Luxury Watches on YouTube: How Brand Videos Influence Fan Videos

Thomas Owadenko - Contributor 

YouTube is just kid's stuff, right? You're not going to find adult men on YouTube doing things like looking at luxury products there, surely? Well, think again. Men in their 30s and 40s are indeed on YouTube to watch certain videos. One of the things they want to watch is… well, watches.

We looked at the YouTube footprint of seven luxury men's watches: Audemars Piguet, Blancpain, IWC, Jaeger-Le Coultre, Patek Philippe, Rolex and Vacheron Constantin. We found that like other successful YouTube brands, high rates of social actions correlated highly with community-created videos.

Watching Men's Watches on YouTube

Of the seven luxury watch brands we looked at, the three led in YouTube engagement were, in order:

1. Patek Philippe
2. Rolex
3. Blancpain

To reach our conclusions, we began by looking at the average social actions per viewer on videos created by each brand. While Rolex had many more views on its channel with 1.6 million than the other two (Blancpain at 109,000 and Patek Philippe at 72,000) it was Patek Philippe which led on owned media social actions. Social actions, in this study, relates to any like, comment, share or tweet on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.

Patek Philippe had a remarkable 6.4% social actions per YouTube view, followed by Blancpain at 3.9% and Rolex at 3.8%. These were significantly higher than the other four brands.

Earned Media and Luxury Watches

Then we looked at the earned media social actions of these brands. In this case, we define earned media as YouTube videos created by fans, retailers or product reviewers. We found that these same three brands remained in the top three of our seven brands. For these independently created videos, Rolex had 1.6% social actions per video view, Blancpain had 1.1% and Patek Philippe had 1.0%.

This correlation continued further. The videos which fans were most interested in sharing and liking on both brand-created and fan-created videos corresponded with percentage of overall YouTube footprint from fans. Of all video views about Patek Philippe, 98.5% were of videos created by fans, retailers and reviewers. For Rolex, 98.1% of views were of videos created by the community. For Blancpain, 91.3% of viewers were created not by the brand itself, but by other YouTube channels.

So we can conclude that for luxury watches on YouTube, there is a high correlation between social actions on owned media videos and earned media videos, and these rankings correspond to high numbers of videos created by the YouTube community about these brands.

Let's take a look at the earned media stats for each brand by views. First, Patek Philippe:

Blancpain:

And Rolex

Compelling Content Leads to Higher Social Actions

Unfortunately, just because these numbers correlate doesn't tell us the reasons behind it. But from experience at Octoly, we've found that when brands in any category create videos that resonate with a segment of the YouTube audience, they correlate with higher social actions and amplified share of voice through community-created videos. In addition, a highly-targeted Adwords for Video campaign can further call attention to branded videos, enhancing the brand among its community of users and fans.

News Source

BigTimeUK.com