwards of 150 brands signed on to his new project as he hopes to pioneer a new industry.