Over the past 20 years, YouTube has evolved from a simple site for sharing videos into the most-watched streaming platform in the U.S., hosting more than 20 billion videos. Meanwhile, creators have gone from hobbyists with webcams to building studios and global fandoms that rival those of Hollywood. Those fans are watching and participating across every screen, with CTV now surpassing mobile to become the No. 1 way to watch YouTube in the U.S.
These shifts challenge conventional thinking about the traditional marketing funnel and the role of video across the consumer purchase journey.
Beyond the funnel: A new kind of consumer journey
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) confirmed the stakes for marketers when they declared, “it’s time for marketers to move beyond the linear funnel.” Their research showed that today’s journeys no longer follow a linear funnel but are fragmented across four simultaneous, overlapping behaviors: streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping.
Now, BCG’s latest research shows that planning around touchpoints that positively influence customer choices can unlock opportunities that planning against a funnel can’t. BCG defines influence here as “the ability to meaningfully and memorably affect consumer demand and outcomes.” And after analyzing the behavior of 10,000 U.S. shoppers, they found that video is deeply influential throughout the purchase journey, far beyond awareness alone.
According to a Google-commissioned BCG study of respondents who reported that digital video played a role in their path to purchase, 43% said it got them interested in buying a product, 50% said it made them aware of products or brands, 45% said that it helped them choose which product or brand to purchase, and 34% even said that it prompted them to buy a specific item.1
While video’s role across the journey is clear, not all platforms are equally essential to the consumer decision-making process. According to the same BCG study, surveyed respondents reported that YouTube was 1.7X more likely to positively influence brand consideration and 1.6X more likely to positively influence purchase decisions than social platforms.2
Yet YouTube’s outsized role across the journey is often overlooked in media plans that lean on funnel-based assumptions. For example, the same BCG study showed that, for the two categories studied, YouTube was significantly underutilized by marketers when its share of total ad spend was indexed against its influence on consumer purchase decisions. This disconnect shows one clear way that traditional models can leave value on the table.