Comunicato Stampa: A Fresh Approach for YouTube: Unlocking Loyalty

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Introductions

Rachel Doherty: Welcome, everyone, to our latest episode of the TLC Marketing Show. I’m truly delighted to introduce not one, but two experts in the loyalty field today. We have Mike Brinn, who serves as our Global Loyalty Director here at TLC Worldwide, and our esteemed client, Hollie Clarke, the Product Marketing Manager at YouTube, with whom we’ve had the pleasure of working for the last 12 months or so.

Rachel Doherty: So, Mike can I hand over to you to introduce yourself a little bit and what you do at TLC?

Mike Brinn: Thanks, Rachel. It’s a pleasure to be having this conversation today with you and Holly, with whom we are delighted to be working. As you mentioned, I’ve served as the Global Loyalty Director at TLC for nearly 10 years. My responsibility here is to develop our loyalty proposition, not only as a business, but also in how we support our clients in developing their strategic approach. Most importantly, I suppose, is using our great reward content, to help build emotional loyalty with our clients and their customers.

Rachel Doherty: Thanks Mike. Hollie, if you could just give a brief overview of you and your role at YouTube.

Hollie Clarke: Yeah, so I’m Hollie. Thank you for having me. My role at YouTube is to oversee and develop programs and initiatives that support our creators on the platform across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It’s been amazing working with the TLC team.

TLC brief from YouTube

Rachel Doherty: Hollie, as a client of TLC, you’ve been working with Mike and the team here for a little over a year now. So, what were you originally looking for when you reached out to TLC?

Hollie Clarke: And what a great 12 months it’s been! Around 18 months ago, during our annual planning phase, after reviewing some of our insights and research points, we realized that we wanted to create a campaign that would reward and recognise our aspiring creators – those new creators just starting out on their journey on the platform.

At YouTube, we aren’t loyalty experts, so we wanted to ensure we had the right team to deliver the program we envisioned, leading us to reach out to TLC. Essentially, we sought someone to serve as a subject matter expert, guiding us on the types of rewards and recognition we should consider from a strategic perspective, and ultimately assisting with the delivery.

TLC thoughts on YouTube objective

Rachel Doherty: You mentioned at the beginning that you needed a loyalty expert, but I believe that after the last 12 months, you’re well on your way to becoming that expert in the field.

Mike, what were your initial thoughts from a loyalty perspective when we received the brief from YouTube? It’s quite different from what we’ve done with our other clients, both in the UK and Ireland, as well as globally.

Mike Brinn: Yeah, it is, and Holly really made us work for that brief because it was a competitive pitch at the beginning, so it took a bit of time. But what’s interesting is when you read the brief—and here’s a good tip for anyone working with an agency—a clear and succinct brief really helps us.

What came across in the brief was Hollie’s passion and YouTube’s passion for wanting to engage with their creators. In other companies, those creators might be customers, and I think when you want to be true to them, when you want to help them, engage with them, and show appreciation for what they’re doing for you, within this program, that’s the North Star.

So, no matter the industry, once you have that passion for your customers, and in this case, your creators, I think it’s all very much the same. It’s exciting because any brief is exciting, but what was particularly exciting for YouTube and challenging for us was that these creators are passionate about something themselves. That’s why they do things online. So, we had to figure out a way to make this program both generic and personalized.

That was a challenge, but in general, it’s just a great opportunity to make people feel appreciated, and once you can do that, you can create loyalty.

Loyalty Principles

Rachel Doherty: Absolutely. You touched on the audience here, which, of course, are the YouTube creators. Are there particular loyalty principles that we would follow with the creators, different from maybe your ‘normal consumer’ walking down the High Street?

Mike Brinn: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think it’s about creating that value exchange first. If you look at it, everyone has multiple loyalty cards because multiple loyalty programs offer some benefit. You could have several supermarket cards because you’re going to get a discount or some other benefit. But to create a good loyalty program, you must figure out how you can be relevant to them and how you can be loyal to your customer base, in a sense.

So, what’s interesting about this, which is not unique, is that you must find out how you can be relevant in their lives. What is it that’s important to them? Maybe they’d love a cup of coffee because they enjoy a break, but they also need some education because they want to improve at their job. This isn’t a B2B program, but in a sense, it’s similar because you’re trying to assist them in their lives.

We often refer to this as the Gemini effect, where it’s like wanting something for yourself and wanting something to help you improve, so there’s a blend that comes into a program, rather than the standard loyalty program. It’s about understanding people’s motivations and ultimately, what emotional connection you can create, because if you don’t get that right, you don’t really have any relevance.

You can have a discount program masquerading as a loyalty program, but you must figure out a way to emotionally connect with your customers, which they already have with YouTube anyways. So, it’s about how you can sprinkle a little more personalization on top. It’s our job. They do the hard work, day to day. They’ve built the brand. We just must find ways to make it a little more personalised.

What did YouTube learn?

Rachel Doherty: Yeah, absolutely. Holly, I’m going to throw you a bit of a curveball question, but was there anything that surprised you about the results in terms of how the creators responded to the rewards we were providing them?

