YouTube Takes the Gloves Off | The Renaissance of Branded Web Series

0:01Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren? Yes. How was your Passover? Thank you so much. It was lovely. It was small. First night was small. We're going to do a bigger Seder on Saturday with the family for the start of spring break. It will be lovely. Did anybody, how was yours? Did you find the Afi Komen, Joshua? Did you look for it? Did you get a prize? One of my children found the Afi Komen and then one of my other children was very upset that the other child found the Afi Komen. So we had to hide it again. and then we had to hide it a third time.

0:30You mean they don't just like give gifts for everybody? They give gifts for everybody but someone really wants to find it. Yeah, that's going to be ugly at ours as well. Went to my brother's house, had a blast and did you get sent at least a dozen times the clip of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show talking about the difference between Passover and Easter? I did not. It's fantastic. I'll send it to you. We'll put it in the show notes. Anyone who wants to know the similarities between the two holidays and the differences between the two holidays You should definitely check it out. I think it brings you some insight into Judaism, Jewish culture.

1:02Josh, I know that we talked a lot about New Fronts last week, but there was one that you had not been to when we recorded last week. So I wanted to get the latest on the YouTube New Fronts. Yes, Lauren. So at the time we recorded, I hadn't yet gone to the YouTube New Front, although lots of the news from the YouTube New Front was already announced earlier in the week. Why? Because Google had their New Front on Monday of last week. and the powers that be decided to release all the news at once, presumably because there's so much interconnectedness and interweaving between Google's advertising offerings and YouTube's advertising offerings now.

1:37It just made sense to announce everything at once rather than put things back. And so YouTube did announce on stage live what we already knew about, which was that the longtime Marketing Hub Brand Connect is going to be revamped into a platform called YouTube Creator Partnerships, which is going to give advertisers a bunch of different ways to find the best creators to work with among a bunch of different parameters to make their campaigns the most valuable and most effective that they can be. But what was interesting on stage is that, Lauren, you've been to a bunch of these different types of events.

2:09How often does one platform call out another platform on stage? Rarely. Rarely, like never, right? Like never. They don't want to talk, they don't want to acknowledge the existence of other platforms. The only way they would acknowledge the existence of another platform if it's somehow complimentary, like TikTok doing something with iHeart. Right, like if there's a partnership, obviously, yes. Or to be doing something with TikTok. Or any one of these platforms doing something with another platform that's complimentary but not competitive. Right. That wasn't the case at YouTube's event. Really?

2:42And it's not like they harped on this, but it is so rare to hear executives from a platform talk about other competitive platforms on stage. I thought it was worth noting. So Kristen O 'Hara, who's Google's VP of agency platforms and client solutions, spoke at the end of the YouTube view front last Thursday. And she said to a room full of advertisers and marketers, quote, So you've already built tons of successful campaigns with other platforms like TikTok and Meta, and you're capturing quick attention. But you're missing valuable audiences if you just use those feeds. I'm going to encourage you all to consider shifting some of your social media budgets to fund YouTube creator content.

3:20So you can take advantage of the 86 % higher ROI on our platform versus other platforms. And that just like is unprecedented. I have a question. I have a question. The way she worded that when she says shifting your social media budgets to YouTube. So she's saying that YouTube is social media or not social media. I bring this up because, of course, the trial last week where YouTube or should say YouTube. Yeah, it wasn't just I think they called it YouTube specifically, not just Google and meta were found. you know, liable for a woman, you know, suffering a lot of anxiety and depression and all these things and awarded her like$6 million.

3:58And YouTube's whole thing is like, we're not social media. So I'm just curious from your interpretation of that, was she sort of saying like, don't, seriously, I'm curious. Like, where is this lady landing? Is this social media or not? Lauren, you've been spending way too much time with your brother who's a decorated lawyer recently. Decorated. And so I think you're getting a little bit too I'm going to get into a phone call between my brother and I just so you can understand what I'm dealing with. I think you're getting a little bit too into the industry here. No, but I think this is very relevant.

4:28Sure, but YouTube could have said, hey, transfer your radio budget to YouTube. No, I know. I'm just curious. From your interpretation, did you feel like they were saying, like, we're also social media over here? No, I did not feel like that in any way. I'm asking a question and it's answered. Thank you. I feel like YouTube just saying, hey, you're spending on these other platforms in certain ways. come spend money on us, regardless of what bucket that money is in. You should spend it with us because we're going to do better for you than those other platforms are. I don't know if they should be saying this.

