What happened with IGTV?
What happened to brands becoming publishers?
How did brand safety continue to go unresolved?
What happened to Facebook watch?

There were a lot of great things within the social video world this year, and I’ll try and focus more on the positives in another post, but I can’t help but feel like 2018 was a year with few breakthroughs and really just an extension of the same issues we experienced in 2017.

This is the year that the hype began to fade around the ecosystem. Social video is no longer new. It’s no longer the shiny object and familiarity breeds contempt.

FACEBOOK FAILED TO DELIVER THE GOODS

In June of this year Instagram launched IGTV, a standalone app where users could upload hour long footage. Hyped as a YouTube killer the app has proved to be anything but, and as Techcrunch put it, “For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady.”

Creators touted onstage during the apps launch haven’t even embraced the platform, as NYMag recently documented, Lauren Riihimaki a.k.a. LaurDIY has just two IGTV both from June 20, the same day IGTV launched.

IGTV peaked at #25 overall in the US iPhone app store. According to SimilarWeb the app continues to fall and is currently ranked 36,226 in overall usage numbers.

To top it off Facebook Watch didn’t live up its ‘YouTube killer’ expectations either.

According to Digiday Facebook Watch is growing, but, “with less than 3.3 percent of Facebook’s 2.3 billion global users spending time on Watch, there’s still a ton of room to grow.”

This time last year I wrote a piece for Mashable titled ‘How Facebook Watch will overtake YouTube as the biggest video platform’. While its certainly feasible that Facebook Watch could grow into a serious YouTube competitor it certainly hasn’t happened yet. In that piece I wrote:

I predict Facebook will successfully leverage its network effect to create a better experience for advertisers, creators, and viewers, and ultimately put an end to YouTube’s decade-long position as the biggest video player. It’s not that YouTube will disappear. Instead, it will likely become marginalized much in the same way Snapchat and Twitter now live in Facebook’s shadow.

I was waaaay off the mark.

Today Facebook Watch is nowhere near the scale of YouTube (that’s not to say they can’t get there eventually, it just didn’t happen in 2018).

BRANDS AS PUBLISHERS IS… STILL TBD

For years one of the buzziest terms to be thrown around at any social media panel (right up there with ‘authentic’) was that brands need to become publishers.

The prediction was that in an era where people have unlimited access to content they’re never going to stick around to watch ads. As a result, to build a brand you need to BE the content publisher a la Red Bull.

This is something a lot of brands have paid lip service to, but few have successfully pulled off.

I point to Red Bull, GoPro, and most recently Marriott as the exceptions that prove the rule.

Ultimately, I don’t believe most traditional brands are able to overcome the internal logistical and cultural obstacles it takes to become a creative content company. Instead, I think the future of brands as publishers is likely to come from publishers (and influencers) who want to become brands.

If you look at the publishers and influencers that are sustaining (and growing) their businesses most of them have invested in products. Complex sold millions of dollars of Hot Sauce off the backs of their ‘Hot Ones’ YouTube series. All the top ten highest paid YouTube stars have built massive brands and product lines.

DEJA VU WITH BRAND SAFETY

Last year YouTube updated its policies which outlined they were going to take greater control over which videos can make money from ads. YouTube applied more rigorous (some would say frivolous) standards around what content was and was not brand safe.

At the time YouTube was under fire in the press for apparently running ads against objectionable content. As a result of the negative press a number of major advertisers boycotted spending money on the platform.

The initiative was dubbed the ‘Adpocolypse’ as creators saw much of their content de-monetized. Creators didn’t do themselves any favors — PewDiePie, the most subscribed YouTuber of all time was lambasted in the press for a prank in which he paid freelancers on Fiverr to create anti-semitic signs as a joke.

Jake Paul, came under fire by the press as well, for unapologetically plunging his neighborhood into chaos with his antics (as well documented by KTLA, the local LA news station).

This year PewDiePie continues to come under fire, most recently for accidentally promoting a white nationalist YouTube channel. Jake Paul continues to create controversy, but his older brother Logan Paul stole the spotlight and became infamous after filming, and then joking about, a dead man he found in a Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’.

The tension between the creator community and YouTube came to a head recently.

YouTube Rewind 2018”, which is YouTube’s year end recap video featuring hundreds of creators and recapping the biggest moments from the year, was soundly rejected by the community and became the most downvoted YouTube video of all time.

