A content analytic study of the presence of brands and materialistic values in popular influencers’ Youtube videos in the Netherlands

1 Introduction

Despite the rise of other visual platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, YouTube remains incredibly popular among both users and advertisers. In 2022, YouTube reached 2.6 billion active users per month and generated a revenue of 29.2 billion US dollars (Curry, 2023). YouTube has the highest market penetration in the age group 3–17 (i.e., 89 %; Ofcom, 2022), as well as 18–29, 30–49, and 50–64 (respectively, 95 %, 91 %, and 83 %; Auxier and Anderson, 2021). Furthermore, it has the second highest penetration in the age group 65+ (i.e., 49 %; Auxier and Anderson, 2021). Given its extensive reach, YouTube has become a popular advertising venue. An automatic content analysis of 139,475 YouTube videos, utilizing scripts to derive referral links to online stores from the videos’ descriptions and a Structural Topic Model on the videos’ auto-generated captions to determine indirectly whether products were orally promoted, revealed that between 2009 and 2017 “YouTube users […] are confronted with an ever-growing share of product promotion” (Schwemmer and Ziewiecki, 2018, p. 1).

Much of YouTube’s revenue is generated by so-called YouTube influencers – users with thousands, ten-thousands, or even hundred-thousands of followers or more, who are often compensated (e.g., with money, free items, or store credit) to promote products and services (Domingues Aguiar and Van Reijmersdal, 2018). Owing to their wide reach and because exposure seems to impact both children’s and adults’ purchases and purchase requests (Domingues Aguiar and Van Reijmersdal, 2018; Rasmussen et al., 2022), spending on YouTube influencer marketing is still on the rise (Perez, 2022). While there are reasons to suspect that much YouTube influencer content is commercial in nature, the field currently lacks insight into the extent to which brands and materialistic values are promoted in this type of content (Taylor, 2020; Vrontis et al., 2021). Media effects researchers have expressed a need to dive deep into the content of social media influencer videos in to order to better grasp their effects on consumers’ purchase intentions and materialism (Dávila and Casabayó, 2024; Otto and Thies, 2024; Touminen et al., 2023).

In this study, we developed a codebook to examine the presence of brands and materialistic values in influencer content. We applied this codebook to 240 YouTube influencer videos to meet three research aims. The first aim is to determine how many brands viewers are exposed to in YouTube influencer videos, and to determine how these brands are featured. The second aim is to determine how many and what type of materialistic values viewers are exposed to in YouTube influencer videos. The third aim is to examine interrelationships and determine whether the number of brands and materialistic values are related to video genre and whether the number of materialistic values is related to the number of brands. By content analyzing the videos of YouTube influencers, we move beyond the research of Schwemmer and Ziewiecki (2018), whose work did not capture brands and brands presence directly, and did not include materialistic values.

2 Sample and codebook

To accomplish the set aims, the present study conducts a quantitative content analysis of YouTube influencer videos. It was designed and executed with the Internet Research Ethical Guidelines 3.0 by the Association of Internet Research in mind (Franzke et al., 2019). The sample consisted of a total of 240 videos uploaded by the 20 most popular YouTube influencer channels in the Netherlands (Born and Krul, 2019; Social Blade, 2020). The channels that were selected mostly posted Dutch content, and the number of subscribers for these channels ranged from 436 thousand to 16.2 million. Given their high number of subscribers, it is highly unlikely that the YouTube influencers will consider their content private, and because the material can be thought of as public, no informed consent was sought. Still, to protect the YouTubers’ individual interests, all analyzes and results pertain to the bulk of content only. No conclusions are drawn on the level of individual influencers or videos. All videos in the sample were downloaded on the same day in January 2020. For each channel, we downloaded one video for each month of 2019; in January, we downloaded the first video that was uploaded; in February, the second; in March, the third, etc. We used this sampling approach because professional influencers tend to use fixed social media posting schedules. The videos in our sample lasted between 2:03 minutes and 2 hours and 2:00 minutes.