4:58I feel like gloves are off. Like, just be like, yo, I mean, look at what we do here. I agree. I mean, again, like in terms of conversion and what we saw at SOCOM is all these managers are saying they are not mentioning TikTok as a indicator, like how well somebody does on TikTok is not an indicator of how somebody converts. And so if you're a brand, you want to know how somebody's going to convert. And more likely is an audience, you know, sort of like your audience is going to convert if you're on a longer form platform because they're staying with you for longer. So like, you know, they should say that.

5:30I totally agree with you. But to also provide you some context in which that was said, it was specifically around YouTube pulling dollars into the ecosystem from these other platforms for shorts programming. On stage at the YouTube New Fronts, they also noted that 45 % of YouTube shorts viewers are not on TikTok and 65 % of them are not on Instagram reels. I will tell you, your girl watches YouTube shorts and she does not watch TikTok. So I feel like I understand. She is talking to me. She gets me. I feel seen. Thank you. So I, yes, I understand the nature of the long form programming on YouTube has a deeper connection between fans and creators, facilitates that and also facilitates by way of that, facilitates a deeper connection between the brands and the viewers that consume them.

6:20This was more about, yo, you're spending on short form programming on these other platforms. Come spend it with us too, because we're going to hit it out of the park for you. And it was part of their new messaging to advertisers that are three Bs, bring, build, and boost. They basically want advertisers to bring their best creative over to YouTube. Bring some of their budgets over to YouTube. Build out their marketing channel on YouTube and YouTube Shorts. Build out more relationships with creators through the use of these new tools that YouTube launched. And then boost all of that content with some paid spend on the platform, which you couldn't do before, but now you can.

7:04How is that different than anything else they've ever done or tried to do with regards to brands and creators? I think it's different for a couple reasons. One, it's just more direct than ever before. They're actually calling out their competitors. they come with this messaging that's very clear that's three b's you should get involved with all of them all of them and then let's run it and then two you put an acronym on it and we're just it's more actionable i think that's where we're at and then two youtube honestly didn't have the infrastructure to facilitate a lot of this before like you weren't necessarily able to boost individual videos what do you mean of course you could boost individual videos before am i wrong so you could boost them through google's adsense features basically turning those individual videos into an ad, but now they've completely rebuilt the tool to make it native to the YouTube studio dashboard and specifically to compete with TikTok's promote feature.

7:52So again, you can always boost videos using the Google ads, but they're just intertwining all these different capabilities that maybe lived in different parts of the platform before and making a lot easier for marketers to take advantage of all these different tools and feature sets. Also, they're making it easier to like find the videos to boost and promote. So it's partly this discovery mechanism, partly just housing everything under one kind of comprehensive tool set that they can go into and facilitate a bunch of these campaigns and deploy more capital that way. All right, Josh, thank you for the update.

8:25And I'm excited to see what happens. All right, let's get into some X stories. You know, it's another day, another week, another TikTok partnership. I mean, they just can't quit. Cameo. You remember Cameo. um huge in the uh in in the in covid i remember the first time i heard about cameo i always remember this ross smith who's a creator who did like famously always did these videos with his grandmother um i remember having a meeting with him at facebook and he was like yeah by the way you guys there's this new thing called cameo where like people can like pay for like videos for with creators and like you guys should like add this as a product feature because like honestly it was you know intact people is it is it a feature or is it a product right is it something you could tack onto something or is it something that should stand alone that sort of whole discussion in and of itself has like changed i think um in the last couple years because i think some of these platforms have so many features that it's overwhelming that some of these standalone um products that would have maybe just been features before have been able to have legs but cameo was one of those companies companies that had a huge like just went crazy during covid i mean at the height it was worth like a billion dollars and then what i loved about it is it was like this place for like call it b-list sometimes celebrities to you know kind of make real dollars like one of the biggest people was brian bondgardner uh kevin from the office he was like the number one creator on cameo for like years which i like love that because i also like what i love about that too and i would always use him as an example when people want to talk about like using traditional celebrities and doing digital things with traditional celebrities it's like you have to find the ones that get it and like somebody like brian bondgardner gets it he's like, what do you want to pay me?

10:07But alas, there was a big sort of decline post-COVID, which in some ways they were expecting, but it's been, you know, it's been tough. And so they have now partnered with TikTok. USB-based creators will be able to sign up for Cameo and offer videos for sale directly all on TikTok. Their viewers will then be able to buy the videos without ever leaving TikTok's platform. So it's basically becoming a feature on TikTok. to encourage sales. TikTok is giving creators custom call to action buttons that they can add to their videos. Viewers can also use TikTok search function to find a roster of all creators offering cameos to the platform.

