Budweiser's gamble, YouTube Shorts virality study, Twitter blocks Substack links, HBO Max rebrand, and why too much AI is bad for your marketing

0:00All right, got another reaction episode today. We are going to kick it off with what Neil has first. So what do you got on your docket, Neil? Right now, we're seeing a lot of corporations integrating AI into their businesses, and they believe it's the next best thing since sliced bread. And I believe it's just going to hurt people's marketing and user experience and just overall business when they're misusing AI. And we're seeing that all the time. I'll give you a prime example of this. So check this out. My daughter is three years old. She's starting at a school where you got to end up taking an IQ test.

0:39And you have to start taking the IQ test once you're five years old. So she has, she's about to turn four. So she roughly has a year before she has to take our first IQ test. And when you think about the IQ test, you do some problems, you're getting some right, you're getting some wrong. So I started Googling what is getting eight out of 10 right? What is getting seven out of 10 right, just ratios, because I wanted to know. So I started having my daughter take them, and it's 100 questions. It was too many to go through. As a three-year-old, she's not going to get through all of them. The first 10, she got seven out of 10 right.

1:14The second 10, she got nine out of 10 right. So at this point, she's averaging eight out of, or quote unquote, 18 out of, no, not 18. She's averaging 16 out of 20. And then the next group, she got nine out of 10 right and then she got eight out of 10 right right so you're doing them in batches of 10 so then when i started googling what does it mean if you get eight out of 10 because i'm just trying to figure out the score without what my daughter scores without her having to take all 100 questions land on quora quora ends up using this ai bot that is just typing answers to you and trying to help you out and i'm like dude can't you just give me the old quora where it just tells me eight out of 10 means this.

1:58This is the rough IQ score. Because some of these schools have minimums. Like if your kid doesn't score 138, you're not even allowed to apply and you can't even be admitted. Now, if your kid scores 139, 140, or whatever the number is, it still doesn't mean that your kid's gonna get it. But we digress on that. Now you guys understand why I was using it, but when I was on course, I'm like, this is such a shit experience. Why don't you just give me the answer? I don't need some AI bot typing out to me the answer and giving me a long-winded multiple paragraph answer when I'm just looking for, hey, eight out of 10 means this score or this range.

2:35And here's the crazy part. When it kept typing me the paragraphs, the first go around, it didn't even answer it for me. So then I click the back button, I go to the next Quora listing and it kind of gave me the answer. And then I just closed that. And then I finally see the Quora normal thread where someone's just typing in the question, someone's answering it. And I got the answer. And I was like, cool, you're using AI where it doesn't need to be used. You could have just told me the answer that someone already answered in the shortest possible form versus showing me paragraphs of an AI bot typing out an answer to me.

3:10Yeah. So I think what really matters here is the user experience and the context. What tends to happen when things get overhyped, such as crypto, such as AI, is we try to put crypto, we try to to put blockchain into everything. We try to put AI into everything. Now, I do believe that Quora is going to figure it out over time. Are they publicly traded, Neil? No, Quora, for my understanding, is not publicly traded. But no, you got it right. Eventually, they'll figure it out. But it was the same thing that happened with blockchain. It's the same thing that's happening with AI. It's just like if someone wants to integrate the AI with weather, what's the weather in Las Vegas, Nevada?

3:43Well, I don't care for a paragraph answer. I just want to see a graph and a chart that just shows me the damn weather right now. Yep. Look, AI is supposed to help save time, make things easier. I'm actually going to share an example of what we've been doing with our leads that come in for my ad agency, Single Grain. And so one of the windows here, so I'm going to share my screen right here. Neil, can you see this? Yes. Not yet. Now I can. Okay. So this is a lead that came in, right? So it'll show like, you know, it'll show like what search term they came through and then it'll show the message and And then what they're looking for, right?

4:17What we do now here is we've added this through AI. So we added a brief summary on what the company is. And we added a couple of ideas here. So our BDRs, when they reach out to the company, it's like, oh, here's what you can do. You can increase conversion rates by optimizing product descriptions, rewarding bullet points, adding comparison, top rated products, and all that. These are kind of generic insights. But some of the insights that I've seen are very unique to each company. And they can actually be used. So this is a practical use case where we're not necessarily making it harder to get an answer.

