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More marketers than ever are using video as a marketing tool, with the number rising from 63% in 2017 to 87% in 2019. This is unsurprising when you consider that research has found that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.

 

As the demand on marketers to create digital content has grown, it has led to rapidly expanding volumes of large video files; as a solution, marketers often rely on platforms such as YouTube to host content. However, this can result in data getting into the wrong hands and being used incorrectly, or worse still, being lost entirely if the platform goes down.

 

In this day and age, it’s not a sustainable way of managing the valuable content that takes marketers huge amounts of time and money to produce – and the demand for such assets is only going to increase. With third-party tools or software presenting more risks than rewards, how can marketers take complete ownership of marketing materials?

 

The challenges of using third-party tools

 

Although sites like YouTube are commonly used by organisations to host and share their marketing content, doing so can be detrimental to the business for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s hard to know how secure that collateral is – something millions of people learnt the hard way with MySpace. In this case, a server migration corrupted files, which meant the social networking site was unable to transfer these files over to its updated website.

 

As the company had failed to backup before it began the migration, 50 million songs spanning 12 years’, as well as any photos and videos uploaded to the site before 2016 were lost. Unfortunately, despite MySpace’s decline in popularity since the likes of Facebook and Twitter came about, some users were still using it as an archive, meaning a large proportion of these assets have been lost forever. This suggests third-party sites may not be following best practices to protect and preserve valuable resources. However, as the user has no control over the site’s IT and security strategy, there is very little they can do about it.

 

This reliance on external tools can also cause a problem if they cease operating - as demonstrated by the closure of Vine. While more commonly associated with social media and teenagers, Vine became a popular marketing tool for big name brands such as Toyota, Urban Outfitters and Oreo. Its closure meant that users were required to download all their content from the website and archive it separately, which presented difficulties in searching for and accessing content once it had been downloaded.

 

Therefore, sharing or reusing these videos for other purposes will have been made extremely difficult. Even these websites having some downtime can cause major problems as marketers may be unable to access their content when they need to, which could have a wider impact on marketing campaigns.

 

While the likelihood of YouTube ever going down is slim, it has its own set of challenges with Google admitting that the site is unable to guarantee 100% brand safety due “dark pockets” lurking on the internet. In other words, the site is unable to safeguard videos against unsavoury or abusive comments that may violate the brand. Similarly, by hosting their content on such sites, marketers can’t police who uses their videos or manage what they are using them for.

 

As a result, the assets they will have spent both time and resources on could be used improperly, after all, we’ve all seen content enter into the public domain only to then become popular for something other than its intended purpose – just think of the ‘distracted boyfriend’ meme.

 

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