How an uninspiring product company gained 225k YouTube subscribers: Video Marketing Examples #7

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To many people, YouTube is both an opportunity and a mystery: why do some brands succeed where others fail?

In this series we’ll be taking a look at some of high-achieving brands on YouTube, understanding who they are, what they do - and trying to unpack the ingredients for success.

Today, we’re looking at Evian - a brand of bottled mineral water owned by French multinational Danone. When you’ve got a channel with 225k subscribers - and your product is something as simple and, dare we say, uninspiring as bottled water - you’re clearly doing something right.

Let’s drill into what that is and where the success has come from...

Pillar content…

Landing on the Evian channel the first thing you notice is a bold ‘who we are’ welcome video right at the front and centre of their channel. 

Titled ‘This is Evian’ it's a 3:53 live action video that introduces the spa town in the French Alps where Evian water comes from. By telling that story, explaining why it's so special, how it's bottled - and also hinting at an ethical sustainability that is an important strand to the Evian brand - this content makes a great first impression.

It’s on the long side for an explainer video but it does a fantastic job of distilling (no pun intended) the essence of the brand.

...repurposed into 15 second vignettes.

The introductory video may have been on the longer side - but it’s actually been broken down into several 15 second vignettes, presumably for use as unskippable pre-roll ads.

This is very smart, enhancing the impact of the pillar content in an incredibly cost-effective way.

Playlists to keep content organised

The Evian channel itself is really well organised, with playlists containing different ‘types’ of video.

This is key. The easier you can make it for people to navigate to your video content, the more likely they are to find it - and, if it resonates with them, and they see a volume of interesting content rather than just one video, there’s a much higher chance that they’ll subscribe to be informed about new content as and when it’s posted.

your content in ‘groups’ - this will help you ideate content, but also organise them into playlists which are like channels for people to watch.

The most popular content

The next step in our investigation is to take a look at the individual video uploads and, particularly, sort them by popularity - to understand what’s been watched, how many times, and try to establish why?

8 of the top 10 videos - accounting for just under 13 million total views! - are in the 14-17 second mark, which illustrates the extent to which we’d estimate they’ve leaned on advertising.

Organic reach is great, but remember the real power of YouTube is often to reach ‘new’ people in a highly targeted way using ads.

And, as a wider point, whenever you create content - don’t forget to make a realistic plan of how it’s going to reach your audience.

On-brand, on-message - but striking a balance

Another thing that stands out on the Evian channel is how strongly their brand message comes through.

The company’s strapline ‘Live Young’ is reinforced by some very watchable, viral content like ‘The Evian Playground’ watched 2.6m times…

This is a really clever ‘sweet spot’ for YouTube marketers to aim for: it’s watchable, fun, engaging content that resonates much more strongly than a traditional ‘ad.’ This strikes to the heart of what YouTube is and who it’s for.

In a Think With Google case study, Michael Aidan, VP Marketing Danone Waters (CMO) & Head of Digital at Danone, said, “The beautiful thing about YouTube is that the engagement coming out of it has nothing to do with a forced message. I click to watch videos because I want to. I share videos because I like them. ”

And when it comes down to it, this level of visibility is crucial - in some industries more than others. Next time you’re shopping for water - a product side-by-side with five or six other products that look and taste the same - people have a reason to choose Evian.

Following on from this we see yet more 15-second snippets which underpin key elements of the brands ethical position around sustainability.

The final verdict

It’s hard to imagine a blander product than water - it literally tastes of nothing! And yet Evian through their YouTube channel demonstrate that a big brand can create a big impression.

People are unlikely in the extreme to subscribe to content about water, and how good it tastes. But by making the brand stand for more than this - they both differentiate the product when consumers see it on the shelves - and create an ethical and moral affinity between the audience and the brand.

This, as well as formatting and structuring their channel well with playlists and ‘hero content’ - and then targeting great content to targeted people through TrueView ads - explains why they’ve been able to reach such a lofty number of subscribers.

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