SUBIC – On the first day of Ad Summit Pilipinas 2016, Google made a strong impression through its vice president and managing director for Southeast Asia and India. That individual, Rajan Anandan, cited several current trends in digital, particularly regarding the website YouTube.
Noting that YouTube has effectively changed the viewing habits of Filipinos, Anandan pointed out that YouTube is basically the old concept of TV watching between 6:00pm and 10:00pm (or “prime time”) all the time. Whether one is in one’s car, at work, or in a coffee shop, YouTube gives the consumer the power to choose when and where to watch content.
As the current #1 channel in the urban Philippines, Anandan projected that within 3-4 years, YouTube will reach all Filipinos, even rural areas. By partnering with different telecommunications companies and being accessible in large wifi hotspots, video streaming is becoming ever faster.
When his talk explored the topic of skipping ads on YouTube, Anandan reiterated how this really gives the consumer a choice. Advertisers and marketers now have to create content that is so amazing and so compelling that it is “unskippable.” He then cited the examples of the “Left Twix/Right Twix” campaign by the chocolate sweet Twix as well as the Geico “Unskippable Family” ad because five seconds is basically what advertisers now have before the consumer decides, “Do I skip or not?”
While those first five seconds are important, advertising on YouTube also means no longer being restricted by traditional boundaries of 30 seconds in television advertising. Anandan cited Cebu Pacific’s “360 video” as well as the very popular and emotional NIDO Fortigrow “For our #1 Lolas” ad that earned high praise on YouTube’s Leaderboard ads in the first half of 2015 as excellent examples that “greatness can have more time.”
The NIDO Fortigrow ad in particular earned 51% increase in ad recall among people surveyed and 18% increase in consideration for the target demographic of people between 18-34-years-old.
As his final example of effective advertising via YouTube, Anandan showed McDonald’s and Leo Burnett tapping of the popular “AlDub” duo of Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza for their Chicken McSaver campaign. In the words of McDonald’s Head of Marketing Margot Torres herself, “ Consumers can’t get enough of content and YouTube is the perfect channel to deliver video content.”
In closing his presentation, Anandan told the gathered audience that with YouTube and the possibilities it brings, “the Philippines is reinventing video, and so are you.”
Read on what Rajan Anandan’s colleague, Google Asia Pacific Chief Creative Officer John Merrifield, previously told adobo about his views on online content.