4:47We're actually making it easier and we're making it less confusing for someone, which is that's what sales is at the end of the day. You're trying to build confidence. So you've got to be very mindful about how you go about adding AI into your workflow. But once you got it going, it's going to take a couple of iterations. It should ultimately save you time. But don't try to just stamp it onto every single thing that you're doing because sometimes it's a little unnecessary. Yeah, if you're going to end up using AI to make your life easier, great, do it. Don't just plug in AI because everyone else is, because in some cases or in many cases, it's going to create a worse user experience, just like I experienced on Quora, and I'm probably less likely to click through on Quora in the future until they figure it out.

5:28Cool. All right. The next one is we wanted to talk about, there is a guy that Mr. Beast hires. A lot of the top YouTubers, such as Eric, they hired this guy. His name is Patty Galloway. And what they did here was they studied 3.3 billion views to decode the YouTube shorts algorithm. them. So the questions they're trying to answer here is what makes a short go viral? How much money can they make? Are they actually good for growth? And then here are the findings. So we're going to jump through this. Those of you that are watching on YouTube, you can follow around as I share my screen and we'll try to narrate as well as we can through audio.

5:59So I'm going to share my screen now and here it is. So let's just go and take a look at, here's the high level here, right? So we can see that – so he did a study, 33 YouTube channels with 54 shorts, 5 ,400 shorts included. So why don't we take a look at this real quick? Number of shorts by video length. Yep. So we can see the ones – most of the shorts are 30 to 40 seconds or so, and then the next level is 20 to 30 seconds by video length. And they even said really short shorts are rare. So 0 to 10 seconds is extremely rare. Same with 10 to 20 seconds. Yep. And the next slide says, but what is the best length to make for performance?

6:47And you can see far and away it is 50 to 60 seconds. It's average views by video length, 1.7 million. And the next level is 800K. That's 40 to 50 seconds. So it makes a lot of sense if you're YouTube. And if you're not, if you're not seeing the graph as Eric's describing it, pretty much the longer the video, the more views it gets. The shorter the video, the less views it gets. Literally, the graph is just going up as the video length goes longer. And then let's continue on that thread too, Neil. So you can see the AVD or the average view duration for the short. You can see it's for the high point, 50 to 60 seconds, it's 4.1 million views for 50 to 60 seconds.

7:24And then for the next year, 40 to 50 seconds, it's 1.8 million. So it's a pretty significant difference. And this is just reinforcing, if you're going to do shorts, try to make them 50 to 60 seconds long. Yep. So just making a long short isn't the goal. Making a short that holds people for as long as possible is. So the takeaway one is a shorts algorithm does unsurprisingly appear to favor longer videos that hold their, that hold viewer duration well. So that's, that's something most of us kind of know here, but here's another interesting thing. I don't know if you've seen this one, Neil, we've kind of talked about this one before, but if you're using YouTube studio, you can actually see the percent of people that chose to view it versus swipe away.

8:01And I believe this is going to become more of a factor long-term because this kind of up. This kind of serves as your click through rate. When people are watching your shorts, if you can't hold them in the first second or two, that basically is your thumbnail. The first second or two, if they swipe away, then that is a negative thing for your video. And that's the same that goes with just general social media. If people are just ignoring it, it's going to hurt you with views and likes and shares. Yeah. And you can see over here. So as As you can see by this line, shorts with under 60 % VVSA, so that's views versus swiped away, rarely performed well.

8:36So that's in the red over here, if those of you that can see the screen. The best performing shorts were typically between 70 % and 90%. So it's kind of the same thing as YouTube, right? You got to have a good thumbnail, and you got to hold people, the AVD, you got to hold people, ideally to 50 to 60 seconds or so. So you decide how you want to play it there. We're going to blow through this a little faster now, but here's the second takeaway. way. So viewed versus swiped away is worth paying attention to. It's important to make your first, second really punchy and engaging to hook viewers early into the video.

