JOM study: Building and home improvement industry in advertising targeting

Hamburg, 19.11.2020. Many people know the situation: You want to renovate or plant a vegetable patch in your own garden, but don’t know how. That’s why many people turn to YouTube videos to get help from professionals. The platform thus holds great potential for the entire do-it-yourself sector (DIY stores, garden centers, tool manufacturers, etc.) to reach contextually relevant target groups with their messages. The digital specialists at the JOM Group, an agency for hybrid marketing communications, have investigated the extent to which the DIY sector uses this content and potential to address people in a specific situation of need.
The sobering result: almost the entire industry leaves this potential unused. Only in 4.4 percent of the YouTube videos viewed did a company in the DIY sector advertise.

For this purpose, a random sample of 500 views, distributed over 10 videos, was conducted in July 2020 and checked for their advertising exposure. The content of these ten videos related to DIY home improvement topics around robotic lawn mowers, filling walls, seeding lawns, cutting grass, setting dowels, installing sinks, cleaning patios, painting fences, landscaping gardens, and wallpapering. The average length of a video was eight minutes and forty-eight seconds.

The ads from the 500 total videos played fell into the following categories: Sports, Financial, Consumer Electronics, Hygiene, Household, Tourism, Automotive, Food, and DIY/DIY. Finance had the largest share (26 percent) with 128 ads, followed by advertised products from sports (18.2 percent) and hygiene (17.6 percent). Consumer electronics, household, tourism and automobiles accounted for between 7 percent and 9.2 percent. Tourism (2 percent) and food (2.4 percent) were promoted least frequently. In 35 videos (7 percent), no ad was placed at all. Only 22 ads from the 500 videos played were related to products or services consistent with DIY craft themes. Thus, the proportion of those ad content that followed the content of the videos was only 4.4 percent.

YouTube is considered one of the most important platforms when it comes to online advertising. More than 400 hours of video material are uploaded every minute worldwide, generating 25 billion visits per month. It also has a strong position in Germany. 76.7 percent of the total German population uses YouTube. Among the most popular categories are educational videos/tutorials. Over 50 percent of users watch videos to learn things they haven’t done before.

“In this respect, the question arises as to why DIY advertisers disregard more than 95 percent of the potential, even though it is possible to select each video in a targeted manner on YouTube,” says Henning Ehlert, Managing Director JOM Group. “Furthermore, this would also massively improve the relevance of advertising for the end consumer.”

The following graphic once again presents the results of the study visually. Clearly identifiable are the three most frequent advertisers, which primarily comprise the areas of finance, sports and hygiene.