The general consensus amongst the creator community on YouTube, was that they felt the video was pandering to advertisers, and ultimately failed to represent the ‘true’ YouTube community.

Clearly tensions are still high.

I don’t mean to diminish the achievements of these companies or the challenges they’re facing.

YouTube and Facebook are over ten years old. This space is no longer ‘new’ and the ‘wild west’ atmosphere has begun to dissipate.

We can’t expect groundbreaking changes each year.

At the advent of the automobile industry there were hundreds of manufacturers, but by the end of the 1920s it was dominated by three players: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Things began to settle down and cars became commoditized, small improvements were made each year vs massive disruption.

I think that we’ve reached a period of time, within social video, that mirrors the 1920 automotive industry. We’re likely to see more small changes vs sweeping changes disrupting the ecosystem entirely going forward.

The major points of our interview transcript include:

•           – Why YouTube created MCN’s and how they’ve evolved
•           – Why creators often sign with MCN’s
•           – How brands should work with creators

The Confessional is a series of anonymous interview with influencers, brands, marketers, agencies and MCN executives to get honest, no-bullshit opinions on working in the space – the biggest gripes, the toughest lessons, the most valuable advice.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Coming from the MCN side of the equation – what was it like working with the brands, the creators, the agencies? What worked and what didn’t?

My understanding of the MCN industry is that Google created it as a way to help produce better quality content and help support creators. It’s largely populated with people who are coming from the talent side of the equation versus the advertising agency side or the technology side.

The biggest challenge is that the industry is new, so the norms have not been defined clearly. You have the MCNs, you have the agencies, and I’m saying “talent agencies,” like WME and CAA. You have the advertising agencies. You have managers. You have creators.

You have a lot more inputs to that equation than what you had back in the old television days. All those inputs and all these people who think that they have a role in the equation make it complicated to establish any real norms, or rules of engagement, metrics, and ways of doing business.

The players have not clearly defined their roles, and because of this everybody is running towards every opportunity. And that causes murkiness. That causes aggravation. It causes the true value of influencer to be masked because of the immense amount of waste of people’s time to get to the bottom line.

So, depending on your entry point you could end up with a very different deal?

Right, and just to focus on the MCN part of it, one of the big problems with MCNs is that they don’t harken back to their mission. Basically their mission was not defined by themselves.

Their mission was defined by Google and it is to add value. That’s ambiguous, but you could say there’s three places that MCNs could add value.Very few are doing this. You could say ad agencies and talent agencies could do two out of three of these easily. 

•       – By growing views & subscribers
•       – Providing business and/or production support
•       – Growing revenue

So, it’s important for MCN’s to be doing something different – creating technology, interesting integrations with available APIs etc.  Because you want to differentiate yourself and if you want an acquisition it’s good to own IP or unique processes .

Even if a creator is signed to an agreement, then at some point that creator’s going to want to get out of that agreement or that agreement’s going to expire. That’s not something other companies really want to invest in because you can go and hire talent.  This is the secret many in Hollywood do not want you to know, talent will “go” with almost anyone who is creating interesting stories, product, services.  The challenge is managing the workflow.  A lot of brands have success working directly with talent.

Anybody can hire your talent. That’s something people forget.

So, what’s the future of MCN’s?

It’s hard to build a product in technology that is actually going to be used by creators, but that’s the need.

We should be more focused on technology to help channels grow.

My classic example is Brendan’s Omelet Channel and my Crêpe Channel, and your handler at the MCN says, “Hey, Brendan. There’s this guy who’s making omelets and you’re making crêpes and you basically have the same audience and you’re both releasing videos on Tuesday. Why don’t you switch to Wednesday and point people there to Interviewee’s channel on Tuesday? And he’ll reciprocate and then down the line, let’s see if there’s a collaboration we could do.”

So, that is a perfect example of not only adding value, but growing the network because traffic goes back and forth.  A couple of MCNs have automated this process again points to the power of making great product and/or using technology to add value. More monetization opportunities. That’s an example of a great way an MCN could add value.

What actually happens is that everybody goes running into the space and the investors who put money in go, “Hey, wait a minute. You guys aren’t making any money. You’ve got lots of expenses, but you’re not selling enough.”

So, the MCN’s try and sell more media (not just brand integrations). The problem with that is that that media is already being sold by a person who has a Google business card OR it’s being sold in real time via an exchange.

The largest ad exchange called ADEX, which is part of DoubleClick, which is owned by Google.

