With 14 million total views, the recent Anheuser-Busch Reventón de Verano festival not only ranks among the most viewed livestreams of the past year but a salient showcase of portfolio-wide storytelling where select company brands were immersed in performances celebrating Hispanic music and culture.
When Wendy’s looked to support the launch of its new pub-style cheeseburger, it served up a Pandora LIVE concert by The Killers during which it infused the band’s live fan chat with a delivery offer and merch giveaways. And with a steady progression of Sound Bites livestreams featuring artists from Alan Walker to Meghan Thee Stallion performing in unique settings, Grubhub continues to position itself as a purveyor of popular culture.
The activations are brand-specific, but the ethos is the same: As viewing patterns shift and attention spans shrink, livestreams are quickly taking center stage as a platform for advertisers to break through, differentiate and dialog with consumers precisely when those consumers are looking to engage.
“A livestream environment provides a unique and differentiated landscape to capitalize on real-time, virtual engagement,” says Jimmy Bennett, VP of media and social at Wendy’s, which this past year integrated into several Pandora livestreams including Dolly Parton’s holiday show. “Inserting the brand at the intersection of culture and passion with an authentic reason to be there is the best recipe for interacting with our fans.”
Anheuser-Busch is no stranger to immersing on the ground at big music festivals and sports showdowns. But when the pandemic sidelined live events, the company stepped more boldly into the virtual realm and discovered a windfall of benefits.
“There have been things we could do that we could never do in person,” says Ronnie Yoked, head of experiential at Anheuser-Busch. “There were interactive elements through websites. There were engagements with talent that were much more up close, like meet and greets, we weren’t necessarily doing at in-person events. There was the tie-in with commerce that was such a natural thing for us to do. At the end of the day, our goal was the same—to make people feel something—but the means through which we did it was different.”
“These live experiences allow us to communicate and have two-way conversations with our diners while connecting to their passion points in an immersive way,” says Mandy Cudahy, Grubhub director of marketing, content and social. “It gives us a use case for our product and our brand… and an occasion to connect on a deeper level with diners.”
That deeper connection is more critical than ever in an increasingly noisy, fragmented marketplace. “The average consumer attention span five years ago was 12 seconds and now I think it’s down to eight,” says John Petrocelli, CEO at Bulldog Digital Media, which powered livestreams for clients from Justin Bieber and Reba McEntire to AT&T and Hyundai that delivered an average watch time of 41 minutes. “If executed properly a livestream is the perfect solution for brands to unlock engagement and watch time at a fraction of traditional media sponsorship, and with a better return.”
From Sponsorship to Content Creation
As at-home audiences continue to flock to livestreams—a new report from Market Research Future projects the global market will expand to $247 million by 2027—brands traditionally steeped in one-way messaging have the opportunity to flip the script.
“One of the things we’re seeing is brands and advertisers who themselves are acting like creators and doing their own livestreams, in some cases with major talent,” says Brian Anderson, global head of music monetization at YouTube.
Produced with white label platform First Tube Media, Reventón de Verano streamed across 54 end points and drew 84,000 simultaneous viewers at the height of its May 2 livestream. While Anheuser-Busch previously produced hybrid live/virtual events including its Bud Light Dive Bar Tour, the livestream paradigm of 2021 brings entirely new scale and opportunity to leverage existing artist relationships—in this case with Maluma and Becky G, among others.
“We have always created owned experiences, but there was absolutely a shift that was necessitated by the pandemic, and it’s expanded the repertoire of my team,” Yoked says. “We used to consider ourselves experiential and experience creators, and now it’s become content and experience creators. We are no longer limited by ‘in real life.’ We are now open and free to think about, What are our business objectives and what is the best way to get there?”
Brand ownership—of everything from the content experience to the consumer data that rides along with a virtual event arc—is livestream’s greatest promise to marketers, notes First Tube CEO Andrew Beranbom.
“With consumer behavior shifting, so is brand behavior,” he says. “Every brand needs to be able to harness talent and culture to reach target audiences. How do you do that in the most authentic way? Historically brands would just sponsor by attaching to things vs. owning them, and now that has completely changed. Sponsorship is going through a total transition.”
Wendy’s Bennett advises ditching the cookie-cutter approach and focusing on “customizing meaningful experiences that help the brand partner bring greater value to the fan experiences. When there is synergy across both the brand and event social content, it is a powerful mechanism to extend content beyond just that moment in time to drive more impact for the brand partner and the audience,” he says.
Tune-in for Sound Bites, which Grubhub creates in concert with First Tube, escalated from 30,000 for the first episode to more than 6 million for the ninth in the series. Average watch time ranged between 8.5 and 19 minutes per episode.
