Why Brands Are Missing Out on YouTube (And What It’s Costing Them) with Larray and Andrew Graham

12:52Larray:Sometimes brands are doing this because they think you can get a better deal. In other instances, they feel like they could do better targeting. I think there's a way to merge all of these worlds. Make the long-form hero piece on YouTube. Make sure there are the moments within that YouTube piece that can be clipped as the custom content you're running as UGC, then run the UGC on short form. So I don't want to overly generalize, but I think this is something I'm not seeing folks take advantage of. So you're sort of getting the dopamine hit of TikTok or an Instagram, but you're also getting the long form satisfaction of YouTube.

13:27Larray:If you look at any of the Nielsen numbers, I'm sure you've read them, Ian, as well, more people are watching YouTube on connected TVs than they are Netflix, right? And brands are salivating to integrate into Netflix series. Okay, great. Yeah, there's cultural cachet and value there, but like pound for pound for viewership, it's actually YouTube, right? So for a group of people, marketers generally, that spend so much time looking at data and analytics and trying to be smart about their ROAS, there's that phrase again. They're just, they're sleeping on it. So my first priority would be finding the right way to tap you.

14:04Ian Shepherd:and one of the biggest one of the biggest things that i've seen through my own business and one things i love about youtube is as you say that growth on the tv set and we're seeing that more than 50 of the viewing of our videos is via tv which is amazing because longer average view durations higher cpms larry i just wonder from your perspective do you see those same trends with your content and are you changing the way you produce the type of content accordingly

14:33Andrew Graham:Actually, my last video was my first test at that because Andrew and everybody has been telling me that people are watching it on TV. And I started to understand how it feels to watch a television show. So I made my most recent video, which is doing incredible because of this. I made it feel like a TV show. I made it feel very, very, I'm not sure if I can say Adult Swim here. Can I say that, Andrew? Are we going to? Absolutely. You can. So if you ever watch Adult Swim, it's like Gen Z core. So I made it feel like you were watching an episode of Adult Swim and people loved it. And they felt like I literally felt like I was watching an actual television show.

15:14Andrew Graham:And it's helped a lot, truly. I've seen the reaction from that before I was doing this. And it's so substantial. It's crazy.

15:25Ian Shepherd:And Andrew, what are you recommending to your other clients about how they produce for YouTube?

15:29Larray:Yeah, certainly long form, anything that's 22 minutes in length or more, not only because it's optimized now for YouTube and the CPM's jump, but having catalog is now valuable. You're looking at places like Samsung and Roku and Vizio that are licensing and in some instances actually financing slates of content for these platforms. You look at the flurry of deals and announcements that are coming from the Fox own platform to be. And if you spend some time looking at all the announcements that are surely going to come out of upfronts, it's more and more long form creator first content. So, yes, there is an advantage to produce long form for YouTube's sake only, but it has all of this halo effect around it as well.

16:16Larray:And if you're a platform and you're going to partner with a creator and you're going to produce net new content, great. But have a catalog there as well in order to keep fans satiated when they show up to a platform to watch that content. I think this is maybe one of the learnings. I haven't spoken to anyone in person about this on Amazon Prime. But in the first season of Beast Games, which was an immense hit, there was no real catalog for the Beast fan or new Beast fan that found the show to ping pong around Prime. Whether to be learned from that or not, I don't know. But from the jump, they have been incorporating catalog as a part of their dealmaking.

16:56Larray:So we recommend the talent certainly build long form, but also build catalog because it has all of this sort of like splash of it.

17:03Ian Shepherd:You see that with Netflix as well. They've got the Mark Rober catalog, the Miss Rachel catalog, and it performs really well. It's introducing a whole new audience to the content. It is.

17:13Larray:And those other platform collaborations create revenue opportunities for the clients, not just in a transactional sense. If you're Netflix is one of the few platforms right now that definitively I have witnessed a one for one effect. You're on Netflix. You're selling more concert tickets. you're on Netflix, your consumer product business jumps a few hundred percent as a result of being there. And part of that is because it's the power of Netflix, but also I think it's also the power of long form. You get invested. You simply cannot have the same emotional connection with a piece of IP that is two minutes, three minutes as you do something that is 22 minutes.

17:54Larray:I mean, just it It seems axiomatic, doesn't it?

17:58Ian Shepherd:Yeah, it does. It does. And Larry, I'm really curious. How has your own revenue varied across your history as a creator? So has it always been brand deals? Do you have merch? What are you focused on?

18:12Andrew Graham:Everything, to be truthfully honest with you. Everything. Brand deals do the number, but the YouTube AdSense, that CPM is so beautiful. It truly is. It's one of a kind. But I mean, I've seen the creator space take a hit somehow. I feel like after COVID, a lot of brands stopped spending so much on YouTube and started to spend more on TikTok. And I feel like now we're in a place where there's so much brands spending all of their money on TikTok or any short form platform that they're not paying attention to YouTube. And there's so much space for them to like come and integrate themselves. And there's so many creators that are excited to be a part of anything because there's not really people getting reached out by brands.