By definition, if you have a seat on the exchange, you can buy and sell YouTube inventory. So, you can just go bid on channels in the exchange because there’s not an exclusive. You can get that inventory if you want it and probably pay less than what the Google salesperson is selling it for if you buy it via the exchange.

So that’s a challenge for MCN’s. Any savvy media agency is going to know that they can buy inventory via an exchange. They have a trading desk.

That is a perfect example of how an MCN fails because an MCN goes to try and sell more media, which isn’t really working because of the exchanges. And, as a result, helping to grow their audiences is falling by the wayside.

Why would the MCN’s sell media? Forget about that the exchange even exists – there are hundreds of Google salespeople crawling over every agency with piles of data. You can’t compete with that nor should you.

They [MCN’s] are just not going to sell the media. They’re not going to get the price that they want. And, the customers don’t want to buy their media because they’re able to get it already and from a cheaper source.

So, how were you guys actually adding value to creators?

Every channel, as part of our agreement would get optimized. We were trying to create technology to solve this, so that it wouldn’t become such a manual process.

You really need a technical understanding of what the Internet and in particular YouTube is…how it works. If you don’t understand the technical intricacies or the map of how to navigate this web, you basically won’t get the views that you need for free via SEO. And that is, once again, a point where MCNs have failed, where they don’t offer leadership. They don’t offer enough of those services.

I’m proud that we offered that. I think most MCN’s just made a lot of promises, and were just casting a wide net and pulling channels in as fast as they could without actually delivering much value.

There’s a lot of name dropping and that’s like heroine to a lot of young creators. They want to work with the big names or go to Hollywood and that’s what sucks them in. They have a little success and they think they’re going to be on CSI. That’s it. They’re just like, “Oh, my God, Hollywood. I’m doing this. Yeah.”

Let’s transition to the advertising side of things. Do you feel brands are doing enough to capitalize on this space?

What’s happening now is that MCNs, advertising agencies, talent agencies, and creators themselves are making it very difficult for a brand to figure out how to get from A to B.

I think that brands over a certain size…let’s say, if you have over $50 million in gross sales per year, they should be interacting with influencers and creating content directly.

And when I say “directly,” I meant they shouldn’t be going down the chain, the digital agency goes to MCN, who goes to the manager, who goes to so and so and then finally goes to the creator who comes up with the idea. That needs to stop.

There’s no reason to have that kind of expense. The whole thing about the Internet is that it removes layers, so you can have more direct control and access and that usually means you save money and you can do things quicker. And that’s what should be happening in 2015.

It should be, “Decide, create, deploy, measure.” And then you just keep doing it.

In terms of execution, there’s always tension between the creator and the brand. What do you think is the best way to navigate that?

Well, that’s called “creative tension” and that’s something that has existed since day one. And it exists in the writers’ room. It exists on the set.

When Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola is yelling at you and Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now” to act a certain way.  It exists everywhere. So, I think people are just basically fucking idiots if they don’t understand that.

But you have to set and control expectations. My rule is early, loud and often. You over-communicate to ensure everyone’s on the same page throughout the process.

What advice do you have for those working in the space?

I don’t care what anybody says. This is goddamn 2016.

There is so much talent, out there.  If someone’s an asshole and difficult to work with.  Guess what. You can find somebody else just as good. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but you can find somebody.

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?

[Click to read my updated post on this strategy under it’s new name of ‘Hero, Hub, Help’]

The concept of “always-on marketing,”creating a steady stream of content, is something brands and agencies have adopted with Facebook and Twitter. In recent years, brands and agencies have even created newsrooms to produce content in real time to respond to current events and customer trends. As production has become cheaper and more accessible the principles that applied to text and images on Twitter and Facebook are being carried over to, and, implemented on YouTube. Consequently, the perception that “viral video” is key to a brand’s content strategy is slowly diminishing.

[Check out my hub, hero, hygiene infographic here]

In many ways the viral video strategy mirrored the traditional ad production model –invest heavily in an expensive TV spot and then promote, wait several months,then go through the process all over again. In adopting the Hero, Hub, Hygiene approach, brands have the latitude to create their campaign and viral content, but it also emphasizes the creation of content series, giving consumers a reason to keep coming back. Successful YouTubers have been implementing this strategy since the platform’s early days. They’ve communicated to their audiences a regular posting schedule so that new content isn’t a surprise that may or may not be discovered, but something that the audience can reliably look forward and return to.

