At Digital LA NewsFronts event, a panel noted that 90% of YouTube Original Channels will fail. We are in the age of “let’s all make content” without much thought or insights into what audiences will watch, be engaged with and share.

Recently, YouTube celebrated a birthday and released the statistic that, “72 hours of video are uploaded every minute” and “800 million people are watching a month.” And the big brands only comprise 8% of the YouTube Top 100 Channel List. The majority of the content in the Top 100 for YouTube are musicians, DIY, and comedy. You are competing for those 800 million people each month, so the videos you upload need to be better than good.

The first step in creating engaging video content is about understanding your audience.  You need to capture audience intelligence. Typically, this would be a time consuming step involving surveys and different research sources. Social data presents the opportunity to tap into conversations to analyze your audiences and provide you with context of what they like (and what they don’t).  And with these insights, a brand can now be creative with the ideas for the video content.  You have created the canvas and now you can paint the story.

Brands that operate purely on gut or creative instincts are also putting marketing dollars at risk for video content that is never watched or worse is highly critiqued and damages a brand.  In fact according to Altimeter, 10.7% brand crises are caused by inappropriate content.

Not only does analysis and trending of social conversation help you create great content, it helps you optimize your marketing dollars for advertising.  Commercials such as the latest Nike Football ad, that has over 14 million views, and P&G ad for the London 2012 Games, with nine million views, don’t require mass TV buys because it was well-timed and aligned to what their audiences would want to watch.  In fact, I haven’t seen either on TV – only discovered on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter via YouTube.  The Nike Football ad has over 700,000 Facebook Shares.

Emotional connection to an audience comes from when you understand them – what they like, want, desire. And from there, a brand can create or support compelling content on YouTube that can be shared by the audience. It starts with insights into audience and it ends with saving marketing spend.