10:42I think this is just actually, it's very, it's again, it's very interesting the way TikTok is partnering with different platforms. I just think it's really, frankly, innovative. And it also is recognizing, again, where they have their strengths and weaknesses. weaknesses like they it's i might my hunch not that difficult to build a product feature like a cameo but it already has like a name it already has a user base so like let's combine forces instead of like you know you know and they're not buying you can imagine this is an acquisition but it sounds like cameo is still going to live on its own but it's going to be integrated a lot into tiktok so i don't know i think this is really interesting i totally think it's interesting and this seems to be tiktok's new playbook like in march of this year they announced a partnership with Apple Music where they introduced this new play full song experience.

11:32So you're in TikTok and then via Apple Music, you can play the full song that you're hearing in TikTok without leaving the platform. Where before TikTok tried to do its whole TikTok music initiative, it never made it to the United States. They killed the app before it got here because they thought maybe the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. But now they realize TikTok is a hub for music discovery for sure. and they want to keep individuals on the platform as much as possible, one way to do that is not have them leave to go find this song on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever other platform they're subscribed to, is to just listen to the music right there while they're on TikTok.

12:10And this seems like the same kind of thing. Why go build it if we can just incorporate it into our app? But again, like this is very, if you look at the historical trend of platforms, which in the grand scheme of sort of like media, it's not that long. But the creator economy moves quite quickly. this is quite innovative like most platforms they would either if anything acquire and just like dissolve yeah i mean you know completely i mean like see musically tiktok they did that as well um or they build it themselves like they're just just out and i think it's also if i may like when i think about this like just holistically it's a way for them also to get in the good graces of having all of this negative you know bias against them for maybe legitimate reasons depending on your points of view, but like doing all these platforms with these very legitimate, uncontroversial, for all intents and purposes, you know, platforms, iHeart, 2B, now, you know, Cameo, it's like, it allows them to be like, look, we're friends with all the good guys.

13:09We're good guys too. Like, I think there's a marketing piece to this as well, as well as a functionality and offering, you know, wanting to offer different things to their creators. So it's, honestly, it's super smart and I just what's next every week and this week in TikTok partnerships. And also for the creators on TikTok who by and large aren't receiving regular income from the platform. TikTok needs to figure out other ways to incentivize them to stay on the platform and keep posting. Incorporating these other revenue generating opportunities is an obvious way to keep their creators engaged and happy and give them other ways to make money when they're not necessarily splitting a ton of the advertising revenue that they get with them 100 um is it enough i don't know you know what i mean is it enough to who knows but it's no i mean that's totally a piece of it too there's many but it's to your point it's again marketing to the creators that's saying like hey you can make all these all this money all these different kinds of ways yeah no for sure don't worry that we're not paying you 55 of every dollar we make on that which by the way like not you know when you have to give away 55 on every dollar 55 cents on every dollar, it's like arguably not the best business model.

14:17It seems to be working. It's working, but it's not like from just like a plain, just like, you know, if you just look at a business model giving away 55 cents a dollar, it's like, it's not ideal. So like, you know, we'll see how long they can not do it. Speaking of other ways that platforms are trying to help creators make money, Meta is starting a premium subscription on Instagram. So here's some of the features. You can view someone's story without them knowing you watched it. Ooh, finally, I can stalk you properly josh um jk you like what you're oddly not online that's weird so you can use somebody's story without them knowing it so you can finally stalk people properly on the platform and then you can see how many times people re-watched your stories which is interesting because like you know again people are like that that's always interesting to know like and that and that helps you figure out like super fans and what's you know what the the numbers delineating between like new you know if these viewers or views are from different viewers or just like repeat viewers um create unlimited audience lists for stories share stories with custom groups of followers extend the story's lifespan by an additional 24 hours uh and a few other things send animated super likes to other stories search within your story viewer list to quickly check if it's a specific version a person viewed your story the big thing i like i've been off instagram for a couple weeks and honestly my life is kind of better because like the problem is is like your brain it's hard for me to process like terrible political news and like a decorator and like a dog and like my kid's friend you know it's like it's too much i'd love to be able to like put things in different feeds for my own mental health um but anyway i don't know if that's coming anytime soon that's my personal product uh i would definitely pay for that kind of feature lord you brought up the stocking in in a joking kind of way but don't you think that that could potentially become an issue with this mm-hmm sure do i don't love it sure do linkedin already has this feature but i think it gets away from the stocking component of it because it's a generally conceived of as a b2b platform yeah and so if you pay for linkedin premium you can look at other people's profiles without them seeing that you looked at it yeah also i could see not a lot of people using this as well because sometimes you want the person to know that you're looking at them yeah but it's a reminder that you exist but sometimes you don't sometimes you don't The best way to do this would have a toggle on and off.