9:06Treat your intro like a thumbnail. Engagement retrics don't seem massively important, but we'll test more. And I'm going to go to takeaway number three. So those of you can just search for Patty Galloway YouTube shorts, algorithm, Twitter, you can find this. Takeover number three is shorts are definitely a good way to grow your subscribers, especially considering how much lower effort is involved versus a long form video. Important to note, sub counts are not overly important in 2023, but everyone wants more. And then we'll finally go to the last takeaway and we'll give our thoughts on this. Takeaway number four, shorts definitely aren't money makers yet.

9:35However, let's give it some time. Expect the RPM, which is a revenue per thousand impressions to rise over the next 12 months. And this guy says, are shorts worth it? I think so. If you can do them without taking away from the focus of your long form videos, go for it. So Neil, what are our thoughts on this? YouTube's pushing short form content. They're trying to compete and it's more so Google. Google has web stories as well, which is similar. They're trying to compete with Instagram and TikTok. So they're going to push it hard. If you want the brand awareness, you want the views on your profile, you want more subscribers, forget the dollars and revenue.

10:06But if you want the other benefits like growth, you're going to need to create shorts. It's much easier to do so. But just like a long form video, it needs to be super engaging. It's really hard to A-B test the first second in a short. but let's, you know, if, for example, if you think about thumbnails, you can A B test your YouTube thumbnails. So use your learnings from that to figure out how you should start off your shorts and how you should bait people or more so hook them. Bait's probably a bad word to use, but hook them and make sure you provide the same value. If you quote unquote bait them and say something crazy in the first second, but you don't deliver on that, you're just going to get huge drop-offs, which is going to hurt your reach in the long run.

10:44Yep. And the other thing too, is when I look at our workflow for making shorts, both Neil and I individually, we will have days where we record content. Typically, one day we'll be focused on long form. The other day we'll be focused on shorts just because sometimes it's a different mindset. And sometimes I might do both, but most of the time we try to split them up because you try to crank out 15 to 20 shorts in a day. And then the long form days, you might crank out a couple of those videos. So just keep that in mind. But they are different beasts. And the What you want to be doing ideally is post natively.

11:19The repurposed videos are okay, but when we do post natively, we find that they perform a lot better, and that makes a lot more sense. But just the hook matters quite a bit. Think about the ADA model, which is attention, interest, desire, and action. So that is that. Let's move on to our next topic. Next topic. So I wanted to talk about this real quick, Neil, and then we can move on from this one because it's this week's news. we're not gonna I'm just gonna share a graph and we're gonna leave it at that so Budweiser's 30 % drop in sales I just wanted to share something they decided to partner with Dylan Mulvaney and Dylan Mulvaney is known in the trans community and I'm gonna share this because Budweiser was trying to revive their reach revive their brand and I'm just gonna share this Google graph and we'll kind of move on from this one because we have other topics to cover.

12:11So here is the Google graph. This is Google Trends. You can see over the last five-year period in the United States, Budweiser has kind of been declining in popularity or more so breaking even, I believe. And they decided to... Change it from past five years to past all time or 2004. Past all time. 2004. Yeah, they have been declining. Yeah, they have been declining. You can easily see it. But what's the number on the screen right before the spike? The spike is at 100. It's always at 100, but go down right below. So you're looking at more than a 10x difference, closer to like 11, 12x difference, which is kind of massive in spike in brand queries.

12:57yep and you can see they kind of went hand in hand so dylan mulvaney with the with kind of this promotion they both shot up like a rocket uh budweiser i wonder who's who's a really popular person we can throw in here just to see tom cruise logan paul tom cruise or logan paul tom cruise why are you thinking tom cruise man because he's consistent everyone already knows tom cruise see you can see on this graph tom cruise's brand is is it bigger it's bigger than And we'll see about that. Okay, okay. All right, you win. You win. Tom Cruise is more consistent. All right. Anyway, that's our thought on that one.

