Music videos have long been inextricably tied to an evolving television advertising ecosystem. They became an indispensable context for marketers to reach consumers in a fragmented TV landscape, and they continue to deliver broad market coverage and cultural cachet for advertisers, even 40 years on from the first time they aired on MTV.
Vevo is now the global custodian of the power music videos hold. As a joint venture formed over a decade ago between Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, Vevo pioneered premium video within the digital space. As early adopters of CTV, Vevo is once again bringing music videos to the television screen on a global scale.
Vevo SVP research Bryon Schafer says the reach this premium content offers has been enticing for media planners and buyers.
“The ability to capitalize on demand-driven consumption has led Vevo’s advertising partners to benefit from adjacencies to the most popular videos on the world’s largest video platform,” Schafer says.
Music videos represent more than two-thirds of the most popular videos on YouTube today.
But YouTube isn’t the only channel where Vevo can help advertisers. As more consumers turn to connected TV (CTV) environments, the company continues to expand its footprint with a multitude of ad-supported, linear and on-demand partnerships across the globe.
These partnerships include Apple TV, Samsung TV Plus and most recently in Australia, Telstra TV. With Vevo back in living rooms and on TV, brands can reach four million Australians each month.
Locally, Vevo reaches 10 million unique viewers and achieves 250 million monthly views in Australia. Meanwhile, its global reach amounts to 150 million people each day with advertising partnerships in 55 territories.
“Vevo’s advertising partners have become the beneficiary of these diversified touchpoints, reaching consumers on platforms where so much of the time spent is with ad-free content and limited advertising opportunities, and where each of these platforms is largely complementary to the next, given the extreme fractionalization of how people watch TV today,” Schafer says.
“Given the scarcity of quality, ad-supported content inside and out of first-run programming, the continued erosion of sports audiences, and a decade long flight to buying a foggy tail of content-blind, value-priced media, music videos have become a foundational counterbalance for advertisers looking to both easily reach and properly contextualize their messaging to audiences around the world in high quality content.”
With the demise of third-party cookies, context is having a renaissance with media planners, buyers and marketers alike looking for relevant, brand safe environments to advertise in.
Vevo offers this brand safe environment with transparent placement against premium videos that map back to TV classifications.
Schafer says the contextual advertising renaissance is particularly evident as the industry seeks out alternatives to platforms like Facebook and Google.
“Being able to move population swaths without a diversified media plan that extends reach is increasingly difficult,” he says.
“Having fewer and fewer high quality contexts that can contribute to a plan’s efforts compounds the challenge.”
The broad distribution that Vevo offers plays a vital role in helping advertisers reach mass audiences quickly and makes it easy for consumers to view a brand’s message.
However, Schafer says there is more to media than just delivering impressions at the lowest possible price.
“Behavioural science shows that people are generally passive beings, so the more widely and easily available advertising opportunities are, the more consumers can be affected by messaging,” he says.
“In turn this availability is tied to salience, or the ease of which something comes to mind. Consumers generally find out about brands by seeing and hearing about them, and simply seeing and hearing about them alongside the biggest stars in the world is one of the more effective ways to communicate with them.”
When looking at the context of music videos, brands have the opportunity to be associated with culturally relevant content that consumers watch, listen to and talk about.
“It does not just drive attention to a product, but it sends a clear quality signal, communicating value,” Schafer says.
“With music videos, brands can cume large audiences quickly, and actually know where their ads ran.
“In late stage-fragmentation, these sorts of opportunities are rare, achieving strong results concisely and even more broadly over time, yet still nailing the contextual nuance required to drive awareness and quality associations among such a varied consumer mosaic today.”
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