Branded music videos on YouTube and their associations with brand awareness among Vietnamese youth

In the context of accelerating digitalization, social media platforms have reshaped branding and advertising practices, encouraging entertainmentoriented communication strategies. Focusing on Vietnam and its digitally engaged Generation Z audience, this study examines how cue-specific attention to branded music videos (BMVs) on YouTube is associated with brand awareness, operationalized as two memory-based brand-identification outcomes: aided brand recognition and contextual brand retrieval (recall-proxy). A crosssectional survey was administered to Vietnamese Generation Z respondents who regularly use YouTube and reported familiarity with at least five of ten preselected BMVs (n = 305). Using descriptive statistics and multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with robust standard errors in STATA, the study tests whether self-reported attention to specific BMV elements, particularly lyrics and slogans, is associated with the two brand-identification outcomes. Results suggest an asymmetric pattern across the two dimensions of brand awareness. Attention to slogans shows a positive and statistically significant association with contextual brand retrieval (p < 0.05), whereas attention to lyrics shows only marginal evidence of association with aided brand recognition (p < 0.10). Other measured visual and narrative elements do not demonstrate statistically significant associations in the models, and overall explanatory power is modest. Taken together, the findings indicate that verbal/auditory cues may be more closely linked to brand-identification outcomes than other elements in musicoriented, multitasked YouTube consumption contexts. By integrating brand awareness theory and music video theory, this study contributes empirical evidence from a non-Western market and offers practical implications for designing BMVs aligned with specific branding objectives (retrieval-oriented vs. recognition-oriented awareness).