Los Angeles – With a growing number of millennials passing the taps of the big beer brands in favor of craft brews, brand name beer makers poured more than $23 million into YouTube over the past 12 months to engage with this all important demographic, accordingto a new report from Strike Social.
As a result of this YouTube spend, according to the report, Bud Light drank up the most YouTube views for its videos, 120 million, while companion brand Budweiser achieved the highest level of engagement, 57.2 million earned views on 106 million total views. Bud Light had 15.4 million earned views for its YouTube videos.
“Total views are a misleading metric for YouTube performance because they can represent promotion on the part of the brand, not audience engagement,” explained Strike Social CEO Patrick McKenna. “Earned views tell you which brand had the most engaging content, and it is audience engagement that drives sales.”
Other interesting facts from the report:
- Budweiser brewed up the strongest YouTube performance with four of the top 10 best performing YouTube videos during the past 12 months, all related to their Super Bowl campaign
- Heineken was second with three videos in the top 10 best performing beer-brand videos
- Samuel Adams had the third best performing video among the beer brands with its HeliYUM video, which was 100% organic (no spend) and garnered 652,000 views
Ranked by views, the top five beer brands on YouTube were: Bud Light (120 million), Budweiser (106 million), Heineken (38 million), Michelob ULTRA (20.5 million) and Corona (17.6 million).
Strike noted both Samuel Adams and Corona, whose Dani Martin video was also in the top 10, missed an opportunity to drive much more YouTube engagement for their videos by failing to put sufficient advertising dollars against those videos.
“Sam Adams and Corona have some great content here and should put spend behind these content themes because they really performed organically,” said McKenna.
The full YouTube Beer Brand Report for 2014 is available upon request.
About Strike Social
Strike Social (www.strikesocial.com), the largest third-party TrueView advertising platform, is a social video intelligence company delivering hyper-targeted YouTube advertising campaigns that increase performance across the social web and give brands insights that allow them to build smarter, multi-platform marketing campaigns. Strike’s Contagious Index™ identifies how much engagement a piece of content is generating so brands can maximize earned media by advertising the most effective creative.