Hasbro, the toy manufacturer, is taking a nuanced approach to measuring the video content created by partners such as influencers as it seeks to understand its impact on kids and parents.

Victor Lee, SVP/digital marketing at Hasbro, discussed this subject during a session held by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) at Advertising Week New York 2018.

“People come in and pitch us [with the claim], ‘I have influencer X, Y, and Z – and this person has one million subscribers and one billion views, you should use her,’” he said. (For more, read WARC’ in-depth report: Hasbro beats back the ‘noise’ of influencer marketing.)

“When you hear ‘million’ and ‘billion’, you’re impressed,” he admitted. “The reality is, nobody’s ever gonna give you that much data, because it’s a false positive.”

For example, after someone views a YouTube video for a single second, he explained, the digital visit is recorded as an “organic view” by the platform. “So, when somebody says, ‘I have a billion views,’ is it really a billion views?” asked Lee.

To more fully assess its results, he continued, Hasbro tracks online content from a couple of perspectives to gain a clearer view of performance among children and parents – its two main audiences.

“We’ve seen a correlation effect: when you have the catalyst of a strong video, you see a search bump on YouTube, because people want to see more of it. Then you see, over a short period of time, a little bit of a bump on Google,” said Lee.

“A search on YouTube demonstrates that there’s more of the target audience, the younger audience. A search on Google, however, demonstrates it’s an older parent, because Google’s really more of that ‘I’m-ready-to-buy’ hand-raiser.”

In fact, Lee contended, the critical consideration is not whether a video is opened, but if the message it promotes is retained.

“[Viewing data] can be a little tough to understand, because some people watch it 75% and some people watch it 24%, but in an aggregate, it’s about 50%,” said Lee.

“But, the reality of it is, with an aggregate of 50%” – and with all the surrounding digital noise – “some of the audience may not be right.”

Sourced from WARC