YouTube Masthead Reservations, Planned and Defended

A Masthead is a date, not a strategy. It reserves the YouTube home feed for a day in one country, sold by a Google contact on a cost-per-day or reserved CPM basis rather than through the auction, and it earns its money only when something happens once: a launch with a stock date, a retail event fixed in the calendar like the French soldes, a category moment you cannot move. Of the Masthead requests that reach us, most should be a reach campaign at a third of the money, and we say that before we quote for the work. When it is defensible: A date, and something built behind it. A Masthead spends its entire audience inside 24 hours. If the product page, the stock, the customer service rota and the rest of the plan are not built for that day, the day is gone and no optimisation retrieves it. We ask to see the stock position and the support rota before we ask Google for a rate, and those two answers have talked more clients out of a Masthead than any argument of ours has. The booking: Market, date, device mix including the television surface where the market carries it, the muted autoplay cut and its audio-on version, companion tiles and their click paths, and the fallback where the format differs by device. We treat anything inside six weeks as a calendar where the dates worth having are already taken, and we will tell you which second-choice dates are usually still open rather than let you discover that from a rate request. Money and mandate: Our fee is fixed and quoted before we ask Google for a price. The media invoice reaches you at the amount billed, on mandate under Law 93-122, and both documents arrive together. We do not take a percentage of a Masthead. A percentage of the largest single line on a plan is an argument for booking one, and we would like to keep the standing to tell you not to. The day itself: One of us watching from six in the morning on the market's clock: rendering across surfaces and devices, companion click paths, feed health, stock levels and site response under load. Kill criteria and the named person who can make that call are agreed in writing beforehand, not debated on the morning. Measurement, and the control: A Masthead cannot be split-tested. There is no holdout on a home feed. What can be done is a geo control where the market structure allows one, a pre and post read on branded search and direct sessions at fifteen-minute resolution against the same weekday four weeks earlier, and a Brand Lift study only where the reserved impressions will produce enough survey responses to report. Below that threshold we do not commission the study and you do not pay for a result that comes back inconclusive. We decline: Mastheads with no date behind them. Reservations booked in our name so they can be marked up on the way to you. Any booking where the creative will arrive inside ten working days, because the format has a review path and a rejection on the morning of a reserved day cannot be recovered. Not for: Advertisers whose annual video budget is roughly the cost of the day. Brands with no owned destination able to absorb a day of traffic. And anyone who wants a Masthead because a competitor ran one. That is the reason it goes wrong most often, and it is not a reason we will write into a plan.