One traditional media company in particular stands out – Viacom. Viacom has a long, storied history with the space; they’d been suing Google over alleged copyright violations on YouTube from 2007-2014. As part of that suit Viacom had been seeking $1 billion dollars in damages, but was awarded no money as part of a settlement in 2014.

Now, four years later, Viacom seems to have done a 180 and fully embraces the digital video space (and YouTube in particular).

In the case of Viacom – waiting to make serious investments in the social video ecosystem seems to have allowed them to scoop up some serious deals.

Viacom acquired AwesomenessTV for a reported $50 million, a fraction of the company’s $650 million valuation back in 2016. This comes on the heels of Viacom having bought VidCon, the largest digital video conference/major influencer gathering.

And, at the very start of the year it was announced that Viacom had acquired WhoSay an influencer-marketing company that had raised $30 million and was incubated by CAA.

With these three acquisitions Viacom turned itself into a major player in the digital video ecosystem virtually overnight. They’ve got experiential, content, and marketing.

With VidCon they have the largest YouTube gathering. With Awesomeness they’ve got one of the largest MCN’s and production companies focused on the space, and with WhoSay they’ve got an established influencer marketing arm.

The timing of all this is interesting – YouTube is well over ten years old now, but I supposed it just goes to show that sometimes patience is a virtue.

It’s often easy to criticize the old guard for being slow, and lacking innovation (its something I’ve done constantly), but oftentimes methodical and deliberate can be mistaken for slow and out of touch.

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

It’s got diversity, great/big announcements, excitement and knowledgeable panels and speakers. This year definitely felt like the tipping point for the conference – getting so massive and (what felt very) mainstream. Having been to every single Vidcon so far (including the international ones) here’s my quick recap/takeaways:

IT’S BIG
Vidcon is fucking HUGE this year. I think there were over 30K attendees and it even sparked its own spinoff, TanaCon. Tanacon drew its own roster of 80+ big name influencers (Casey Neistat, etc) and apparently an additional 20k attendees, which ultimately resulted in it getting shut down.

CELEBRITY
We’ve been talking about influencers as celebs for a long time, but this year there was a noticeable shift.  Influencers pretty much did not mingle anywhere – security was through the roof, everything required an RFID wristband to get in and out, way more restricted access, etc.

In years past the influencers were relatively accessible, fans were screaming all over, etc. That was definitely not the case and it makes sense given the size of the crowds and potential dangers associated with that many people coming together in one place.

MAINSTREAM
Ray Kurzweil (AKA the guy who popularized singularity) spoke and Marshmello DJ’d.

Almost all the endemic brands and companies (other than the major platforms like YouTube, FB, and Insta) have been sidelined by major brands. In years past the MCN’s really dominated things here. Now its all Mars, Amazon, Adobe, etc.

FACEBOOK IS A PLAYER 
YouTube is still the big player, but the biggest announcement that got people excited was IGTV. If you watch their announcement video you’ll notice they’re basically going after the youtuber/influencer crowd – the tone is much younger than facebook and it is open to anyone.

Compare IGTV with what YouTube has done with FB watch and it makes sense. FB has kept FB watch heavily curated and limited to fewer partners – probably to appeal to an older demo and keep things more premium for advertisers.

I think the combo of IGTV and Facebook Watch ads up to a formidable competitor for YouTube (for ad dollars anyway).

PEOPLE STILL DON’T ‘GET IT’
The big draw for me was seeing the announcements from Facebook & Instagram, but the two biggest recurring themes within the programming was the same as in years  past, ie how brands and influencers work together and how to create content that will be shareable for _____ platform.

Personally, I’m frustrated as an advertiser that there’s still such a need for these talks. Influencer marketing and social video are not new – youtube has been around for over 12 years now. Brands and agencies need to get an understanding of the basics.

YOUTUBE IS STILL KING
YouTube is the backbone of the digital video and influencer ecosystem. Everyone gripes about them, and they’re slow moving, and easy to poke fun of (not innovating enough, not paying partners enough), but no one is seriously talking about abandoning them. They’re still considered ‘too big to fail’.

They didn’t have any big sexy announcements at their keynote and this year the CEO didn’t even come down to do the talk, but there’s no serious indication that they are defunct – they definitely have Facebook nipping at their heels, but they’re still the king.