THE HERO, HUB, HYGIENE APPROACH EXPLAINED
I like to picture this strategy as a content pyramid with three core layers. At the top is the Hero content: this is your beacon seen by the masses, but most of the content you create can’t, and won’t, fall into this category. From there you have your hub content – there is far more Hub content than Hero, but often is a content series, or video created around brand events and/or product launches. Lastly, the foundation of the content pyramid is the hygiene content. Hygiene capitalizes on existing user interests and is designed to pull users in based on search.

HERO CONTENT
Hero videos are large-scale events or programs that drive mass awareness – oftentimes around product or event launches. This is the top of the pyramid –Hero content builds awareness at a much broader scale to reach the mainstream. According to YouTube, Hero content is something that’s done on average 1-2 times a year for a brand and will still entertain and inspire the viewers with emotional storytelling. An iconic example of Hero Content would be Red Bull’s Project Stratos. For those who missed the biggest digital event of last year, Red Bull’s Project Stratos drew worldwide attention for sendingFelix Baumgartner’to the edge of space, where he then jumped from his hot air balloon and set the world record for the highest freefall jump.  The event was livestreamed, and the video of Baumgartner’s record-setting jump has over 36,000,000 views and drove thousands of new subscribers in just over a year.

HUB CONTENT
Hub videos are meant to entertain and keep an audience coming back. According to YouTube, this content should be “regularly updated,” “valuable and engaging,” and should incentivize people to “subscribe – like – follow” Looking at Red Bull’s channel through the lens of YouTube’s Hero, Hub, Hygiene framework, an example’s of  Red Bull’s hub videos are the behind the scenes and training videos leading up to the official Project Stratos jump. Another great example of hygiene content on Red Bull’s channel is their “Who is JOB” series. “Who is JOB” is a reality web series on its fourth season, that documents the life of pro surfer, Jamie O’Brien and his adventures with friends. In creating a series, Red Bull has established a way to focus its content creation around relevant consumer passion point (in this case, surfing). The fact that it’s a series allows Red Bull to more easily create a volume of content, and engage subscribers regularly.

HYGIENE CONTENT
Hygiene videos are created around the core interests relevant to the ideal viewer or target consumer.  Oftentimes this content is specifically created to capture viewers searching key terms related to the brand. It’s worth keeping in mind that even if your brand isn’t creating the extreme sports content that Red Bull does, it can still create highly relevant hygiene content. For example, if you’re a computer software company, your content could be how-to videos helping your consumers navigate your product. People tend to find hygiene videos through search when they’re looking for answers to a specific question. Although not your typical ‘hygiene’ content, Red Bull’s  “Who is JOB” series could be categorized as hygiene because series is highly optimized for Red Bull’s target consumer’s interests – a cursory search for ‘surfing’ reveals a number of “Who is JOB” videos.

HERO, HUB, HYGIENE CASE STUDY – THE SHAVING INDUSTRY
Within the shaving industry, Dollar Shave Club is considered to be the king of online video. They exploded on to the scene in March of 2012 with a disruptive pricing model and hilarious video, which immediately went viral. Today, the original Dollar Shave Club viral video, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” has 14.5 million views, nearly one hundred thousand likes, and 13,000 comments. By all accounts, the video is a success and has been critical to Dollar Shave Club’s success. However, the reality is for every Dollar Shave Club, there are thousands of attempted viral videos that are total duds that never managed to capture an audience. In many ways the Hub, Hero, Hygiene framework allows brands to relieve themselves of the pressure of having to create the next big viral hit, so they can focus on a long-term community-building strategy. This is something that Gillette has excelled at. Gillette has taken the opposite approach of Dollar Shave Club, and as a result has generated more subscribers – cultivating an engaged community that it can continue to tap into.

GILLETTE’S YOUTUBE CONTENT STRATEGY
Gillette launched its primary YouTube channel in May of 2009. Since that time, Gillette has posted 895 videos, garnered over 24 million video views, and accumulated 22,000 subscribers on its main channel. It’s worth noting that Gillette has multiple channels dedicated to specific markets, including Spain, Peru, Mexico, India, which collectively have an additional 750 videos, tens of thousands of subscribers, and millions of views.

