If you’re unfamiliar with Tanacon (recently dubbed the FyreFestival of influencer events) here’s the necessary background information–

Best known for her vlogs and pop-music, Tana Mongeau is a 20-year-old YouTuber with over 5 million subscribers across her two channels. Tana recently attempted to create her own, alternative to Vidcon, which she dubbed ‘Tanacon’.

The whole ordeal started when, according to a video Tana created, Vidcon had promised her a VIP pass then withdrew the invite after she’d promoted the conference to her fans. After her anti-Vidcon rant generated millions of views Tana decided to launch Tanacon and make an anti-Vidcon. The original vision for Tanacon was that it would be free and all fans would be given the chance to meet their favorite creators (Vidcon charges for tickets).

Tanacon quickly drew a roster of over 65 well known creators including uber famous YouTubers Casey Neistat and Shane Dawson to make appearances. In the weeks leading up to Tanacon the event built up a huge amount of publicity. Tana promised that fans would get 4X the value of the price of their paid tickets (and promised to let many fans get in free).

Tanacon ended up being a disaster of epic proportions.

Within hours of opening its doors Police shut down Tanacon. Apparently 5,000 fans showed up – almost all of them spent hours in the hot sun waiting to get inside. One fan collapsed and was taken away by paramedics, hundreds of others got sunburns.

The event was massively understaffed, had minimal security, and almost none of the attendees got into the venue to see any of their favorite creators. The swag bags that were promised to be 4x the value of a ticket turned out to be filled with a few stickers and some condoms.

It was exposed later, via a three-part documentary by YouTuber Shane Dawson, that Tanacon was put in the hands of a 21-year-old talent manager with questionable credentials. The documentary exposed countless missteps, but the most egregious was that Tana had agreed to host over 5,000 fans, in spite of the hotel only having capacity for 1,000.

Why does any of this matter, and, why am I writing about this?

I think this shit show is the result of the same kind of behavior we see in (a lot of) influencer marketing. People quickly build audiences and become ‘influencers’ – they oftentimes have millions of adoring fans that hang on their every word and will do just about anything the influencers asks.

The issue then becomes that they don’t have any ‘real’ business experience. While they know how to build their audience and cultivate their community they don’t necessarily have the same skillsets that translate to understanding timetables, budgets, project management, etc. As a result they get in over their head and don’t take their newfound responsibilities of running a business seriously when it comes to working with major brands and companies.

In the case of Tanacon – they signed a contract with the Marriott to host the event, which stated they could host just over 1,000 people. Tana and team decided to say ‘fuck it’ and sell tickets for 5,000 people. This is not the behavior of normal businesspeople, and its wayyyyy out of bounds of common sense.

Unfortunately it is too common.

I’ve worked with thousands of influencers. Some of whom are phenomenal and professional – they’re buttoned up, they know what they know and delegate the rest to their team.

There’s another contingent of influencers that believe because they have their audience the only thing that matters is that they’re ‘authentic’ – that this ‘authenticity’ comes at the price of any real responsibility and is a hall pass to be a terrible business partner. Deadlines are missed, the work promised comes back as something totally different, and communication is lacking. I’ve had influencers ghost on deadlines, come back late and say that they don’t want to post their original idea after they already shot it, have asked to get out of contracts right before deadlines were supposed to be met (and even right after) without real reasons.

This behavior is more common in influencer marketing than in any other business or aspect of marketing and advertising I have ever seen. It is too common. Just after Vidcon I was hanging out with a buddy that is a talent manager. While hanging out one of his talent called to say that a video he’s been working on for a brand for the last week and was already a few days late to post wasn’t going to work for his channel and he no longer wanted to post it. This was a video the influencer concepted and sold to the brand. This was a video he’d edited entirely himself knowing the deadline and where it was going to live. He had 100% creative control, but still didn’t want to post it because he didn’t think his audience would like it.

This is not acceptable behavior for a professional. If it was any other part of the ad industry you’d work late – make it happen (or just think things through far enough in advance to avoid issues).

I don’t mean to disparage all influencers or paint the brush that they are all a pain in the ass. They’re not.

