YouTube Anoints Its Top 10 Video Ads of 2014

YouTube has released its list of Top 10 ads of 2014—revealing how significantly the business of online advertising has changed in just the last two years.

Digital marketing execs, take note: In 2012, the first year YouTube posted a “Leaderboard” listing the most watched video ads, the spots that ranked highest were mainly TV ads, repurposed for the Web, or teasers for Super Bowl TV spots, notes Tim Peterson, who covers digital media for Advertising Age.

Compare that to the top-10 list announced this week, and it’s clear that this approach is on the way out. “Many of this year’s most popular YouTube ads will never be seen on TV,” Peterson writes in a recent article for AdAge. “That’s a big departure from even a couple years ago.”

Five out of the 10 most popular spots are digital-native ads. Advertisers “are starting to take advantage of digital as a way to shoot ads that would be hard to imagine ever airing on TV,” Peterson notes. “And it’s paying off.” If you haven’t seen Heineken’s Routine Interruptions: The Payphone with Fred Armisen, click here. It’s not the star performer here, coming in at No. 10, with a mere 13.8 million views (and counting),  but it’s our fave.

What’s also remarkable about the 2014 list: the average length of the spots that broke into the top 10 has jumped 47%, to a whopping 3 minutes. The Nike Football video ads, “Winner Stays” (which nabbed the No. 1 spot) and “The Last Game” (ranked No. 2) clock in at 4:13 and 5:29, respectively. Procter & Gamble’s Always brand spot #LikeAGirl  has a running time of 3:18. Meanwhile, the average viewing time has also increased, by 54%—so audiences are sticking around for more of the show. Total views for all 10 ads have already topped 427.5 million.

It should be noted that, even though these spots aren’t TV spots in the traditional sense, there were high-profile televised events—namely the Super Bowl, World Cup and the Sochi Olympics—that helped steer viewers to them, driving their popularity, Marketing Land reporter Amy Gesenhues points out in her story about the list, which includes all 10 clips. Tubular Labs analyzes each spot’s performance in terms of engagement (likes, comments, Facebook shares, tweets) to determine “Who Really Won?”

In other advertising-related news: account managers tracking ad performance will be able to get new insight from Google in AdWords for Video. Previously, you had to rely on YouTube Analytics for this kind of feedback, but now, Google’s performance and engagement dashboard will show a graph of organic views and paid views as well as a helpful audience retention graph. “Finally, there is a new holistic view of each video’s contribution to an account’s performance,” Ginny Marvin of Marketing Land writes. “Advertisers will be able to quickly gauge how much value a video is contributing to their audience growth on YouTube.”

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