18:57Andrew Graham:So that's my answer.

18:59Larray:I want to bounce off of that. Larry's absolutely right. And here's like a quick anecdote around this. We have a client who did something like 60 some deals last year. A lot of deals. And all but three were on short form. And this particular client has a very robust YouTube series as well. In fact, the series on YouTube goes viral on short form. And we had an energy drink brand that wanted to integrate into this client's short form. We said, please consider integrating into the long form series, the hero product, the product that people are obsessed with, that have sticky audiences, that watch 22 minutes of it.

19:38Larray:The content that then goes viral on the short form where you're trying to react. Let us give you this gift brand and integrate into the hero product. They first said flat out no. Then they said, well, we're going to have to cut the budget in half. And it's just like, oh, my gosh, like, help me help you understand this, CMO. Larry, I think you should talk about for a minute something we mentioned about maybe counterprogramming. If you're a brand and you're used to spending on TikTok, maybe there's an opportunity on YouTube. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

20:11Andrew Graham:A hundred percent. I mean, I feel like, especially my show, Ride or Die, I don't have a consecutive brand for it. However, I think all of my short forms from Ride or Die goes viral, and it's always me just being empty-handed. But if I think if I had an energy drink in my hand as I'm filming this show, it could be such a beautiful transaction for not only myself, but the brand. Yeah, I mean, it's such an opportunity, but it feels so, it just feels like common sense. But I also, I completely understand how people cannot understand how much impact YouTube has when it comes to a brand's partnership.

20:50Andrew Graham:I mean, if you go back to 2006, 17, when beauty gurus were doing MAC campaigns and MAC, it was the most, they were spending so much money. They was making so much money. And I feel like once the beauty community died, everyone wanted TikTok. But now there's such a huge market there for the beauty on YouTube because nobody's spinning over there. So it's like, there's so many people are zagging, right? Yeah. Yeah.

21:12Ian Shepherd:I can go on about this forever. No, I mean, I'm with both of you on this. My company, we invest into YouTubers. We had more than a billion long-form views across our content last year. We had more than 500 brand integrations, and 100 % of those 500 integrations were performance brands. It's a real miss that not one of them were Fortune 500 brands, and we would love to support them with campaigns and integrate them with our content. So if CMO is listening, there's a huge opportunity here.

21:49Andrew Graham:Pick up the phone. Call us. My main thing is I just want the next generation of creators on YouTube. They put so much work and energy into their content and I feel like they aren't seeing the flowers that they are getting from brands. And I would just, I mean, when I was a smaller YouTuber, all I did wish for was a brand deal because I knew how much energy it took to make a video. So seeing that brands aren't paying attention to YouTubers anymore, it's not disheartening, but it's like, come on, y 'all. This is the people that are actually hungry for it, not saying anybody that's making sure if them isn't.

22:21Andrew Graham:But there's so much energy and so much passion that goes into YouTube where I'm like, if you gave... Can I speak about my first brand deal, by the way? Please. I'd love to hear this. When I got my first Curology brand deal, I made a skit. I put in energy and I'm telling you that skit went up. Everyone loved it. Anytime you see my brand integrations, I put my suit and tie on and I make sure I perform because it's something that I'm intentional by. It's literally long form content. I have to make sure that the viewers that's watching don't get bored. TikTok, you can't get bored. It's 12 seconds.

22:54Andrew Graham:YouTube, YouTube, I got you. I'm about to give you the full shutdown.

22:59Ian Shepherd:It'll be a nice segue into the next section. I'm really fascinated. When do you both start working together Andrew, what chose you to represent Larry?

23:08Larray:Well, it's been a little over a year now, but Larry's a multi-hyphenate, right? This is the thing I keep harping on and why I was so happy that Larry agreed to do this interview with us. He equally is competent on long form and short form. Most of the brand work that we do for Larry, and we just had a year, New Year kickoff. We had a great last year together. Most of that revenue was short form revenue, right? Where a lot of our discussion, though, is around the long form piece, which we believe is the cornerstone to Larry's media company. We believe it's going to create enterprise value for him for all the reasons that we talked about earlier.

23:44Larray:So why Larry beyond that? You know, he's extremely respected in the community, highly responsive, extremely. I mean, you can just tell from this interview, gripping to engage with. But he really has the chops to be a creator in a capital C sense. That's why we're excited. And by the way, it wasn't just me. There's a whole group of people here at CAA that are excited about him. We don't sign sort of as cowboys and cowgirls here and just do it on our own. There's a whole community that has to like dig in and work with a particular client. So from books to television to consumer products to my colleague Lydia Ducoud, who's my partner in crime with Larry, there's a whole group of people that do the same thing.

24:25Andrew Graham:It's an ecosystem. It feels like a family. And to be truthfully honest with you.

24:30Ian Shepherd:That's great to hear. And Andrew, you've been doing this or you've been at CAA for nearly 10 years now. How's it evolved, the support that you give to creators?