HYGIENE
There are 51 how-to videos on the Gillette channel, ranging from the obvious (“How to Shave”) to the more obscure, such as “How To Shave A Pencil Thin Mustache.”  All of these how-to videos are providing value to their target demographic and are evergreen pieces of content – they’re not time sensitive. In the YouTube Brand Playbook, YouTube invites brands to consider the following when trying to come up with Hygiene content:

What is your audience actively searching for regarding your brand or industry? What can serve as your 365-day-relevant, always-on, PULL content programming? E.g. product tutorials, how-to content, customer service, etc.

In Gillette’s case, each of these how-to videos has been created around key search terms that their target demographic (adult men who are shaving), would be searching. This is classic Hygiene content strategy. For example, Gillette’s “How to Shave – Shaving Tips for Men” video has over 1.5 million views, one thousand likes, and nearly 500 comments. It’s a simple instructional video with voice over and basic motion graphics to transition from each step. Undoubtedly, Gillette’s content marketing team looked at YouTube and Google’s keyword tools and identified that there are an average of 44,000 searches on YouTube, and nearly a million on Google each month. Gillette’s “How To Shave” videos now appear on the first page of search for Google and YouTube search results, and are supported with advertising. Of the 895 videos on Gillette’s main channel, approximately 70% of Gillette’s videos could be classified as Hygiene content and include consumer product reviews and testimonials in addition to the aforementioned how to videos.

HUB CONTENT
Gillette has also invested heavily in creating Hub content — compelling content series that are entertaining, tapping into their target consumers’ passion points. A number of examples of this type of content live on Gillette’s channel and many incorporate their sponsored athletes and celebrities. For example, Gillette created a series of videos, “What Women Want” which feature Q&A sessions with supermodels Kate Upton, Hannah Simone, and Genesis Rodriguez. In the videos, the supermodels discuss their POV on manscaping and male grooming habits, and gives advice to male viewers. The content was created specifically to promote the Gillette Fusion ProGlide Styler, a “three-in-one shaving tool that trims, shaves and edges for whatever body hair style she likes.” Other Hub content on Gillette’s YouTube channel include their Gillette Body Ready fan interview series. To support the launch of the Gillette Body razor, Gillette tapped three of its pro athletes — professional skateboarder Ryan Sheckler, Olympic gold medalist in beach volleyball Phil Dalhausser, and national CrossFit champion Jason Khalipa — to participate in surprise Q&As with a their fans. The fans were invited to chat with their heroes and learn what they do to get their bodies ready for their sports. The “What Women Want” and “Body Ready” videos are great examples of Hub content because they’re centered around the Gillette consumer passion points – athletes, sports, and models — and are created largely around new, timely product launches.

HERO
Like any brand, Gillette has its mainstream Hero content intended for the masses. Being a sponsor of multiple high-profile athletes such as Ryan Suter, Clay Matthews, and Ryan Sheckler has enabled the brand to leverage them in key tent-pole moments. Gillette’s Hero content include its launch of the Gillette Fusion Pro Glide (this video has since been taken down). which was promoted heavily throughout the 2013 NFL season and features Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews. The 60-second spot, title ‘Clay Matthews Conditions’ (this video has since been taken down) ran on TV and was promoted heavily on YouTube, accumulating over 200k views. More recently, Gillette funded a documentary,“The Kissing Experiment: Are We Killing The Kiss? ”(this video has since been taken down).

The video was part of a larger brand campaign and invited men and women to visit a site, where the documentary was housed.There, women were polled on what they preferred most – clean shaven or men with facial hair (perhaps unsurprisingly, the results of the poll stated that most women prefer clean shaven).As a Gillette spokeswoman positioned it, the campaign “was strictly to drive awareness to the conversation.” These mass awareness campaigns are the archetype of Hero video content. It’s the content meant to be seen by the masses. As YouTube positions it in the brand playbook:

What content do you want to PUSH to a big,broad audience? What would be your Super Bowl moment?A brand may have only a few hero moments in a year, such as product launch events or industry tent-poles.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
While Gillette has done a great job in capitalizing on search and generating a great deal of content following the hero, hub, hygiene framework, there’s also a great deal of missed opportunities. The brand could generate content on a consistent schedule, do a better job implementing end cards and annotations consistently, and curate more of what goes on to their channel. That said, by iterating and continuing to produce content they’ll continue to learn more of what does and does not work for them which will undoubtedly tee them up for long term success.

PARTING THOUGHTS
There are 100 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every minute. As a result, it’s imperative that content provides value to consumers in order to gain traction. Remember, on it’s own, the Hero, Hub, Hygiene framework can’t guarantee success.

