Motivation for the YouTube Study
As some of you have seen, we are in the process of wrapping a study of the top 100 global brands and how they use YouTube. The study represents one of the most thorough and comprehensive reports on the use of both YouTube and online video by the top 100 global brands. To build a targeted brands list, we used Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2012 report. More details on Interbrand’s methodology and selection criteria can be found at www.interbrand.com. For the study, we collected data from1,378 YouTube channels owned and managed by the top 100 global brands. Together, these channels consisted of 258,000 videos with more than 9.5 billion aggregate views. Not only did we analyze each YouTube video, but we also collected the statistics, metadata, descriptions, and sentiment for each one.
What we wanted to find out was whether business use of YouTube moved beyond a niche, experimental social video platform to a business-strength content and communications ecosystem. The data and our analysis, which we cover in this study, clearly confirm this. YouTube can no longer be ignored by any organization serious about brand, business, or sales. Specifically, what we present can and should be used by all organizations serious about best practices in digital marketing. Our study concludes that the top 100 global brands are exemplifying new directions in marketing and advertising.