However, I do think that there’s a lot out there that are burning bridges for the rest of the industry.

Marketers and agencies are working with billion dollar brands. There are campaign deadlines and bosses these people are accountable to, there are stockholders, and real consequences.

Many influencers are much more like the Hank and John Green who developed Vidcon. That event is buttoned up. It’s been slowly growing over the last nine years and is hands down one of the best-run industry conferences I go to (full disclosure I’m on the Vidcon Advisory Board, but I’d believe this even if I wasn’t).

Hank and John Green have taken the even seriously from the beginning – they’ve planned methodically with venues booked over a year in advance. This past year Vidcon hosted over 30,000 people, hundreds of creators, and worked with dozens of sponsors over the four days of the event. Sessions and keynotes started on time. Security was tight, and the event was incredibly professional and brand friendly. This is no small feat.

I love unbridled ambition and the passion of young entrepreneurs. However, within the influencer-marketing ecosystem there are a lot of bad actors who need to understand that if they want to work with brands they need to take the contracts they sign seriously.

Many influencers are creating terrible experiences for the fans and the brands.

In short – don’t be like Tana and ignore the contracts you’ve signed and not take things seriously. Instead be like Hank and John Green – build your reputation as a trusted source, think through who you work with, the agreements you sign, and the work you decide to take on.

Would you rather have one foot in the past or one in the future?

It’s true that, from the looks of it, Cannes is much more fun – you won’t find anyone popping bottles of champagne on a yachs atVidCon. Instead, you’re far more likely to find a few digital influencers, forward thinking brands, agencies, and talent managers huddling around cups of StarbucksCcoffee in some hotel lobby hammering out a few deals.

That said,VidCon is at the epicenter of what is happening within influencer marketing, social media as a whole, and more importantly – what is happening with culture. Digital influencers are the most recognizable celebrities among teens today, becoming a digital influencer is the most desirable job amongst teens today, and the most engaged athlete online is now an E-Sports athlete, the Twitch Streamer, Ninja.

I personally take pride in the fact that while other agencies send execs to the South of France to hear talks, such as ‘What is Innovation”  myself and my team are on the ground working and meeting with influencers at VidCon.

VidCon is where innovation is happening – even the major platforms understand this and make major announcements there. For example, this year Instagram waited until the first day of VidCon to launch IGTV (instead of doing it during the peak of Cannes). Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube also followed suit making a variety of announcements around platform updates, features, and partnerships onsite atVidCon.

Looking at the ad trades you’ll see that brands and agencies are struggling to capture eyeballs. Ad formats are shrinking and advertisers are having trouble even watching a 6 second ad. Marc Pritchard, the CMO of P & G stated that they “stopped wasting money on 30-second ads, and we’re designing ads to work in 2 seconds,” and that “it is time for marketers and tech companies to solve the problem of annoying ads and make the ad experience better for consumers,”

I agree with Marc that marketers need to solve the problem for annoying ads – but, the reality is the solution exists, and I think if he and his team spent more time immersing themselves inVidCon, and the ecosystem as a whole they’d have the answer already. While P&G is struggling to get ads to work in 2 seconds, people are watching influencer content that is as much as 6 hours long.

According to recent studies long form video content consumption is up 30% over 2017. The #1 Most subscribed YouTuber (PewDiePie) regularly posts 20 min long videos, and the most downloaded podcasts are all well over 45 minutes on average (with some top podcasters like Joe Rogan going as long as three hours).

Clearly attention span isn’t the issue – most advertisers are just not great at creating content and putting it in front of the right consumers.

My team and I at Epic Signal certainly don’t bat 1000, but getting past two seconds is fucking terrible and certainly the exception rather than the rule. Instead, by having an understanding of these platforms, how to work with influencers, and integrate paid media – we’ve seen fifteen minute long pieces of branded content generate 75% completion rates. On a recent campaign with Boost Mobile we integrated influencers into paid social (in addition to having them create their own branded content) and beat the previous CPA benchmark by 50%. The list goes on.

This success comes from us investing a lot of time with these platforms, ingratiating ourselves in influencer communities, attending events likeVidCon (and a lot of trial and error).

