By Helen Myers, Advertising Week Correspondent
Advertising Week Europe welcomed Vevo in a conversation regarding the relationship between content quality and engagement with advertisers.
The panel kicked off with Vevo’s Head of Sales, Chris Wright, describing the need for advertisers to meet audiences where they reside. With younger audiences, that space is YouTube. YouTube is often presented as a homogenous entity, but its sheer amount of content and subcategories means that the variances of quality should be analyzed in different ways. Through proper analysis, brands and agencies can optimize a TV-sized audience.
The conversation focused on “premium quality content,” which Senior Manager for International Research Nav Gadhvi describes as content fit for TV that is professionally produced and edited. In 2023, Vevo partnered with Channel 4 to conduct a study on the correlation between content quality and audience attention using the “fit for TV” metric. In 2024, Vevo expanded on these insights and partnered with Amplified Intelligence to further explore the impact of premium content on YouTube on CTV.
“Our biggest headline in this study is that premium content captures 40% more active attention than non-premium content. And what really stands out is how much longer people focus on ads placed around premium content. 84% of the ad is watched, whether actively or passively, and this highlights how premium content not only holds viewers’ attention, but also makes ads more effective,” Gadhvi explained. She further added that people often like premium content more, leading to them being more engaged in the accompanying advertisements.
Premium content is most beneficial in engaging younger audiences, as Gadhvi states that young viewers are drifting away from traditional television and spend 20 percent of their viewing time on YouTube. Co-viewing is also a practice more commonly used with premium content, as 3/4 of households view premium content in groups of two or more people.
Richard Brant, the Senior Director of advanced TV, strategy, and partnerships at Vevo, led the Q & A segment with the Head of Planning at MG OMD, Flora Williams, and the Head of YouTube Sales at ITV, Abul Noor.
Williams discussed the partnership between Omnicom and Amplified Intelligence to create a TV Attention Panel, built up of 1000 homes across the UK. This panel measures active attention during YouTube ad breaks, revealing detailed engagement metrics such as when audience attention plateaus.
Noor discussed the importance of creating an objective definition of premium content by determining the pillars of what makes something premium. “We are taking those pillars and that broadcast DNA we have across broadcast and streaming, and applying it to the world of YouTube,” Noor said. He explained further that YouTube has evolved, and brands need to evolve with it, which includes being willing to listen and learn.
When asked what the best way to construct a TV campaign in the current age, Williams gave insight into Omnicom’s unified video approach. She explained that they take a holistic video view and factor in things like attention, trust, and screen size based on every client and projected audience. “That’s the great thing about unified videos as we have such a plethora of opportunities. It’s about creating curated plans to make it work as best as possible,” Williams said.
The conversation ended with Noor describing how broadcasters need to consider YouTube as being a part of their ecosystem and should invest time in planning for that accordingly.
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