This latest interviewee for The Confessional is with a YouTube creator who has over two million subscribers across multiple channels. This creator is extremely well known, and has been on YouTube since 2008. He has (yes, it’s a he) a wealth of knowledge working with brands and building up channels.
He’s one of the most professional YouTube creators I’ve ever worked with and approaches his channel like a business in a way that few other creators do. He shared his approach to dealing with brands, managing brand deals, as well as his thoughts on how creators can better sell themselves to brands and get paid what they’re worth.
Some of the highlights from our interview include:
Enjoy.
(Editor’s Note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
I’d love to hear what’s it like for you when you work with brands? How do you approach that? What’s the process? What’s the pain point?
As much as I hate to say it I’ve had a kind of “fuck you” approach to brands.
I don’t mean to sound arrogant in that sense, but you don’t really have time to waste, so I try to be to the point and not be a jerk about it. But as far as brands are concerned, I’m very up front and I’m like “Hey, this is what I’d like to do and how much it will cost.”
I try to storyboard stuff from time to time or I’ll do a visual deck to make sure that we’re on the same page. There’s been maybe a couple of brands that nickel and dimed revisions and I just wouldn’t work with them again.
You’re definitely among the YouTube creators who are more professional, buttoned up, and process oriented. Why is that? Is that a conscious thing to differentiate yourself from other YouTube creators?
I want people to understand that this is a business and I’m treating it as such. And I really demand that respect and time, that effort and energy and in doing so I give them equal.
So if I spend a half-day creating a visual deck for a brand so that we are clear as to the flow of a campaign, great, because then I know that’s going to reduce stress and hurdles down the road where there might have been a lack of communication.
I don’t know if other creators do that level of work. I don’t necessarily do it to separate myself from them. I just do it to try to make my life easier.
It’s ultimately just trying to help make it seem more professional.
Do you think creators understand how to work with brands and how to address their needs and goals?
It’s hard to speculate for the masses because there are so many different types of creators out there. I personally feel that it’s hit or miss. For every example you can give, you can give another that’s completely different.
You can take someone like Michelle Phan or somebody who is insanely business savvy and understands a successful campaign strategy, how to biz dev etc. It’s all over the place.
But, I think it’s kind of hard to be successful if you’re not business savvy, because you end up burning bridges and then the well runs out.
Do you think YouTubers are getting paid what they’re worth?
I feel like certain ad agencies and brands understand the value of social media and digital content creation for their demographics. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t necessarily see the value, or they see the value and they try to undersell it to the creator.
At the end of the day your rate card should reflect your ability to sell to your audience.
I know a lot of guys especially in the entertainment industry will say, “Hey, this is my rate, if you can afford it, great, if you can’t just come back to me when you can.” They don’t do the whole “Let’s do a deal this time and then later on we’ll figure it out,” because later on it never happens. Unfortunately it doesn’t because when you commit to doing something for a specific rate be it professionally or for a brand integration people hold you to it.
And more often than not the brand ends up coming back because the brand or the agency goes “Hey, well, I really want to do this with him”, and that ends up working in your favor.
How do you explain to brands why you charge them a certain amount? Do you go into detail on production costs, TrueView, comparisons to TV, etc?
All the time. That’s easily one of the best way to show a brand your value. You can buy views to target my audience and it’s going to cost you like $150,000 to get the same views and demographic as my video.
So when I say, I want $30,000 to $70,000, to do a custom integration, that’s worth its weight in gold. It’s a deal to get the content and reach the same demographic for half the costs of a media buy.
You’ve been on YouTube almost since the beginning. How do you think things have changed? What do you feel has changed the most?
The space is so competitive at this point.
People are willing to sell themselves short, and as a result you have to really work really hard to figure out where and how you can bring value to the viewer and capitalize off of it. It seems as though everything that you’re willing to do, somebody else is willing to do for the attention and you’re trying to do it for profit to pay the light bill.
A lot more people just see YouTubers and think “Hey, I could do that too.” It’s great because ultimately, I’m a consumer and I love shaking the system up and making sure people are creating good stuff.
Competition breeds innovation.
The second you feel complacent or you feel like you understand, it changes. It’s constantly evolving how people consume media and what’s effective.
What do you think is the key to success in building a channel on YouTube?
I don’t think there is one and it would be very arrogant for me to say definitively how to start a successful channel today. I think there are so many different variables.
If I were to start out a channel right now I would pick the one thing that I am the most passionate about that I enjoy doing every single day that I feel like I could come up with an endless supply of creative content. That’s it.
I would also spend so much money on marketing. I think that a lot of people spend their time creating a lot of really good content and then don’t bother marketing it.
But, regardless, you need to be brutally honest with the stuff that you create.
You know if you’re gaming the system or not. You know if you’re phoning it in or not, and that’s why I said I would just pick something that I was extremely passionate about.
]]>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?
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