The Dilemma

As members of Generations Y and Z earn more buying power and become more alluring targets for marketers, they also become more difficult to target. Young Americans are watching less TV and consuming more online content (1), and this transition has not been kind to traditional advertising. It is anticipated, for example, that a largely young, tech-savvy, male audience will block $20.3 billion in ads in 2016 (2).

The Opportunity

Brands like Toyota and Macy’s have attempted to earn the trust of a young audience by recruiting YouTube stars as spokespeople (3). Research has shown that this can be an incredibly sound strategy. In a survey of Generation Z consumers, half of respondents indicated that they looked to YouTube stars for product recommendations (4). In another survey, young respondents indicated that they trusted the opinions of YouTube stars more than those of mainstream celebrities because they thought of YouTube stars as more authentic and less prone to having their messages massaged by large corporations (5).

Marketers must act with caution, however, when working with YouTubers. The era of YouTube stars is still in its infancy, and it is clear that this youth carries with it the benefits of trust and perceived detachment from corporate message management. Marketers have displayed an eagerness to take advantage of this trust by using YouTube stars to connect with young people. At the same time, many YouTubers are seeking exposure and extra income and can therefore be persuaded to communicate carefully constructed brand messages. In the long term, the proliferation of YouTube stars delivering obviously scripted messages will likely undermine the very trust that makes these messages particularly valuable.

A recent ad for Crunchyroll by the Game Grumps provides a perfect example of how YouTube stars can advocate for products and services while preserving trust in this new brand of celebrities.

Enter Crunchyroll

Crunchyroll is a media streaming service similar to Netflix that offers a unique selling point with its great breadth of over 15 genres of anime and great depth of 25,000 episodes across all genres (6). It currently has advertising contracts with several popular YouTubers, meaning that the marketing team is likely aiming to increase awareness and trial.

Enter the Grumps

The Game Grumps are the comedy duo of Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan that has existed in its current form for about 3 years. They host a daily show where they play and commentate over video games. Instead of simply providing commentary on the experience of the game, however, the Grumps present a combination of scripted and impromptu comedy that is sometimes based on the game in front of them and sometimes not. To many fans, the charm of the comedy comes from its off-the-wall nature, its willingness to make fun of any subject matter, and the chemistry between Hanson and Avidan. If you would like a concrete example of their brand of comedy, please watch the following clip: https://youtu.be/DKNTKbg2Cnk?t=40m46s (the clip is part of a larger compilation, lasts about 3 minutes, and contains language that is not safe for work).

The Ad

Before reading on, please make sure to watch the ad. It can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfItou5aGso. This ad was featured at the beginning of an episode (not included in the video above) and could therefore be skipped by advancing the video. However, most of the top comments on the original video praise the ad rather than the episode itself. Some of these comments include, “If all ads were made by Arin and Dan, people would look forward to commercials,” “I think the ad is my favorite part of this video. Sponsorship done RIGHT,” and “I [really] love these commercials… the best commercials ever, actually makes me want the product.” The original video has 1,465,202 views (as of 5/6/2016) and the re-upload of the commercial alone by an unauthorized third party (linked above) has 77,449 views (also as of 5/6/2016). It is clear that the ad has created both a great deal of exposure for the brand and positive attitudes about Crunchyroll and the Grumps.

The Extended Parody

The most striking aspect of the ad is its structure as an extended parody of advertisements in general. It was incredibly important that the Grumps did not deviate from their off-the-cuff comedy style that thrives on making fun of anything and everything available at the moment. However, it was equally important that Hanson and Avidan presented the brand in an exclusively positive light and pitched key Crunchyroll features.

The only thing left to parody, then, was advertising itself. In doing so, Avidan and Hanson maintained their trademark personalities and chemistry, which made it appear as though they were creating a comedy sketch separate from any brand. They made it a point to appear as if, like in their show, they were presenting comedy that wasn’t controlled by any third party. This was especially apparent when Avidan made a mistake in reading his lines and requested that the take be left in, a request that would have been swiftly rejected by almost any brand manager. This established the Grumps as authentic, which almost certainly made viewers much more receptive to every aspect of a moderately complex message (unlimited ad-free anime that can be accessed from anywhere for only $6.95 a month at www.crunchyroll.com/gamegrumps).

Besides communicating the brand message effectively, the authenticity that the Grumps presented also validated them as trustworthy entities unwilling to present a carefully refined brand message. Because of this, the trust that the audience has placed in them will carry over to their next sponsorship deal. If all other corporate sponsorships on YouTube take lessons from this example and allow YouTubers to employ their own style of message presentation, the website will remain an excellent platform to advertise to an audience critical of advertising.

Beauty in the Details: A Psychological View

While we could stop talking about the beauty of this ad right now (and feel free to, I know you’re a busy person), there is one psychological nuance in the ad that I feel deserves attention.

The relevant psychological construct is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. There is a great deal of research that shows that consumers will use all information in their environment to make decisions, even if this information has no relevance to their actual decision. The anchoring and adjustment heuristic, along these lines, shows that people exposed to arbitrary numbers will use them as an anchor for future decisions of quantity. That is, they will compare future data they receive to these numbers. For an excellent example of this phenomenon, see “Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by Kahneman and Tversky (7).

In the Game Grumps ad, Avidan provides an arbitrary anchor concealed by a joke when he claims that the Grumps were only paid $8 for the ad, an absurdly low amount for a brand deal. When customers eventually asked themselves whether the monthly premium membership was a good deal, they had likely already processed $8 as an anchor point that represented an incredibly small amount of money. Therefore, they interpreted the price of $6.95 as an even less significant amount. In this way, the Grumps made the price of the membership more attractive than it would have been otherwise. What is especially interesting is that most audience members were likely unaware that this process was going on and therefore had no reason to question these judgments.

Suzana Deng provided a great deal of valuable feedback in the creation of this post.

Sources

(image) Screenshot from ad taken on 5/18/2016

(1) Sam Frizell, Time Magazine, “Millennials are Abandoning their TV Sets Faster than Ever,” http://time.com/3713134/millennials-tv-cord-cutting-cable/

(2) Adobe and Pagefair, “The Cost of Ad Blocking,” http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report-the_cost_of_ad_blocking.pdf

(3) Lauren Johnson, AdWeek, “How Brands and YouTube Stars are Hooking Up to Reach Millions of Millenials,” http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/technology/how-brands-and-youtube-stars-are-hooking-reach-millions-millennials-164316

(4) Joan Schneider, Harvard Business Review, “How to Market to the iGeneration,” https://hbr.org/2015/05/how-to-market-to-the-igeneration

(5) Tim Peterson, Advertising Age, “Why Female YouTube Stars Carry More Clout than Mainstream Celebs,” http://adage.com/article/digital/female-youtube-stars-carry-clout-mainstream-celebs/301119/

(6) Crunchyroll, “About Crunchyroll,” http://www.crunchyroll.com/en/about

(7) Consumer Behavior Course at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis taught by Professor Robyn LeBoeuf