I say this not to brag, but to point out that much of the industry is still caught up in the gigantic circle jerk of trying to impress one another with champagne and yachts – resulting in an inability to communicate with consumers.

Just like anything else you’ve got to put in your ten thousand hours – that means spending a little less money on champagne, Rosé, and yachts in France. Instead, why not invest in listening to people who are able to get millions of fans to hang on their every word for hours on end, like you can at VidCon?

End of rant

——————————–

The last year has been pretty incredible within the YouTube ecosystem.

The space has gotten a lot of buzz and a lot more ad dollars flowing into it. Previously brands were experimenting, but not quite investing the way they should.

A lot of this really changed when Disney made a huge investment in the ecosystem, when they purchased Maker Studios about a year ago. When Disney spends half a billion dollars on something people tend to take notice.

The ad dollars really started flowing in as a result of the credibility that Disney lent to the space. The acquisition also kicked off a string of acquisitions and you could really sense and see the hype in all the PR and press that had flowed out of the space over the last year.

YouTubers were on the cover of Fast Company, they were on the cover of Variety, celebrated as the future of celebrity. They were on the cover of Adage and Adweek. And the overarching narrative throughout this was that YouTube is the future of media, entertainment, celebrity, advertising, and within the ad industry everywhere you looked it was YouTube is the future, the future, the future.

But I call bullshit. Not because YouTube isn’t the future of all these things, I think it’s got a bright future, it’s more that YouTube for a long time has been the past and the present. The platform is over a decade old and for nearly as long its been around has been having a huge impact on media, entertainment and advertising.

For as long as I’ve been working in this space, which is about nine years now, I’ve been able to work with a lot of the same channels and creators and leverage a lot of the same tactics and still continue to deliver value to brands and continue to surprise and delight them.

But brands have had a tough time with this space.

Look at the top 100 most subscribed channels on YouTube and there’s not a single consumer packaged goods or apparel brand. Now, compare this to other platforms like Facebook where there’s nearly a dozen brands in the top 100.

YouTube culture has become pop culture but that this is not a new phenomenon by any means, this has been in place for a long time. Despite this, advertisers have largely ignored the opportunities. But you can make huge gains in this space.

I imagine a lot of people are familiar with this space and probably thinking ‘I get it, I understand what’s happening’.

But, what do you think of when you hear ‘Breaking The Internet’? I imagine a lot of people think of Kim Kardashian’s Paper Magazine cover photo showing off her rather large assets. That photo was deemed to have ‘Broken the Internet’ because of all the press coverage and hype it generated online, and it did generate a lot.

The week following the release of the photo, there were close to 600,000 mentions of Kim Kardashian’s Twitter handle, which is a lot. But, that this was the first time in about a year that she generated more conversation and more mentions than this PewdiePie, the popular YouTuber who posts videos of himself playing video games with commentary.

In a typical month PewDiePie generates 50% more conversation on Twitter than Kim Kardashian. And what’s crazy is he’s not alone, he is by no means the exception.

A couple other great examples, Jenna Marbles versus Chelsea Handler. Jenna Marbles generated ten times as many tweets last month as Handler.

Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Oakley. Neil Patrick Harris hosted the Oscars, he’s huge. Tyler Oakley generated, over 20 times as many mentions of his name.

It might be easy to dismiss this and say these may be outliers or this is a new phenomenon that digital stars are overtaking traditional stars, but, it’s not.

Going back to 2008, I was working with EA on the launch of the video game. And we came up with a pretty cool campaign. We gave early access to a portion of the game, where you could design your own creature, to a handful of traditional and digital celebrities. Everybody participating went, created their own creature, and then invited their audiences to go vote for them. The winner with the most votes was going to get $15,000 to donate to the charity of their choice.

We had traditional celebrities like Stan Lee,Katy Perry, Elijah Wood, Carlos Santana, The Flight of the Concords. On the digital celebrity side we had folks like Kevin Rose, Phil DeFranco, iJustine, Veronica Belmont, the lead editor of Kotaku.

Who do you think won? Was it Katy Perry who just did the Super Bowl halftime show? Elijah Wood who at the time was at the peak of his Lord of the Rings fame?

