With no fanfare, Google opens Brandcast to the public.
Google has very quietly opened up their Brandcast product on the web with no official announcement or fanfare. There is nothing on the Google blog about it either. This may be because they are still working on the process and while there is obvious structure on the site, a number of things are not the way they should be, along with errors when clicking on several areas of the site. You can see Brandcast.com for yourself and see the general structure. There is not much behind it. The URL of "http://www.brandcast2012.com/" does not match what we would have expected such as "http:\\brandcast.google.com" or something to that effect.
We would not even know about this had not The Next Web made everyone aware of the existence of this site. The intent of Brandcast is to help you determine the best ways to target and reach your audience with your brands. This is all on top of YouTube. Video sharing has become a great way to reach your audience.
Why should you care about Brandcast?
That is really the question as to how it is going to benefit you. You need to attempt to reach your target audience with a product and doing that via YouTube advertising is often unclear. It does not matter what your product is, but you need to associate it with Brand recognition. With a brand, you need to then market that brand so that people know who you are and why your brand is important to them. Google started laying the foundation with Adwords for videos last fall so that you could place your ads and manage them as well. Of course, this is only of value if you are targeting a large geographic area as YouTube videos are not constrained by geography.
Since Brandcast is a site which assists you in targeting your audience, it is going to be a resource once they have added some depth to it. It currently has 3 main groupings to the site and is fairly intuitive as to how to navigate it. The 3 main groupings showing up right now are YT Original Channels, Find you audience and Marketer Resources.
Under YT Original Channels, you are shown a series of 19 categories which obviously may changes as other categories are reflected. These are tied to YouTube categories. All of these have nothing under them and return an error in loading the page as this is obviously a work in progress for Google. But they do provide you with an idea as to how this site might be beneficial to you.
The Find your audience group has under it a break down of potential target audiences which you might what to advertise to and is not complete. They have Teens, Men 18-34, Females 18-34, Adults 18-34, Men 18-49 and Adults 18-49. They are missing Females 18-49 for some reason and should be correcting that soon. There is nothing under any of these age groups and clicking on any of them returns an error. But you do see how they are showing you the audiences which you would most likely what to target. The under 18 market is one which spends a lot of time with YouTube and will more than likely end up here.
The last section is for Marketer Resources and under that you are displayed 3 items of View More Content, Follow Us On Google+ and Research Request. The View More Content takes you over to YouTube and shows "This channel is not available:. The Follow Us on Google+ takes you over to YouTube for Marketeers on Google+. The Research Request displays a screen to fill in your information and email address so they can contact you later.
Exactly how this will play out for other than the medium to large business has yet to be determined. Much of that is because there is a lack of published information as to how things are going to be working and we are making assumptions based on what we are seeing here. We can expect to see much change over the next week.
The YouTube Brandcast is reportedly to be announced on May 2nd at a press event in New York. Expect to hear more about this in the coming weeks from Google.
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