It’s easy to view advertising as a formula with a clear process to follow to become the next Red Bull. But beyond the Hero, Hub, Hygiene strategy, Red Bull, and Gillette and others understand the audience they’re communicating to, and know what their audience will find entertaining. It’s also incredibly important to implement the best practices, optimizing thumbnails, titles, tags, descriptions and creating end cards.

Not every brand needs to focus on entertaining its audience; in fact, oftentimes content that is strictly entertaining is not going to be the most valuable to the target audience. In Gillette’s case, they provided value by supplying useful information that their target consumers were already looking for.

Many brands are creating content that is so overwhelmingly transparently self-serving as to be off-putting for consumers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars don’t solve the issue either. Driving views to your video may boost your view count, but if engagement drops off after the first 5 seconds, is that content valuable? I’d argue you’ve effectively created content that acts as a “leaky bucket” which is inefficient in its inability to convert consumers to subscribers (or even get them to watch a full video) and in its inability to make a lasting impression with consumers – which may alienate them entirely.

Going forward, brands can’t rely on capturing lightning in a bottle with a viral video. Instead, a brand channel needs to have a solid foundation of Hero, Hub, and Hygiene content to draw viewers in and turn an audience into a community. This allows them to iterate and optimize for success over time.

[Bonus: Click here to download my analysis of how one brand channel grew from 0 to 400,000 subscribers implementing this strategy.]

At the time, the grants were considered by many to be an attempt on YouTube’s part to bolster its premium content to woo advertisers to the platform.

Now, rather than bring traditional media companies and celebrities into YouTube, YouTube is turning its top creators into celebrities. In order to gain mindshare among advertisers and bring in bigger budgets YouTube has launched an ad campaign dedicated to featuring many of its top creators.

YouTube’s new CEO Susan Wojcicki stated that, “If you look at our top creators, they have a lot of subscribers; it’s all categories like entertainment, health and beauty, food, cooking, and yet I think a lot of times advertisers and users don’t know about these channels.”

Wojcicki’s comments, and YouTube’s evolving tactics, highlight the lack of understanding of the YouTube ecosystem that many advertisers are continuing to face. YouTube has changed the face of media, content, and celebrity but dollars haven’t caught up with the times.

YouTube is wildly popular with Teens and Young adults, and according to a recent study, “74 percent of 14-18 year-olds and 68 percent of 19-24 year-olds in the U.S. use YouTube, which is above Facebook and significantly more than Twitter.”

While ten years ago teens were watching Jon Stewart instead of 60 minutes, this generation is watching Phil DeFranco in favor of Jon Stewart.

So what’s the holdup?

YouTube is doing everything it can to spur adoption of the platform. In many ways Google Preferred is a step back for advertisers. It’s not the best way to buy ads on the platform – in fact, its more than likely worse. However, its clear Google is adapting to advertisers, but advertisers are not adapting to the times.

The Google preferred program is manufactured scarcity. YouTube has rolled up channels, verticalized them, and packaged them to advertisers in a way that makes sense to traditional media buyers. It’s limited inventory (by design), making it feel more akin to TV buying vs digital.

The irony is that with 100 hours of content uploaded each minute, and an audience of over one billion users, there is so much inventory that CPM’s on the platform are in decline. Also, a recent article brought to light the fact that the Google Preferred program is filled with a number of channels that are of dubious quality. In the end, most advertisers would be best served by logging into TrueView and bidding on the open marketplace on an as needed basis (or hiring someone to do this for them).

With YouTube’s glut of inventory and audience, it’s a buyers market.

However, advertisers are unwilling or unable to buy advertising on YouTube in a way that doesn’t follow their existing habits and infrastructure.  They’re working with media buying agencies who have no incentive to optimize and make brand dollars work harder.

Most media agencies businesses generate profit by receiving a percentage of a total spend. As a result, they’ll want to keep margins low – a great way to do this is to buy your media upfront. The problem is, the ecosystem has changed, and the dinosaurs haven’t figured out that they’re already extinct.

In the long term, both brands and Google will come out further ahead once brands get a better understanding of YouTube (and digital media as a whole). The losers will be the brands and media companies who fail to evolve.

Brands may start to get a lot more bang for their buck as they learn to unbundle the outdated bureaucracies of yesteryear and begin leveraging the advantages digital has to offer.