It wasn’t any of the traditional celebrities that won. It was Phil DeFranco who posted one video and in 24 hours got over 100,000 votes, it was incredible. He beat all the traditional celebrities by a landslide.

So, this shift has been possible for so long, I mean this was seven years ago.

Why isn’t everybody doing this?

The ad industry, my industry, admittedly is probably as guilty of this as much as anybody.
We’re obsessed with what our peers are doing, who they’re working with, what press they’re getting, what awards everyone is winning. This is holding us back.

For example, let’s take a look at the content creation process as it typically exists with the brands and agencies today. It’s not the most efficient system.

Typically the brand gives the agency a creative brief. The agency goes through rounds and rounds and rounds with a number of creatives, finally lands on an idea, they take that to the brand, typically there’s back and forth. Now from there they get sign off and it goes back to the agency. And the agency then doesn’t go off and produce it, what they do then is they go and hire a director.

After you finally hire the right director, then you go into post production – casting, storyboarding, and so on. After a few weeks you end up on set and then you’ve got to pay for a production crew, you’ve got to pay for craft services, it’s a whole ordeal. There’s unions, and if you go past eight hours you’ve got to pay time and a half and it’s a big expense.Then finally after that you go into post production – editing, color correction, music, sound design and so on. And at the end of it you’ve spent a couple hundred thousand dollars and nobody’s even seen your spot. Then you have to support it with media.

Now, you could do that or you could brief one of these YouTube creators.

Give them a brief, allow them to create, concept, produce, and distribute a video to their millions or thousands of fans and followers.

When they distribute content, it’s to their hundreds of thousands, or millions, of fans who are desperate for the content. And oftentimes, not always, you can do this for about as much as you pay for craft services on a typical production set.

Despite this, one of the things that I often hear when I’m kind of pitching this to clients is, “Well don’t you think this is a fad?

And, I don’t really think that’s the case and that’s because these creators have a direct line of communication to their fans, there’s a feedback loop there.

You create one bad video as a YouTuber, you see all the comments, the feedback, you can even look at the analytics and see where people are dropping off and you can leverage those insights and make changes and adjustments with the next video. People are not shy at all about sharing their opinion with creators. So, the YouTubers have an opportunity to learn from this.

Now, compare this to the studio system.

If you’re an actor and you’re in a terrible movie that didn’t make any money, the odds are a studio doesn’t want to go out and hire you again. There’s a saying, “You’re only as good as your last project.” And it makes sense, a studio doesn’t want to invest and throw good money after bad.

But, this direct line of communication that YouTubers have is incredibly powerful. And it’s more than just likes, comments, and shares, there’s a real tangible benefit to this. In fact, Variety did a study among teenagers asking them who are the most popular celebrities today and the results were pretty incredible.

Of the top 20 most recognizable celebrities 50% were YouTubers, and all five of the top five were YouTubers.

And, going back to my point earlier about this not being a fad, these guys having real staying power, number one on that list is Smosh, who were the first creator that I worked with way back in 2006. They haven’t gone away. Even back in 2006 they were averaging two million views a video, so it’s pretty incredible.

Now, who’s number 20 on this list that Variety put together? Number 20 on is Leonardo DiCaprio. Poor Leo, not only has he not won an Oscar, but he’s also lost a popularity contest to YouTubers.

As an advertiser it’s tempting to throw my money at these top creators – those on the cover of Adage or Adweek or Variety.

But, it’s important to keep in mind the context of the new media landscape. Old media is based on scarcity, new media is based on abundancy.

Twenty, thirty, and forty years ago there were only so many distribution outlets, and so many networks, so you only had so many celebrities. Today, the whole model has totally flipped on its head.

YouTube has:
– Over a billion visitors every month
– 300 hours of content being uploaded every single minute.
– 50% of visitors are coming from mobile (so it’s a highly fractured audience)
– 10,000 channels with at least 50,000 subscribers

So as an advertiser that’s a huge opportunity, 50,000 subscribers is a lot.

