YouTube Masthead Buys Built Around a Real Date

A masthead is a day, not an audience. It is reserved on a cost-per-day basis, it places your video at the top of the YouTube home feed across desktop, mobile and the television app in one country for that day, and it is worth buying only when a date already exists in the market: a switching window closing, an application deadline, a price change with a statutory notice period, a service going live in a region. If you cannot name the date and explain why a household would act that week rather than next month, we will tell you to put the money into in-stream and keep the difference. Media cost is yours, paid directly: The reservation is invoiced to you by Google. We take no rebate, no commission on spend and no share of the buy. Our fee is fixed in the contract and identical whether the day costs fifty thousand euro or five hundred thousand. Ask any agency proposing a masthead the same question in writing, and read the answer carefully. Eight weeks out: Home feed inventory is calendared per country and the good dates go early. We hold the date before the creative exists, agree the demographic gating available on the reservation, and write the kill criteria into the booking: what we swap, who decides, and by when. Frequency is capped at once per person per day by the format itself, which is the one thing about a masthead nobody has to manage. What the television app changes: On a TV screen the unit autoplays muted and there is no click worth planning around. A masthead plan that assumes a clickthrough has written off the largest screen it bought. We plan a spoken route instead, a phrase or branded query the viewer can carry to a second screen, checked in advance against the live results page so it lands where you intend rather than on a competitor's page. A code shown on screen for four seconds in a family room is not a plan. The week of: Traffic arrives concentrated, not spread. We load-test the form endpoint and the payment step against a multiple of your worst previous hour, agree what degrades gracefully, and brief your contact centre with the exact claim wording so the first caller does not hear something different from the ad. Remarketing lists go live twenty-four hours ahead. Without them, the day is reach and nothing else. The day itself: Somebody watches delivery hourly against the pacing curve, with the swap already approved and the alternate assets already trafficked. Nothing about a reserved day rewards improvisation. The week after: Sequenced follow-up against the audience the day created, and measurement that does not depend on the platform's own attribution: branded query volume in Search Console against the same weekday across the four preceding weeks, direct sessions, contact-centre volume by hour, and where the category allows, a same-day survey. Not included: Production, localisation and dubbing. The reservation itself, which you pay directly. Site engineering, where we run the load test and hand your team the failure points but do not fix them ourselves. If they are not fixed by the agreed cut-off, we will recommend moving the date rather than running into a wall. When we decline: No date, or a date nobody outside your company recognises. A site or contact centre that cannot absorb a concentrated day. A masthead wanted as evidence of ambition for an internal audience. And any brief where the answer to what happens if it works is not already staffed. The failure we see most often is a successful masthead landing on a Friday nobody rostered.