The codebook consisted of 18 pages of text, containing open-ended and multiple choice questions about the YouTube videos, as well as brief definitions for concepts like direct promotion (“explicitly encouraging the audience to buy or rent products or services of a sponsor, for instance, by urging them to go to the store or by mentioning prices or discounts”) and indirect promotions (“promoting an item by mentioning benefits of that item, without making a direct purchase appeal”). After the codebook was finalized, it was programed in Qualtrics to ease data registration and access. Fifteen percent of the videos were randomly selected and double-coded by two coders independently to assess the inter-coder reliability. Inter-coder reliabilities were calculated in SPSS using the macro by Hayes for Krippendorff’s alpha (Hayes and Krippendorff, 2007). The codebook consisted of three sections. Krippendorff’s alpha ranged from .92 to 1.00 for all the variables in the first section, .94 to 1.00 for the second section, and from .68 to 1.00 for the third section of the codebook (for a complete overview, see Table 1 and 2).

Section one dealt with the general characteristics that were logged before the video was viewed. Here, we determined the number of subscribers and the length of the video, as well as the number of views, the number of thumbs up, the number of thumbs down, and the number of comments. In case there were no comments (16.3 %), the comment section had been turned off by the YouTuber himself or herself. Finally, we also coded the main genre of the YouTube influencer video.

Section two dealt with brand presence in the videos and was largely based on previous work by Malik and Wojdynski (2014) and Smit et al. (2009). We also took inspiration from previous content analyzes of brand placements in movies (Naderer et al., 2019; Nelson and Deshpande, 2013), television programs (Chan and Lowe, 2018; Elsey and Harris, 2016; Smit et al., 2009; Speers et al., 2011), and music videos (Sánchez-Olmos and Castelló-Martínez, 2020), as well as content analyzes of brand placements online, focusing on influencer content on social media, including YouTube and Instagram (Cranwell et al., 2015; Coates et al., 2019; Elkin et al., 2010; Hendriks et al., 2020; Kolo and Haumer, 2018; Primack et al., 2017; Schwemmer and Ziewiecki, 2018; Tur-Viñes and Castelló-Martínez, 2021), blogs (Boerman et al., 2018), and frequently downloaded apps (Meyer et al., 2018). The number of brands pertains to the number of unique ‘real’ brands included in the video; the YouTubers’ own merchandise is excluded. A brand is included in the count if its logo is partially or fully visible, when it is orally mentioned, or both. Unlike Schwemmer and Ziewiecki (2018), we did not examine whether specific brands are mentioned in the video descriptions.

Section three dealt with the presence of materialistic values in the videos and was inspired by the three dimensions of the Material Values Scale developed by Richins and Dawson (1992). According to these authors, materialistic values comprise three dimensions: ‘Material centrality,’ the importance consumers attribute to possessions and their acquisition; ‘Material happiness,’ the happiness consumers associate with possessions and their acquisition; and ‘Material success,’ the extent to which consumers associate certain possessions and their acquisition as markers of success.

3 Results

4 Conclusion and discussion

Previous studies examining solely the presence of food and beverages (Coates et al., 2019), or the presence of alcohol, tobacco, and/or electronic cigarettes (Cranwell et al., 2015; Hendriks et al., 2020) in influencer content found high levels of displays of these items, but relatively low levels of branding. However, based on our results focusing on all product categories, we conclude that YouTube influencer videos are saturated with brands and materialistic values: most of the selected videos contained brands (97.5 %) and materialistic values (93.8 %), and they contained quite a few (an average of 8.93 brands and 3.86 materialistic values). Brands play a prominent role in YouTube videos without being directly promoted. More than half of the videos contained a sponsorship disclosure. Interestingly, these mainly indicated that the video was not sponsored (37.9 % vs. 12.9 % of disclosures indicating that a video was sponsored). Brands were often used by YouTubers themselves, who typically indirectly promoted brands and mostly included them visually – for instance, by wearing certain attire or consuming certain snacks. Although nearly all videos contained brands and materialistic values, the number of brands and materialistic values differed greatly across video genres and were most dominant in the vlogs and beauty and fashion categories.

Our findings bear important theoretical and practical implications. Scholars have recently called for content analyzes of social media influencer videos (Taylor, 2020; Vrontis et al., 2021), because these can advance our understanding of their potential to affect consumers’ purchase intentions and materialism (Dávila and Casabayó, 2024; Otto and Thies, 2024; Touminen et al., 2023). The high numbers of brands and materialistic values found in our sample, validates future research into their effects. The fact that 45.0 % of the videos in our sample lacked a sponsorship disclosure is alarming. Current EU legislation requires the use of disclosures for all types of social media marketing (European Commission, 2023), but previous research has indicated that a large share of influencers from various EU member states do not comply yet (European Commission, 2024). Hence, the awareness of current legislation and the use of disclosures should be promoted and monitored over time and – if needed – non-compliance needs to become penalized.