To put it into context, there are shows on MSNBC, that don’t even get 50,000 viewers. So you have 10,000 outlets with the potential for TV scale. So you don’t need to necessarily go for the biggest creator to be effective, bigger isn’t always better.

A great example of ‘bigger not always being better’ is six years ago I was working with DKNY on the launch of a new fragrance and we faced a bit of a crossroads.

We were deciding how to allocate our dollars, we knew we wanted to work with influencers and we were debating whether we should we give our money to one of the top five fashion makeup beauty gurus at the time, or should we distribute our dollars across up and coming creators?

We did the math and on a cost per view basis it made a lot more sense to distribute our dollars across ‘up and coming’ creators. We got about 50% more views than if we’d allocated it to one of the top more recognizable creators. This was six years ago, there wasn’t as much competition among advertisers as there is today. By going with the ‘up and comers’ we were not only getting a more efficient spend but we were also tapping into more niche communities that hadn’t been as saturated with brand names like the those following the top creators.

In working within this space I definitely recommend you let your competitors be star fuckers.

It’s good to buy low, sell high. Spread your dollars amongst the most relevant creators because you’ve got plenty of options in terms of scale.

So, why does all this matter?

Well, in a lot of ways, we in the ad industry are behaving in a manner not that dissimilar from the same teenagers that we’re trying to target. I mean, we’re obsessed with what our peers think of us, we want all of these awards, this recognition, these accolades without necessarily putting the time and the effort to understand the realities of the way the world is working today.

By continuing to tell ourselves YouTube, Snapchat, Vine, etc are something that’s going to be big in the future. We wash our hands of taking any responsibility and taking action today. We need to change our mode of thinking.

An analogy that seems appropriate is this story I heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger. I heard that when Schwarzenegger was training for Mr. Universe he took ballet classes because he thought it would help him with his posing on stage.

At first I thought that sound so ridiculous, a bodybuilder doing ballet?!?! His peers must have thought he was crazy.

However, when you take a step back it makes so much sense. He wanted to look more elegant and fluid when he was doing his poses. So what more effective way to understand how to do that than study ballet? Who cares if it’s different, it works.And I think we need more of that thinking in advertising.

How ridiculous does it sound to say, “Hey, you know, don’t give your money to a bunch of professional directors, invest it in YouTubers, and not even necessarily the most popular ones.”

We in advertising can spend a few more years and try and win some awards for commercials, or invest in this space and in new ideas and ways of working.

Because, YouTube is not going to future proof you, it’s not the end all, be all of advertising. It’s investing in a mode of thinking and basing decisions on facts, and the realities of the way the landscape is working. When you do that, even if it looks ridiculous to your peers, you’re going to adapt and change and set yourself up for success to evolve and be able to learn, and ultimately that mode of thinking is what’s going to let you thrive and set you up for success in the long run.

As a brand why should we develop our own YouTube channel? What should we do to grow? Why aren’t we growing subscribers?

WHY YOUTUBE MATTERS
It’s the largest social network in US & has more millennials than any cable network.

WHY MOST BRANDS ARE STRUGGLING
YouTube is the ultimate litmus test for brands.

You can’t buy (perceived) success on YouTube in the same way you can on Facebook and Twitter. There are only six major brands/media entities in the top 100 most subscribed channels on YouTube vs 16 on Twitter and 41 on Facebook.

On YouTube you can buy views but not engagement or a community like you can on Facebook and Twitter (with promoted posts and accounts, etc). A lot of brands are approaching YouTube from a traditional advertising framework/process. Brands have their creative and media agencies, traditional production processes, and they see content through the lens of a campaign. On YouTube this doesn’t necessarily work. If your brand changes with each campaign how will anyone know what you are and what you stand for?

THE FOUR KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL BRAND CHANNEL
1) Best Practices
It’s important you optimize your channels (ie use the youtube brand playbook). Make sure you’re tagging and titling content appropriately as well as using end cards and welcome videos. No amount of optimization is going to make a bad channel great, but its going to be critical in converting viewers to subscribers and generating earned views, in fact:
-Metadata & thumbnails drive of organic growth
-50% of views comes through related videos
-10-20% CTR on end cards

2) Go With What People Know
Don’t overcomplicate the channel.

