MrBeast, Logan Paul & KSI’s Epic Collab: Genius Yet Controversial?

Did you see the MrBeast, Logan Paul, and KSI collab?

No.

Okay, so this one over here, so you'll like this, maybe your kids will like it, but I don't know if your kids should do it. So MrBeast and Logan Paul just launched a Lunchables competitor. Remember Lunchables?

Yeah.

It's called Lunchly. And in the Lunchly, you get Prime is in there and you get a Feastables bar, right? So it's chocolate and it's like, I don't know how sugary Prime is. And then it's Lunchly, right? So you have KSI, who's a big influencer, Logan Paul, who's a big influencer, now he's WWE champion, right? Or I don't know if he's champion or not. And then you have MrBeast, obviously. And so I just think it's interesting. I think they're probably going to crush it. But the question is, it's good for business, but is it good for the people?

I don't know if that much sugar is good for children. I'm going to go with no. And even Lunchables, I'm not a nutritionist, nor is Eric. We're not trying to give nutrition advice, but I'm pretty sure eating Lunchables all day long is not good for you either.

I love Lunchables as a kid, but I was pretty sure even back then that this is probably not that good for me. So you can go mass cons— they're going— okay, the good thing about them is their audiences are very wide TAM, right? The products that they're going for are very wide TAM. But in my opinion, I'm like, okay, you're gonna nail the business part, but if you wanna nail it long-term, the trend right now is healthier stuff. People are looking at all the ingredients. The dinner we were at yesterday, everyone's looking, talking about ingredients and all this stuff, right? I think the move might have been to try to go healthy, maybe charge a premium price, a higher price maybe.

But, and it would have to taste good at the same time.

Yes. Oh, that's a big thing. Yeah, because MrBeast did say like the thing he found with chocolate is it just doesn't matter. It has to taste good. Yeah.

Yeah. And with chocolate, it doesn't matter how healthy it is. If it doesn't taste good, people don't buy it.

You know, let's think about the food that we eat all the time, right? I eat— I love eating Erewhon, right? I love eating Sweetgreen, right? And it's delicious, but it's like at least semi-healthy.

I don't get Sweetgreen Air One too often delivered. What do you got?

Goop?

Goop. But we just go to a lot of restaurants because you can Uber Eats from all the high-end restaurants that have like cleaner ingredients.

Oh, so you like Uber Eats from Avra or something?

Yeah. Oh, straight up. We Uber Eats Avra. Another place that we call in is Koi.

What's Koi? K-O-I?

Uh-huh. The sushi restaurant.

Sushi delivered?

But they have everything, sushi, chicken, et cetera.

Yeah, okay, okay.

And we do get sushi delivered. It's not bad, but mine are usually vegetables. You gotta eat the fish.

Oh, you don't eat fish?

Yeah, I don't eat fish.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I wanna talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. So auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. By the way, we're talking about MrBeast, and it's funny because we're on stage and I was trying to get you to read this MrBeast production book. I sent it to the group chat with like Yaniv, Syed in there, and then Yaniv read it. He's like, oh my God, this is golden, right? So I'm just going to read off a couple of things here. So MrBeast, basically he created a book for his employees. It's a 36-page book. It's an onboarding book and it's called How to Succeed in MrBeast Production. And it was really well done. I want to, you know, name off a couple of things over here because Keep in mind, MrBeast, he's only— he's still in his mid-20s right now. And, um, I— one of the key things he talks about in the book is like, I only want to hire A players, right? Because B players, C players, like, they drag each other down, um, and we can only afford to work with A players, right? And in here, like, he, he also talks about the very end for your career. At the very end, he's like, you know, don't just like wait for your career to happen to you. Like, come to me if you want to grow. There's plenty of things that we want to do. And if you're pushing, you're always asking, like, we will help you create something, and we want you to make a lot of money, right? I think it's pretty inspirational. You know, grammatically, he's not the best at this, and he says this in the very beginning, but this is kind of like his expectations for how the company should be run. And he's like, I don't care how traditional media does things, like, we're different. Here he says this, the amount of hours you work is irrelevant. So, you know, someone might solve a problem in 30 minutes, and then a team of 5 couldn't do it in a week, like, I don't care. Like, it's all about output, and I think we can agree with that. Um, and he talks in here about if you want to learn how to go viral on YouTube, there's a lot of stuff in here on how to do it. But he just teaches all he can, and he's like, dude, like, go the extra mile too. Like, sometimes I might need a castle, but sometimes as we're looking for castles, I might, might find someone that has like a giant, like the biggest bouncy ball house in the world, right? Like, if you don't use that, you're not creative enough. Like, we need you to be creative, right? So it's just a really intense onboarding document that I love this stuff, right?

