Top brands advertising on YouTube via collaborations with famous influencers = Yay or Nay?
If this headline got you a bit confused, don’t worry! That’s the whole purpose of it. In this blog, I will talk about the whole movement of brands collaborating with famous YouTube beauty gurus for the sake of advertising and reaching bigger/newer audience online. I will also ty to elaborate from my own point of view, whether I believe if this whole movement is a successful or a failed attempt.
But first, let’s go back in time, specifically to the year of 2013!
It was a milestone year for YouTube as a platform, as it reached its 1 billion unique users earlier that year. “If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” (YouTube, 2013)
This surely caught the attention of many brands as it established a powerful image and presence of YouTube as an online platform. Hence, some brands that had already existing accounts on YouTube were encouraged to take a further step; collaborating with famous YouTube influencers. I shall focus my discussion specifically to collaboration projects between makeup brands and beauty Gurus.
“EM”, a makeup brand that was brought to the world through a collaboration project between L’Oréal and the American-Vietnamese YouTuber Michelle phan in 2013.
Phan, an OG in the makeup tutorial world was in her mid-twenties when the collaboration took place, she had over 8 million YouTube subscribers on her channel that was launched back in 2006, and she was the first official video make-up artist for L’Oréal. I personally was one of her fans as a teenager up until I graduated from university. Basically, this was the demography of her subscribers; female teenagers hoping to learn makeup tricks by using cheap drugstore makeup. Unfortunately, these factors weren’t taken into consideration when launching “EM”. The price range was a bit more expensive than the average, unlike what Phan promised. This discouraged her teenage audience from getting their hands on her products, leading to low sales and eventually L’Oréal selling “EM” back to Phan as a last resort.
“WWD reported that the reason for the sale was because L’Oréal felt the range was too expensive for the star’s young following with an average price of $24 per item.” (Skidmore, 2015)
I’m with brands investing in YouTube influencers for the sake of gaining broader audience. However, brands should also take into consideration the background of their influencers’ audience in order to be able to sell to them. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean brands should exclude advertising on TV, because its audience are the buyer audience due to their age (25+). Also keep in mind TV ads can be rotated throughout the year, unlike YouTube ads that must be trendy, timely and new which means spending more cash on advertising.
YouTube, T. (2013). YouTube Hits a Billion Monthly Users [Web log post]. Retrieved 2020, from https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/onebillionstrong
Skidmore, G. (2015). L’Oréal sells Michelle Phan beauty range back to her. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://www.cosmeticsbusiness.com/news/article_page/LOreal_sells_Michelle_Phan_beauty_range_back_to_her/112692
