When digital media decides that it has to go analogue

How ironic that the world’s greatest and largest digital broadcaster, YouTube, has decided to use “analogue” promotion for its “Fan Fest” here in Sydney. Search online and you will find almost nothing other than this page and a “waitlist” holding page on Ticketek.

Remember YouTube claims the following statistics. With more than one billion users, every day people are watching hundreds of millions of hours and generating billions of views: up 50% year on year. Some 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s correct, every minute. Put that in perspective: that’s 432,000 hours of NEW video every day. No one can watch even a minor fraction of that, and mega-computers are needed just to keep track of it all.

With all of that digital reach and power, how come YouTube has decided to blanket Sydney bus stops with its Fan Fest posters, such as the one in Randwick (on High Street, outside of the Prince of Wales Hospital) below?

It does say something about the power of the “tangible”, and the limitations of digital advertising and social media in promotion, when YouTube (and its parent company, the all-powerful Google) has decided to utilise “outdoor advertising”. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America traces the earliest advertising to ancient Egyptian times. The modern billboard industry is widely accepted to have its start in the mid-1860s, with 1870 marking the beginning of modern outdoor advertising.

Food for thought in our digitally disruptive times.