16:34But I do think there are like lots of implications that are being foreseen, but we don't exactly know how they're going to play out in terms of not great behavior happening on the platform. There's certainly people that I do not look like look at on LinkedIn because I know that they I mean, there's I mean, former colleagues that I just like maybe don't care for. You know me. I love everybody. but I definitely I mean are there people that you like deliberately like don't look at there's people that I choose not to interact with in in life in general and I would choose not to interact them on social media platforms no but you never found yourself being like I wonder I don't want that because then they'll say on LinkedIn you've never done you've never done that it's been a while I work a lot on myself Lauren yay and I think I've improved no keep going my vibration is just is just operating a little bit a higher pitch and tone keep going not quite there yet no you're no no there high frequency josh yes i'm here do you have any do you have any uploads or downloads i do lauren so here's one that seems like a blast from the past this this could be an article written in like 2012 2013 okay here's the title that sam gattel chose on tube filter with star-studded show the marketers adobe buys into the branded web series renaissance Maybe the renaissance there gives it away.

17:55But there is this, I think it's aptly described, this renaissance that is happening right now with these branded web series. So it used to be in the past, I mean, you remember this, there was this on flux. I produced, that was how I started in the digital space. There's companies like Babelgum that don't exist anymore. I produced web series for them, like very familiar. And this is back in like 2010, 11, 12. 2010, yep. Lexus has its own branded online video destination called L Studio. And they produced some big shows. One was starring Lisa Kudrow. It was called Web Therapy. And from Lexus's L Studio, it went on to run for four seasons on Showtime.

18:37And so there was this moment in time where brands were like, okay, we can do our own marketing. We don't have to go produce it on television or make a short film or anywhere else. We can just distribute it online. And it was great. And then those kind of fell out of favor, I think, because there was so much money invested early on. Because they didn't understand that you can't pay what my guest Lisa Kudrow's, you know, price was for Webster. Like you have the whole thing with digital series has got to be like, you know, cheap and fast. And especially in those days, like the money was not there to support that.

19:13Like the fact that that got picked up for TV, that was the only reason to really do it at that time is like, could you get something picked up for TV? Right. The ROI wasn't there either, partly because the audience wasn't there. But now there's massive audiences online. And so it might make sense to go dabble in this again with some cast of celebrities that people recognize. Yeah. But a lot of these series, to your point, they were also doing them on independent platforms. And today you would just kind of probably put it on YouTube. Right. So that's what Adobe did. This is its second season of The Marketers.

19:42It stars Hasan Minhaj, Patti Guggenheim. Other people that make an appearance are Kristen Chenoweth, Chance the Rapper, TikToker Lina Dong, and of course, Adobe Acrobat software. and the thing is this is pretty good it's entertaining sam really liked it he's a tough critic but i think if you can get past him especially for a branded web series it speaks volumes this is what jared carneson who is adobe's global head of social media said to brand innovators acrobat isn't the story the characters are adobe acrobat is how they brainstorm build presentations shape their campaigns it doesn't interrupt the narrative it moves it forward That's the shift we're making from content people tolerate to content that earns the attention it asks for.

20:28We believe this does. And this is the first among a new wave of this type of branded web series coming directly from the brands. I mean, we talked about this a little bit earlier. Crocs did a vertical video production that was its own web series. And we're going to see many more like this in the future as not only the cost of production comes down to produce these kinds of things. The talent also is more amenable to be in these kinds of things. just because the ecosystem has shifted. The Overton window has moved over towards online video and these kinds of things being cool, especially in the absence of more television and film productions happening.

21:03And then also the audience is potentially there now. So you can get a breakout. Did you say the Overton window? Is that what you said? Yes. I just want to make sure everybody heard that. I just want to make sure everybody, like, I don't want that to just, like, fly by. I just want to make sure, like, everybody, like, noticed that one. Well, you've got to act like you've been in the end zone before. No, no, no, no. You don't have to call this stuff out. I just want to make sure everybody heard it. You just kind of went real quick. Sorry.

21:27And we're going to see a lot more of these in the future, too. I think so. I'm digging it. I think so. All right, Josh. I think we did it. Lauren, I think that's it. I'll see you getting just real semantic about the four questions at an upcoming Seder. You mean semantic? Yeah, I will. If not, then next week on Creator Upload. Today's show was produced by Lauren Schnipper, Joshua Cohen, that's me, and Adam Conner. It's edited by Adam Connor too. Original music is by London Bridge. You can check him out on Instagram at London Bridge Music. Make sure you subscribe to Creator Upload right here on YouTube, on Apple Podcasts, as well as Spotify or wherever you're listening.

22:03While you're there, give us a rating and leave us a comment. If you want to talk, hit us up at info at creatorupload.com. If you like our show, recommend it to a friend. If you love it, just tell everyone. Thanks for listening to Creator Upload, and we will be back next week.