And it's when I'm like, why the heck would you want castles?

I'm like, oh yeah, MrBeast probably does need castles and random things. Yeah, but dude, you never appreciate the fact that, at least I don't, I'm just like, you have to look at many, many different castles, and then within those castles, there's like gems that you can find, and you have to figure out how to hook them all together. And then you have to like, when you plan for a shoot, it's not just for one day. You need to plan like multiple buffer days, 'cause shit can go wrong, right? So it's just like, There's a lot in here that I can appreciate, and it's for free. So I highly recommend everyone read it. And probably it's helpful, like, you don't need to have a 36-page book for your company, but it's helpful. Like, for us, we define our standards of excellence, right? We, we have like a lot of pages of this stuff. And we had a new guy that onboarded last week, and we had him read this as well. He's like, oh, yours is pretty much the same thing. I was like, okay, that's good.

Well, that's good. Yeah, I haven't read it. But the one thing I know I disagree with is only hiring A players. You can't scale a massive company with elite players.

I think it's hard for agency-type businesses, right?

Any businesses. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google.

I agree. But I think up to a certain number, you can keep it A-players. But I think you'll get to a scale where you can't.

Yeah. And also, for certain tasks within an organization, you don't need A-players, and A-players wouldn't do those things.

You're okay just having someone that doesn't— like, because if someone's an A-player, they're very motivated. You don't want someone very motivated to try to jump around when it comes to like, Things like accounting, for example, right? So there are some things where you need stabilizers. And you know what the difference between a rock star and a superstar is?

No.

Okay. So a rock star is someone that just does their job really well. They don't necessarily want to grow a lot, but they're very solid at their job. A superstar is someone that's constantly pushing. They're an intrapreneur. Maybe they want to become an entrepreneur, but they're trying all the new things. They have all these new ideas, they're jumping around, and they're major impacts on your company, right? But you kind of need rock stars and superstars.

I was about to say, I'm like, I think in our organization we have more rock stars than superstars by far.

Yeah, and I think that's probably— I mean, your size is 1,000 people, right? I think that's, that's a good thing. The worst would be if you say we have a lot of superstars and everyone else just kind of sucks. That would be bad because then the superstars would just get pissed off and leave. Yeah, yeah. So that's that. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So This first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to So just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. You have one over here, um, and you have it in all big text. It's AI on Innovation: Analysis of 546,000 AI Overviews. This is from Search Engine Journal.

Yeah, I don't, I don't have my iPad in front of me because we're recording at the HubSpot event.

Only I have it.

And Eric was smart with that to bring his iPad. But Search Engine Journal had a really cool article on AI innovation analysis of 546,000 AI overviews. And there's some interesting charts in here, and I want to share some of the data with you. Top 10 most cited domains in the AI overviews: YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, National Library of Medicine, Google, support.google, Healthline, WebMD, support.microsoft. And the reason I want to point out support on Google and Microsoft is because it's both support sections, which is kind of interesting, and Mayo Clinic. And the other thing that was quite interesting is there was one other thing here, the AI overviews and citations, like how many times do they actually cite a link out of the, out of the number Only 0.85% of the time. So less than 1% of the time—

They don't cite—

They don't cite a link.

Wow.

So 99+% of the time, they're citing a link.

They're stealing.

Only 0.1% of the time. I mean, 0.85% of the time. And the way we look at that is, if you're not optimizing for the AI overviews, you're missing out. Eric and I at our agencies, we're seeing clients get an increase in traffic when they optimize for the AI overviews. We haven't seen SEO traffic go down. Once Google released the AI overviews, we actually have seen them go up, not by much, but by a small percent. And when I say a small percent, literally, it's between 1% and 2%. But that's better than it going down. But you got to optimize to also be included in the AI overviews.

You know, just to give credit to Kevin Indig, shout out to Kevin Indig for that one. He contributed to that. But I think it's It's interesting to me because, you know, the AI overviews, they've tweaked it a lot because the AI overviews, it was like 80% of results a couple months ago, and now it's down to like, what is it, single-digit percentages?

Last time we did analysis on our, what is it called, on our user base, it kept going down. And the last time we checked, it was somewhere around 7-8%.

I think they're testing it and they'll pop it back up again at a certain point. So don't expect it to be a permanent thing. Anyway, that is it for today, everyone. This is live from us at Inbound 2024. This is how seriously we take it, guys. Neil had to speak at a couple of things. I have 4 things to speak at today. This is the 3rd one. I have one more. But please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. You can have a call with our guy Austin, and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.