13:37Logan Paul's spikes are probably joining WWE and the Floyd Mayweather fight. Those are probably the big ones. You're probably right. So anyway, those are our thoughts on that one. You know, you decide how you want to play it, but we just wanted to share the stats with you. So that's that. next topic is on Twitter blocking Substack links. Neil, you want to go on this one? Yeah. So if there's a Substack link in Twitter, it's blocked and some people may hate on it, but if I owned a business, why would I want to promote any other? Let me, let me add some more context here real quick. So the reason that Twitter started to block Substack links was part of the reason was Substack kind of made its own version of Twitter, right and you know elon will do what he wants to do and so he's like okay he decided to you know whoever's posting sub stack links we're either going to take away the reach or you know we're gonna we're gonna block those links straight up and you know it is what it is and a lot of people have been using twitter to grow their sub stack accounts which is a version of your email newsletter and your your email service provider go ahead neil dude have you seen the elon musk bbc interview you i did yeah where he called the guy a liar it's so funny he's like you are a liar that is a farce yeah because he's trying to come at him he's just like he's like yeah there's a lot more misinformation and hate speech and he's just like cool uh can you please give me an example of it and the guy couldn't come up with one because he's like well over the last few months we've been seeing can you give me an example of it and then he's starting to drill elon on things like misinformation he's like well bbc's been around her 100 years have you guys ever had misinformation The guy's like, yeah.

15:16And I like it. Elon's giving a taste of their own medicine back to them. But look, if you own a business, you have all right to block one of your competitors from leveraging your profiles, your platform to grow. Why would you promote your competition? It doesn't make sense. Even if someone's a similar type of competitor, but not really a direct competitor, more like an indirect, why not block them? Some people may not like it, But who cares? You're in business to make money. You're not in business to grow your competition. Yeah, I mean, it's a privately held company. He can kind of do whatever he wants.

15:53The other lesson here is you don't want to build on someone else's land. So once you have a channel that's figured out, then you want to figure out how you can diversify as quickly as possible. And then the channels that you can, quote unquote, own are like your email list, right? I'm air quoting right now. and you can own your SMS list to a degree, right? You have a lot more control over those. No platform can just say, oh, you're going to be banned or we're going to shut you down because a lot of people have these thread bros, I'll just call it on Twitter. They've been growing their sub stacks through writing these long threads that get good reach.

16:25And at the very end, they say, hey, subscribe to my sub stack. So that's what it is. I think, you know, is Elon, is he doing crazier and crazier stuff that he probably shouldn't involve himself with? Like, you know, what he did with the Twitter sign. Probably not, but he can do whatever he wants. So it is what it is. And this actually dovetails well into the next subject, but did you want to add anything else? No, let's talk about Beehive and how you're using them as your newsletter platform now. Yeah, so Beehive is another email service provider or ESP. And Substack, I kind of look at it as a newsletter.

17:03They're also like an ESP too, because they handle the deliverability or the delivery of the emails for you. And Beehive is interesting because they're another platform. It's spelled B-E-E-H-I-I-V. And they were created by the people, these former Morning Brew employees, which is, that's also a newsletter as well. And from their experiences working at Morning Brew, which is, they do like$70 or$80 million a year right now. They're bought by Business Insider. but from their experiences, they learned, hey, what a actual good email should look like. And so in Beehive, the reason why I'm moving over from my current ESP is because they have one, they have discoverability features, meaning that if I write a newsletter, it will also recommend other similar newsletters as well.

17:47And we can all kind of discover each other. That's one nice piece of it. The second piece is it has nice referral features in there. So I don't know if people remember when you subscribe to the hustle or the morning brew newsletters, there's like these referral kind of prizes you can win for the more referrals that you give out. So that's built in as well. And it has a whole host of other features. It just makes it really easy to grow a newsletter and it's really friendly. And I do believe newsletters are one of the great ways to grow your audience and then figure out whether you want to monetize through ads or monetize through their own services and products that you provide.

18:20So that's why we think it's good. And we've talked a lot of other email pros. more so I talked to a guy that helped grow the hustle newsletter and the milk road newsletter. And he recommends beehive. He uses beehive. I've talked to a handful of other ones. I'm just like, okay, I'm going to move over to beehive as well. And they will actually help you do it. They're not paying me to say this, but that is my reasoning. Here's the thing. If you have a super popular newsletter, I don't know if I would be using beehive. It's not the cheapest solution. I'm not saying it's not great. It's more. So if you have, For me, I get two to 300 ,000 new email newsletter subscribers per month.

