Leverage the 'Stars' of User-Generated Video Content

Triple-team the medium: Product placement, advertising and sponsorship.

By Ava Seave
05/18/2009 -03:46 PM

Kevin Nalty has a conflict of interest. He is a marketing director for a big, buttoned-down pharma and he is a YouTube comedian—hilarious, and really a star—known as “Nalts.” He reports that more than 150,000 people watch Nalts videos each day.

So Nalty [pictured] definitely has something personal to gain in the article in AdAge where he strongly advocates marketers to find “wildly popular amateurs with tremendous audiences” as venues for advertising. But I don’t care about his prejudices because I agree with them.

Nalty doesn’t reveal any details when he asserts that he has seen “private studies” that show awareness and purchase intent rise with use of online video media, but don’t let that hold you back. Marketers would need to do their own tests anyway, since there is so much variation by product and context. (Nalts is careful to remind you that all amateurs are not created equal and that having someone who can buy the right media in this genre is not so easy to find.)

Marketers can do their own product-specific case studies relatively inexpensively—and probably in full cooperation with whoever they are working with to test this out. The excess inventory of user-generated video is staggering, so there is a big appetite for bargaining. There are opportunities for product placement, sponsored content and media buying—and a product’s campaign should work with all three to get the most awareness from viewers.

Product placement may cost a little more in the future however. In early May, YouTube was notifying some content partners that it planned to start enforcing its policy of not allowing product integration into partner videos unless YouTube got a cut of the action.

Ava Seave is a Principal of Quantum Media, a strategy and marketing consulting group.