Common YouTube Marketing Mistakes From the Post-Google Era
The mistakes that tripped up brands trying YouTube in 2007, from ads pretending not to be ads to ignoring the comment section entirely.
By the fall of 2007, enough brands had tried their hand at YouTube that the failures were becoming as instructive as the successes. Google had owned the platform for about a year, the site had just hosted a widely watched Republican presidential debate built around user-submitted video questions, and advertisers were paying attention. Plenty still got it wrong. These were the recurring mistakes.
Making an ad and hoping nobody would notice. The single biggest misstep was uploading a conventional television-style commercial and expecting it to spread like the homemade videos that went viral. YouTube’s audience in 2007 was unusually quick to call out anything that felt like disguised advertising in the comments, and a video that got tagged as fake or as a shill in the first few hours rarely recovered.
Disabling comments and ratings. Some companies, nervous about negative feedback, turned off comments entirely or deleted anything critical. This backfired in two ways: it signaled that the brand wasn’t confident enough to engage, and it threw away free, public customer feedback that competitors without a YouTube presence had no access to at all.
Uploading once and disappearing. A single video, however well made, rarely built an audience on its own. Channels that gained a following in 2007 posted regularly enough that subscribers had a reason to check back, while one-off “viral” attempts mostly sat with a few hundred views and no momentum.
Chasing a big-budget stunt instead of a repeatable format. A handful of expensive, elaborately produced videos got attention that year, and a lot of marketing teams tried to copy that approach on a fraction of the budget, with predictably weaker results. The channels quietly succeeding were usually running a simple, repeatable format, tips, demos, behind-the-scenes clips, rather than betting everything on one expensive swing.
Ignoring where the video would be found. Titles written for internal branding purposes (“Q4 Product Launch Teaser”) rather than for what a searcher would type into YouTube or Google’s search box meant a lot of decent videos never got discovered outside the people who already had the link.
Forgetting the video needed a next step. Plenty of videos ended cold, with no mention of a website, no call to visit a store, nothing. Viewers who enjoyed a video had no obvious path to becoming a customer, so even genuine attention rarely turned into anything measurable.
Not paying attention to what was already working. By late 2007 there were enough clear examples, deal-of-the-day teasers, hands-on demo videos, campaign-style debate submissions that CNN had aired that year, to show what held an audience’s attention. Companies that ignored those patterns and insisted on their own untested approach were, in effect, running an expensive experiment with no benefit of hindsight.
None of these mistakes required a large budget to avoid. They mostly required treating YouTube as its own medium with its own norms, rather than a free channel to rebroadcast a television ad or a press release with a play button on it.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2007 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