Lot’s of brands use channel gadgets (here’s an example of one). These gadgets are apps in an iframe on the Youtube channel. It interrupts the user experience and forces viewers to interact with the brand in a manner that they’re unfamiliar with. As a result there is a ton of dropoff (50% fewer viewers convert to subscribers, and there are 15% fewer shares than brand channels without gadgets).

Also, many brands are talking to themselves, using jargon, such as campaign hashtags that is meaningless to the average viewer or that no one is already searching. It’s important that if someone came across a video they’d be able to understand what it is in plain language. For example, I don’t know what ‘#TheTechYouWant Cyber Event Announcement with Trey Songz‘ means. It’s a terrible title and I would never click on it. Why not say ‘Trey Songz Announces Our Gadget Sale’?

3) Focus on a Human Connection
The most subscribed channels are overwhelmingly built around individuals (or a handful of individuals). The homegrown Youtube creators never had big budgets or resources when they started out, and ‘quality’ production isn’t as important as the ability to have people communicating with other people.

Successful brand channels such as Nintendo have started to do adapt to Youtube’s ‘hero, hub, help’ strategy – they’re creating shows like ‘nintendo minute.’ It’s a show, its consistent, its got the same hosts, and the format is more or less the same each time. It’s also doing very well (for a brand show). Engagement is exceptionally high (1.7k likes, 585 comments).

Now compare the Nintendo content with something like Toyota’s channel. Their second most viewed video has over 3mm views but far fewer comments and likes. Toyota clearly bought the views – but did it translate to anything meaningful? It certainly didn’t help grow their channel.

4) Iterate Like hell
The majority of all the successful channels post regularly, and are telling the same story over and over again. If you watch one episode of Epic Meal Time you’ve more or less seen them all. However, that doesn’t make each episode any less entertaining – it is still funny.

By replicating a specific format each time its clear to the viewer what you can expect from your channel. It also allows the brand to iterate on the concept and make it more and more engaging over time. The brand can apply YouTube insights and learnings to each episode (ie audience likes more bacon, let’s add more bacon and watch views and engagement go up). People go to a channel and subscribe to a channel because they know what to expect and they like what it stands for.

Building upon fewer ideas is incredibly important when you think about this in the context of what’s happening across the web at large – there are so many distractions. YouTube has over 100 hours of content uploaded each minute, and there are 500 million tweets each day, 4.75 billion items shared on Facebook. By repeating your message over and over you have a chance at being remembered. Many brands don’t do this and instead change the content with each campaign.

IN CONCLUSION
Ultimately the keys to success means connecting to people in a human way, that they’d understand, ie don’t ‘speak campaign’.

Emotions matter more than production – glossy TV style content doesn’t work on YouTube.

It’s also critical to maintain focus. Brands that do well build out a style of content and/or series of content that is very consistent. You’ll see channels like Red Bull have several ‘shows’, many of which are in their 4th or 5th season. They’re repeating the same format because they understand they’re viewers like this content, and in repeating it they can iterate and make it better and better each time.

A campaign driven approach means creating a whole new style of content and creating bursts of activity that give potential subscribers mixed messages. Even if they like the first campaign – they may not like the next. What incentive is there for me, as a viewer, to stick around if you show me something totally different than the content that brought me into the channel?

I’m relatively happy with how my talk turned out. It was a large crowd, so I had some early jitters in the beginning, but got in a groove fairly quick. If you’re interested you can see my talk below.

Thanks to the crew at The Next Web, Sophie in particular, for putting together such an amazing event and great group of people!

You can read about my talk here. Overall, I’ll be sharing the tactics to create and promote shareable content. It should be a lot of fun, I’m currently working on pulling some data to help support the narrative of YouTube being the most powerful social network. Hoping to be sharing that on the blog some time soon.

Anyway, TNW always has amazing speakers and thought-leaders. Honestly, I never thought I’d be able to be one of them.

Here are a few of my favorite keynotes from previous years.

TIM FERRIS: How To Master Any Skill By Deconstructing It

Keynote Ryan Holiday at TNW Conference Europe 2013