24:38Larray:My gosh, it's evolved tremendously. So I've been here 10 years and I was a talent manager for five years. So despite my youthful complexion, I've been doing this for a minute. Excuse me, someone's calling. It was a sales call, though. Maybe it's about you, Larry. The calls are coming in. You can leave that in the cut, Ian. We're busy here at CAA. Commerce. It's changed dramatically. When I first joined the agency a decade ago, I was really hopeful that we were going to be able to bridge the success that we were having for creators. And keep in mind, a decade ago, 2015, 2016, it's the era that Larry was talking about.

25:15Larray:Mac campaigns everywhere. It's when brands actually were very focused on custom content on YouTube. I wanted to see that same opportunity, that same enthusiasm for Will Smith, for Zac Efron, for Noah Schnapp, clients of the agency. And it took a while, but we eventually got there. I was fortunate to be a part of the team that did Will's deal with YouTube. And I think Will is probably still to this day, one of the most well-known A-list traditional Hollywood talent that have leaned into creators. But it took a very long time. It probably took four years for that deal to even happen, right? And for linear Hollywood to start to wake up to the power of being a creator, capital C.

25:57Larray:When the pandemic happened, all of a sudden, all the actors and writers and directors and producers and musicians and athletes that we represent, they weren't on fields. They weren't on sound stages. They weren't on concert stages. They were at home. And they had a very, very, very strong awakening to the fact they had to have a relationship with their audience. And since that period of time, there has been this deluge of focus from Hollywood on becoming a creator. Also, as linear networks increasingly cut budgets, reduce output of series production companies, traditional institutions in Hollywood are now also going, kind of interesting, oating an audience, maybe we should be paying attention to creators with a capital C.

26:41So very acutely in the last three years, the investments of our agency in creator,

26:48Larray:the inbound interest from A-list clients has gone through the roof. Creator is at the center of every single signing that this agency has, every brand meeting that this agency has. You effectively cannot have a entertainment strategy without talking about creator strategy. And in a lot of regards, these other things, unscripted television, film, like these become commercials in a way for what those celebrities want to do elsewhere, right? Whether it's launch a tequila brand, a makeup business, a media company, and all of that is powered through direct-to-consumer relationships. In other words, creator, right?

27:27Larray:So it is completely reoriented in the decade I have been here. And in the last three years, it is like warp speed.

27:36Ian Shepherd:It's funny, isn't it? Because Larry, you are a creator, have been for more than 10 years. Andrew and I have been working with creators for more than 10 years, but it does feel like 2026 is a big year for creators. What are you most excited about looking forward, Larry?

27:50Andrew Graham:In the creator space? Honestly, I'm excited to see what like the next creator generation does. I'm so, I'm such a big fan of like High Sinat, iShowSpeed and what they've created. And I'm so excited to see them take the platform they made and see what they do with it. That's my favorite thing what a creator does especially Mr. Beast how he made Beast Games love that stuff I love seeing them just rise to entrepreneurship of it all beautiful and how about you Andrew in a moment

28:18Larray:of tremendous consolidation in media at a moment where I think a lot of my peers in linear media may feel a bit dour about the outlook of media I remain really optimistic it is there is no better time to be a creative ever in entertainment. You own your audience. You own the means to make the show or the IP that you want. There's nobody giving you notes. I mean, yes, Larry, when we work with a brand, somebody gives you notes. But generally speaking, when Larry's creating ride or die, he's the studio. Right. Exactly right. And so during this moment of tremendous consolidation, I'm really bullish on net new media companies coming to the fore.

29:00Larray:Ian, your company Electrify is one such expression of it. I genuinely believe the next Walt Disney Company, the next Viacom, CBS, it's coming out of the creator world. Whether that ends up looking like a roll-up, whether that ends up looking like one massive talent, I'm not quite sure, but I am excited not about saving the old world, but building the new one. And I think we're there.

29:26Ian Shepherd:Well, Andrew, Larry, it's been really great to speak today. Before we wrap up, I just have one last question. any advice for brands listening what would you recommend they do

29:36Andrew Graham:you want me to i said andrew take it away i i'll take it away um any brands listening i will say work with your creators and have faith in them and don't be afraid to allow them to take control and start please start looking over there at youtube because you're missing out there's so many beautiful creators with such amazing communities that are diehard and that are willing to listen to their creator and make sure they make the best purchase.

30:06Larray:Drew, anything to add? I think it's wonderfully put. Certainly, advertisers are missing the point as it relates to YouTube. Buying paid media on YouTube is not a YouTube creator strategy. You need to work with creators directly. And YouTube is a sticky platform. You are getting a community, not just transactions on YouTube. So please, pick up the phone, call me, call Ian. Let's do something together. Yeah.

30:31Ian Shepherd:So thank you for the opportunity, Arian. Thank you, Ian. This was so awesome. Thank you.

31:00Ian Shepherd:expertise and a team to scale your business faster. And third, a creative transition plan, enabling you to step back or exit the business altogether. We've raised over$100 million and made 10 investments, including YouTube channels, Veritasium, Fern and Fireship. If you're a creator thinking about the next stage, please get in touch to find out more.