YouTube

YouTube Convenes ‘DTC Council’ To Fortify Relations With Direct-To-Consumer Brands

YouTube has reportedly formed a ‘DTC council’ to interface with top direct-to-consumer brands, and thus attract more advertising in the space.

Direct-to-consumer brands like eyeglasses startup Warby Parker, mattress vendor Casper, and beauty brand Glossier — which cut out the retail middlemen to sell products (often online) directly to consumers — allocate a lion’s share of their spend right now to Facebook and Instagram, Digiday reports. Now, YouTube wants a bigger piece of the pie.

Last month, execs from roughly 20 top DTC brands — including TechStyle (which owns Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty lingerie brand) and online grocer Imperfect Produce — convened at YouTube’s offices for the inaugural DTC council meeting, Digiday reports. The meeting was led by YouTube’s director of performance advertising, Nicky Rettke, who sought to hear from companies about their audience targeting, ad priorities (be it raising awareness or driving sales), and what type of ad products they would like to see.

Subscribe to get the latest creator news

Subscribe

“We spent a full day with these execs, walking through our roadmap and discussing broader challenges that aren’t specifically related to the product, like understanding customers better, and connecting what’s happening in their world to ours,”  Rettke told Digiday. “What we heard very loud and clear was that these brands are focused on performance metrics — they care about perception of their brands, but it ultimately comes down to driving new customer acquisitions, subscriptions, and purchases. That’s the key metric.”

Another point addressed at the meeting, Rettke said, was how YouTube can proliferate a variety of ad creative to save marketers money and time. To this end, YouTube unveiled two new ad products at its Google Marketing Live showcase this week: Discovery ads and the Bumper Machine, the latter of which harnesses machine learning to auto-generate six-second spots from longer video assets.

Nettke told Digiday that the council will reconvene later this year.

Share
Published by
Geoff Weiss

Recent Posts

Have you heard? Pokimane at Chipotle, a Rooster Teeth reunion, and a Mike Tomlin Minecraft update.

Each week, we handpick a selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends,…

3 days ago

Hollywood’s creator obsession continues as Sony hires YouTube exec to lead horror label

As major film studios seek deals with directors whose careers began on social media, Sony…

3 days ago

YouTube eclipses TV to become the top news source in the U.S.

Syracuse University's Center for the Creator Economy has published a report that will make traditional news outlets…

3 days ago

A YouTube test brought creator analytics directly into brands’ YouTube Studio dashboards

At its annual Made On presentation, YouTube announced several tools that help brands forge partnerships with creators.…

4 days ago

OpenAI brought in Patreon’s Co-Founder. Here’s what he has planned.

Two weeks after OpenAI announced the hire of Sam Yam as the head of its Creator Product division,…

4 days ago

AI-generated videos get labels. The European Union is applying the same standards to text.

AI-generated text has become a major concern in classrooms, offices, and publishing houses, but the European…

4 days ago