Lorraine Landon

I interviewed Lorraine Landon, head of agencies at Google South Africa to find out what one could expect to learn from the Google masterclasses on ‘YouTube: all you need to know for campaign success’ and ‘video advertising: what works best when’.

The morning session will cover everything from drawing creativity from data to deriving insights from YouTube’s consumer tools, products and targeting solutions as well as YouTube analytics and metrics, while the afternoon session will focus on the objectives of video advertising, identifying what ads work best for each video platform and why.

Landon will be joined on stage by her colleagues Kerri Prissman and Jonathan Andrews, both agency relationship managers.

All creatives, especially marketing managers and brand managers are encouraged to attend.

What is Google’s involvement in the Loeries this year?
Google has been a keen participant in various events at the Loeries Awards for the past five years. This year, we are running a YouTube Creative Masterclass for both sessions on Thursday, hosting our now famous dinner for our top clients and agencies, and sponsoring the Digital and Interactive Communication Category Award.

Comment on the use of YouTube for campaigns and video advertising in general. Is this the next big thing?
Absolutely! At the moment, video accounts for 75% of content consumed online and is predicted to rise to 90% by 2019*. With those impressive rates of consumption, it is essential for video advertising to become an integral part of advertising and media strategies.

Effective marketing is based on communicating a story to your audience, understanding who they are and what is important to them. While there is a lot of discussion in the market around digital transformation, the purpose of marketing is still to tell a brand’s story, regardless of platform. YouTube’s many formats and the nature of an engaged audience means that those brand stories can be shared, developed and personalised.

Advertising on YouTube not only helps a brand to achieve the reach, frequency and engagement objectives that are key to every media plan, it affords the advertiser the opportunity to learn more about those who are engaging with their brand stories through the sophisticated measurement tools offered by the platform.

In this year’s Google masterclasses, the key topics of discussion are going to be around optimizing YouTube campaigns and video advertising. Briefly mention some key strategies to ensure these mediums are used to their greatest potential.

• Audience: The heart of all great advertising strategy is not only understanding who your audience is demographically, but knowing what is important to them, how they interact online and how a brand can be useful them. It is an acknowledgement that the audience may be at different stages within the decision-making process and that campaign and communication strategies need to be tailored to speak to them wherever they may be in the marketing ‘funnel’. At Google, we call this ‘See, Think, Do, Care’ and we spend a lot of time learning about audiences within these different stages and what the most effective video strategies would be. A robust audience strategy is a great starting point in approaching video advertising.

The key takeout?
The golden thread that runs throughout our masterclass is an emphasis on clarity. Successful campaigns depend heavily on clear brand objectives, well-defined audiences and media and measurement plans that deliver on those objectives.

The Google agency team is really looking forward to having fun with the masterclass participants. They should be prepared for informative and interactive sessions!

At the end of Session 2, we’ll invite the agencies and clients in the room to enter our ‘Case Study Challenge’. We’d like to populate ‘Think with Google’ with local case studies where these best practices have been employed and award-winning campaigns have been created!

*Source: Cisco.com

The masterclasses are currently under way at the Southern Sun Elangeni Hotel in Durban. For more info on these, go to Loeries.com.