18:56The last thing I want is other newsletters being promoted in my blast. But on the flip side, if you have a smaller newsletter, you're just starting out, I think it's a great solution to actually grow your list faster. But on the flip side, if you're already really established, you have a big audience, it may not be in your best interest to use it. But maybe they have an option where you can block that off where they're not pushing other people's newsletters within yours. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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21:42So that is a smaller newsletter. So I just want to clarify that. It is an opportunity to try before we buy almost, before putting all our eggs into one basket. So food for thought. Yeah, I like it overall. But my biggest issue is the moment you said, hey, they're going to end up promoting other people's newsletters when you send your blast. I hate that. That's not forced. You can turn that off if you want. Okay, well, if you can turn that off, then I don't really see an issue with it. But that was my biggest pet peeve with it. Yeah. Let's talk about the next one on the HBO Max rebrand. Do you want to give some context around it?

22:19Go for it. Well, you do know, what was it, John Wick? Or was it Creed? One of those movies will not be on HBO Max. It was one of them. I had no idea. You're the one that watches more TV than I do. So if you guys don't know, HBO Max, they're rebranding, and it's going to be called – what is it going to be called now? Warner something or – No, Max. No, just Max, I think. Is it just Max? I thought it was Warner something. No? No. Yeah, let's Google it. HBO Max rebrand to Max. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It's just Max. but when you look at HBO Max this is first a pet peeve and this has nothing to do with marketing if you ever download HBO Max videos and you go fly on an airplane it does not work and you cannot watch them on an airplane I don't know why I've tried so many times and I just don't get it then why let me even download this if I can't watch it when I'm not on wifi it doesn't make sense to me either way it makes sense on the rebrand because why limited to HBO Max And what's funny is I pay for a lot of the streaming services.

23:30So Netflix, Disney, Paramount +, I have Peabock. I have a lot of them. Apple TV. So I'm pretty much paying for most of the services out there, even Hulu. But when I think of HBO Max, I'm mainly thinking of HBO and Showtime, even though Showtime's not really on there. You can get Showtime stuff on Paramount +, at least the last I checked. but getting away from that rebrand I think is a smart move because it'll take away the stigma that it's just quote-unquote HBO Max and their limited inventory or category being uploaded because that's not really true right now there's more stuff uploaded than just what they show on HBO but that's what a lot of people think here's my take on it I think the name Max is a nice name I just wonder short term if that's a good move because the name HBO has so much legacy.

24:24HBO, what I think about HBO is high quality content. I think about Entourage. Was Entourage on HBO? It was, right? I think about just good shows. Game of Thrones? Yeah, so Game of Thrones, Entourage, all really good shows. Yep. And so I see there being like, why not just, I mean, there's been an HBO before, but why like throw away the HBO name? That's kind of where I'm coming from. I don't know if there's any divesture of brands there. I think maybe they're offloading HBO from Warner. Was that what it was, Neil? Well, right now I'm on Google Trends right now, but Warner Brothers or Warner Bros as a topic is not as popular as HBO.

25:03So based on what you're saying, they probably should just keep it HBO Max. That's what people are typing and searching in. I think if they just end up changing it to Max, max, they're going to lose a lot of brand. It makes sense on why they're trying to do it, but in the short run, they're going to get hit on brand searches. And what they'll just have to do is spend the advertising dollars all over again and build up the new brand max. Yeah. We're talking about brand equity here, right? When you think about... Here's a good example of a rebrand here. Typically, you see rebrands happen when either the company isn't doing well.

25:41Like for example, Time Warner becoming Spectrum or something, like the cable, right? Because they just got so many bad reviews. That's one. The other one is Facebook rebranding to Meta. And that's just led to more confusion, I believe, than any help in the last couple of years. I still call it Facebook, Neil. I don't know what you call it. Yeah, I do too. Here's an interesting stat. So I'm looking at Google Trends on my screen. Max is 83 times more popular than HBO Max. And yes, HBO Max does rank number one on Google for Max, but there's a lot of other Maxes that people are looking for, such as Max official website or Max Music.