Grubhub is “extremely involved” in the creative process, Cudahy says. “We have a lot of opinions, everything from artist selection to theme. We look at it from a cultural perspective and a brand safety perspective, whether the artist will help us meet our engagement goals and are they authentic to the brand? We would never work with someone who doesn’t do delivery.”
The company developed an internal scorecard of metrics through which it rates proposed artists on their ability to deliver on goals including brand reach and engagement, diversity and brand safety. Grubhub also produces quarterly surveys to assess the ways Sound Bites is imprinting on brand health.
Expanding Opportunities, Shifting Budgets
“One of cool things of past 12 months is we’ve seen the convergence of experiential budgets and digital budgets all happening around livestreams because [brands] couldn’t create activations on the ground,” says YouTube’s Anderson. “We’ve seen a lot of creative work that probably couldn’t have happened otherwise.”
Advertising verticals already embedded around live music events—including tech companies, beverage brands and auto manufacturers—are digging in even deeper, he says, while newcomers of all ilk are coming to the party as they seek deeper connections with consumers.
“We've definitely seen the power of virtual events to reach scaled audiences and tap into the passion for live music entertainment when it wasn't otherwise accessible during the pandemic,” Wendy’s Bennett says. “Livestreaming has been a great opportunity to show our fans ‘we get you’ by engaging fans in a shared passion for music, and ‘we got you’ by providing them with a customized delivery deal to enhance their viewing enjoyment.”
As TV audiences continue to dwindle, notably around awards shows and other tent-pole events, “we’re definitely seeing big traditional TV buyers looking for more major online activations where they can reach big audiences in a short period of time,” says YouTube’s Anderson. “We talk a lot about fast reach, and we position these livestreams as prime vehicles to reach audiences in a very short period of time, if you have a product launch or a marketing message you’re looking to get out the door in a concentrated light.”
While YouTube was the home to the National Independent Venues Assn.’s virtual SOS Fest and recent Global Citizen “Vax Live” festival, Anderson says brand activations don’t have to be around a major productions to break through. “With the democratization of technology and the creative community looking for innovative ways to reach fans, we’re seeing an explosion of interest from smaller brands and advertisers to get involved with more intimate streams with very specific target audiences.”
Budgets are following suit. Cudahy says livestreams now comprise more than 25 percent of her overall budget. “It used to be we would do one show a quarter and all of sudden the pandemic hit and we were seeing real results from the virtual events when it came to in tune-ins, watch time and even conversions overall, so we started to move up the budget to monthly,” she says.
At the outset the company focused solely on emerging artists, but it recently expanded its lens to include A-listers like Megan Thee Stallion. “The Meg show was biggest show we did, that was well upward of a $1 million show, and now that the team saw such success from Meg it’s hard to go back,” Cudahy says. “We’re now creeping up on the artist level, which is adding cost, so our budgets have grown exponentially.”
What’s Next?
As artists begin to step back into venues and consumers begin to step back out, all signs point to a bigger, and better, opportunity for brands in the hybrid world.
For one, viewership on connected TVs is ratcheting up, much of it in a co-viewing environment. “We’re really excited about innovations on the advertising side very specific to the connected TV surface,” Anderson says. “As we start to bring more interactivity to the TV, and are able to speak to multiple users at one time, we’ll see brands thinking live first and then building those live moments more and more on TV, which is a larger creative canvas.”
With a foothold in music, brands are also beginning to expand their livestream palette as new opportunities arise. As well as more Sound Bites and other music programming, Grubhub is diving into esports. The company just signed a three-year partnership to be the official sponsor to the League of Legends championship series, and is also looking into B2B livestream opportunities, Cudahy says.
Technology advances mean more data, and more data means more targeted messaging. “More data means we can be smarter about how we speak to our consumers and show up for them,” Yoked says. “If I have another event down the road, I can now reaching out to people who I know have expressed interest in my previous events, in my previous brands, in my previous talent. I’m not just spamming them.”
A slew of shoppable experiences are also on the way. “E-commerce is the next massive component of the livestreaming experience,” Petrocelli says. “It’s well-documented. It’s a $100 billion in China, and it’s supposed to double in the U.S. from about $5.5 billion t $11 billion this year. For the fashion and beauty industries, for example, I can’t even wrap my head around the opportunity it’s so huge. Wal mart just partnered with TikTok in that business. This is a really compelling way to partner with an influencer and show a beauty product in real time and give the audience the ability to only talk about it, but immediately pull it into a shopping cart.”
“The experiential marketer was forced to get a digital education over the last year. And what they uncovered was they are not only able to see more ROI by adding in content extensions, but they also can use data to inform decisions of what the real-life experience will be,” Beranbom says.