Effective use of YouTube

Malaysia Airlines

To become a proactive content creator, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) is developing relevant and interactive travel content for fans on its YouTube channel, which starts with a brand page customised to feature four key pillars of the MAS marketing journey.

Amazing Journeys: As one might expect from the brand's slogan, "Journeys are made by the people you travel with",  this section is a platform where users upload videos of their trips, view others’ videos, and share on their other social networks.

Your Dream Airline: This section allows users to make suggestions for MAS to become a dream airline, enabling it to better understand its travellers and customers and understand what is needed to make it the ultimate air carrier.

48 Hours Kuala Lumpur: This area provides users with a tool to explore the best of Kuala Lumpur by clicking hotspots on a map to watch relevant videos. Users can then build their personalised itinerary by adding these places to a list, which they can share via other social networks or email.

Our World: This section features a curated playlist of videos showcasing the stories of MAS. Example includes MAS’s Social Media Ambassador Yuna’s special concert, a 96-hour instafood journey with the UK’s five top bloggers and Malaysia Airlines Group CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya’s journey to London to confirm MAS’ membership in the Oneworld Alliance.

MAS also live-streamed the celebration event of MAS joining Oneworld on YouTube, and received more than 40,000 views from around the world. The YouTube masthead for the livecast event reached between 1.25 million and 1.5 million unique visitors for the first two days after it was launched. In addition, the channel also achieved 6.32 million impressions, with 1.5 million unique visitors within the same period.

“YouTube offers a more interactive experience and allows us to present our story in a way that cannot be conveyed by a simple picture,” Mohd Hisham Saleh, head of social media & innovations at MAS, told Campaign Asia-Pacific. “We use TrueView for advertising, as in our experience we find that targeting the right audience is a must, and something that needs further scrutiny.”

Saleh pointed out that MAS is unable to properly leverage the YouTube engagement with the audience as communication is currently one way. “However, as Google+ is now linked with YouTube, we foresee this challenge to change in the near future as we envision more two-way activities can be done through the use of Google+ and Hangout linked with YouTube,” he said.

Estée Lauder

Estée Lauder traditionally uses TV and magazines as its major marketing platforms. With consumer behaviours changing, however, the brand found that online videos could serve the same purpose as TV, providing entertainment and information to audiences. In addition, fashion and beauty content are very popular on YouTube.

Estée Lauder Hong Kong launched its own YouTube channel, serving as a hub of all its content across different platforms. Its homepage has a masthead format, which has a similar effect as broadcasting the TVC at the prime drama time on TV. Its eye-catching design is aimed to help build brand awareness, provide additional information beneficial to customers, and drive customers’ action like a mini-site. 

The brand’s TVC assets run across the channel in TrueView format, which has further boosted the brand on earned media. To further build brand preference and awareness, the channel also features makeup and beauty videos, such as how-to tips, which the target audiences are interested in.

Estée Lauder has recently added in interactive element for its content, allowing users to engage and interact with the videos. It launched Hong Kong's first interactive "big eye" makeup video tutorial.

Tourism Australia

Tourism Australia unveiled a new look for its YouTube branded channel in November last year, in order to showcase 'World’s Best in Australia' in an engaging and immersive way.

"Video content is a powerful tool in destination marketing," a Tourism Australia spokesperson told Campaign Asia-Pacific. "Tourism Australia looks to maximise the opportunities of having its own YouTube channel to share its campaign videos online as well as rich destination content to showcase the range of experiences on offer in Australia and in turn inspire people to visit."

The channel provides customised content in nine languages for 16 key markets (including Australia) to enhance the trip-planning experience for potential visitors. Its video content is linked to an interactive Google map for users to see where the footage was filmed and in turn build their own itinerary around the destinations they are considering in Australia.

Users are encouraged to create their own moving itineraries by choosing their favourite videos from the channel’s more than 450 pieces of content, and re-arrange them into a personalised “Holiday Playlist”, which they can share with family and friends.

The chosen videos and locations will be automatically populated with relevant video clips related to the destinations and locations featured in their selected videos to create a bespoke, moving gallery which they can also share. This moving gallery is generated using a library of almost 2,500 smaller video clips which have been geo-tagged and associated to the 450 main videos on the channel.

Other features include integration of Facebook friend’s images that have been tagged at the destinations shown in videos, integration of @Australia’s Instagram images that have been tagged at the destinations shown in videos, and ability to filter through videos either by state or city, type of experience, Australia’s icons or by popularity.

The spokesperson said that to leverage YouTube as a channel, the onus is on the content creator, rather than the YouTube channel, to create good video content that is compelling to the target audience and leverage this by also tapping into other media and social channels they consume, to drive further traffic to the content on the YouTube channel.

Have your own examples of brands using YouTube well? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet @CampaignAsia.