Hollie Clarke: Yeah, it’s quite funny, to Mike’s point. When we first approached TLC, we emphasized all those things – we wanted it to be emotional, not generic. So we definitely didn’t want to give creators something as basic as a free cup of coffee, and we were very certain about that. Mike and the team were saying that usually, it redeems quite well; people love a free cup of coffee, and it taps into their emotional side. So, we decided to give it a go. It turned out to be one of the highest redeeming rewards.

So, as I say it again, we weren’t loyalty experts, and I think having that experience was amazing because we would have missed out on it if we hadn’t tried. So, the thing that I’ve learned is don’t be afraid to veer away from simple treats because sometimes they work really well. Absolutely, Mike’s right. We made sure to deliver rewards from an educational perspective, supporting the business side of the creators’ journey, but we also had to tap into their personal passions and lifestyles. And I think that was a big learning for us.

Rachel Doherty: Yeah, absolutely. Whether it’s a cup of coffee or a sausage roll, people know what they want, right?

Loyalty Connect Dubai Expo April 2024

Hollie, you’ve got an exciting week ahead. So, Mike and Holly, for everyone who doesn’t know, you’re speaking at Loyalty Connect, which is an Expo running in Dubai from the 23rd to the 24th of April. Hollie, maybe you can give us a bit of insight into what you’ll be speaking about when you feature next week.

Hollie Clarke: Yes, so exciting, and thank you for letting me share the stage, Mike. We’re going to give an overview of our campaign that we ran, diving deep into our initial campaign objectives, goals, and the planning process we went through. Then, of course, we’ll discuss a couple of high-level results, and most importantly, the learnings we gained from it and how we’re using them to implement our campaign for this year.

Rachel Doherty: So yeah, I mean next week is going to be very exciting. So, a huge, good luck to both of you. If anybody is attending the Loyalty Connect Expo next week, make sure to check out Mike and Hollie’s speaker note. We’ve also got the International Loyalty Awards connected to Loyalty Connect, and we’re very honoured as TLC to be shortlisted across six categories, for some of the work that we do globally. And of course, YouTube features within that under the category “Loyalty Redefined,” so it’s going to be an exciting week next week for sure.

Top of Form

Rachel Doherty: So, it’s also worth mentioning, Holly, you probably hate this, but I’m going to give you a huge shout-out for being nominated for the “30 under 40.” So, a huge congratulations on that, and we wish you a massive amount of luck next week as well.

Hollie Clarke: Thank you.

Challenges brands face in the Loyalty industry

Rachel Doherty: Last couple of questions before we finish up, but Mike, talk to me about some of the challenges that brands can face within the loyalty industry. With so much noise targeted at consumers, how do brands break through that noise?

Mike Brinn: Yeah, actually, just to reflect back on it because I’ve seen what Hollie’s going to present next week, so here’s a sneak preview. I think what’s really interesting when you talk about brands today thinking about loyalty is that in the last 18 to 24 months, one of the first things you start considering is return on investment. So while we can discuss the great stuff you need to do about engagement, emotional connection, etc., what’s interesting that you’ll find in Hollie’s presentation is their methodical approach to understanding how this program could work.

I think that’s really critical today – understanding what your customers want, what you can justify doing with them, and then learning from that through testing so you can roll out effectively. Because I think sometimes people are looking at the loyalty industry and saying, “I need a program.” The me-too programs traditionally fail. Capgemini came out with a stat a couple of years ago which stated that 97% of all transaction-led loyalty programs fail.

Loyalty today is about gaining the heart, not just the transaction, because the discount is just a spiral, isn’t it? You just keep discounting and discounting, and it doesn’t change the name of the program, and it could be anybody.

So, I think it’s a good learning, what you’ll see next week from Hollie’s presentation, is spending time understanding what your customers really want. Spend time trying to figure out where you can help them. Get back to basics of what’s the value exchange? I’m not against discounts, not against points. But what else can you do that can make you relevant and stay on message? I think most brands do an amazing job of creating a marketing message and/or brand positioning. And sometimes they then disconnect that with the loyalty program. They just go with the loyalty program to do a specific thing to drive transactions.

Make sure your program understands your customers and makes them feel special. Show that you care about them. Create a community if you can, all those things that work really well, and make sure you care about the world as well. That is a little bit of that sprinkle in there, and it’s no harm to give them a cup of coffee every now and again. To Hollie’s point, sometimes that’s frustrating because you do this big strategic review and then you say it’s a cup of coffee, there’s more to it than that, but I think it does work.

Personalisation

Rachel Doherty: Mike, we’ve spoken about it before in one of our previous episodes when we talk about personalization and how to connect with that audience. So I think that really resonates in terms of making sure that when you’re cutting through that noise and doing something maybe slightly outside of the box, you’re personalizing that content because that’s fundamentally what consumers are looking for – content from these brands. And of course, that’s exactly the whole premise of our YouTube campaign as well with the creators.

Wrap up

Rachel Doherty: So I think we’re going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much, Holly, for joining us. It’s been amazing to chat with you. So, a huge good luck for next week, both for your own award and ours, but also for your speaking note with Mike. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Hollie Clarke: Thank you so much for having me.

Rachel Doherty: Mike, as always thank you so much for providing that expertise. So, thanks again, but it was great to chat to you both and we’ll see everybody at the next episode and if you are in Dubai next week at Loyalty Connect, please pop by and speak to Holly and the team.