YouTube Launches 'Hype' to Incentivize Small Creators

YouTube just launched Hype. I don't know if you heard about it. And YouTube just launched Communities. So Communities, people can engage on the Communities. Talking about community again, it's a good dovetail. But also Hype, you know what Hype is? Hype is for like, let's say your channel has under 500,000 subscribers. Instead of just a like, you can hype it. You get 3 Hypes per week. And that will signal to YouTube that this is a really good video and they should give it more reach. Because they're trying to give smaller creators more reach to incentivize them to continue to create. And I think that's a great thing.

That's cool.

Yeah. 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 do so, just go to marketing school dot io slash 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, marketing school dot io slash agency, and we'll see you inside.

So this data is from Anne Marie Nelson Bogle. She's a VP of Ads Marketing, and the key. Findings include, one, increased representation. So brands are featuring more diverse characters and perspectives. 2, celebration of self-expression. Ads are focused on individuality and unique styles. 3, community-focused storytelling. Brands are emphasizing connection and social gatherings. 4, embracing magic and fantasy. Ads are using imaginative elements to spark interest. And last but not least, number 5, partnering with creators. Brands are collaborating with creators to build trust and fan bases. Those are the main aspects that they've seen in the top-performing ads. Now, you don't have to use all of them. A lot of people are just using 1 out of 5, but those are the common elements that they're seeing that are causing brands to perform really well.

Dude, if I had to just pick one from here, community-focused storytelling. So the MrBeast book, he just said in there, like, he shows their retention when they— the ads are not that good, right? You see drop-off, like hardcore drop-off at that point. But when they make it about storytelling that's relevant to the video itself, it just flows in seamlessly. And so they're just like, dude, your ad should be storytelling, right? And it shows over here, community-focused storytelling. I think that's more important than any of these 5 over here.

I think that one's important. My favorite one is the influencer one, because that's easier—

Partnering with creators?

Yeah, because corporations have money. It's easier to build trust by working with influencers and other creators. A great example of this is Nike. Everyone wants to be a personal brand and have millions of followers, but Nike doesn't focus on that. They know corporate brands are more powerful. So what they did is instead of focusing on building personal brands, they partnered with people who have personal brands, EX, LeBron James. They used to partner with Kobe, Michael Jordan, and that's really elevated Nike and just made them boom over the years.

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 want to 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. We're also 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. People shouldn't focus on the personal brands, right? Because your personal brand drives less than 10% of revenue. And so I think it's good for us to— we've talked about this before, but I think it's good to reinforce it. Because it's interesting, because we'll say things that sometimes contradict what we're doing, because we spend so much time— like, this is— you're going to yawn. Neil's going to yawn, guys. Go ahead, yawn.

No, no, you did.

Okay, so, um, but yeah, I mean, let's talk about a little more.

I was yawning, so I wasn't—

personal brands versus corporate brands, corporate brands, right? And your personal brand is less than 10% of your revenue, um, but at the same time, we still take actions that build our personal brands.

So I remember in our first year of business, we did around $5 million in revenue. This is for ad agency NPA Digital. The personal brand pretty much drove 100%. In the second year of business, we did around 18-ish million in revenue. The personal brand drove $10 million of that. The third year, we did 30-something million in revenue. The personal brand only drove around $10 million. And as our revenue kept growing, the personal brand was stuck at $10 million. Keep in mind, my personal brand's not like a Tony Robbins or a Gary Vee or Kim Kardashian or anyone like that, or Ronaldo. So they're going to get more leverage from their personal brand than I am. But even when you look at these personal brands, and let's take Kylie Jenner, for example, Kylie Cosmetics, she got her beauty company to pretty large. They say she sold it for over $1 billion. It wasn't really the case, right? Her end-up share, I think, was like for the majority of the business, it was 50%, but I don't think the business performed. So let's call it around $600 million or $500 million or somewhere around that.

Still good.

It's still amazing. There's nothing wrong that she did. I would love to have, you know, give me $500 million, $600 million. I'd be ecstatic.

Yeah.

But what you find is you compare her to Estée Lauder, Maybelline, or any of the big, you know, beauty brands, L'Oréal, and what do you notice? They're gigantically bigger by leaps and bounds. It just shows a personal brand only makes so much money. You know, you can say, "Oh, look at Michael Jordan! He's done so well with his personal brand." He has, but Nike's made even more money than him from their corporate brand, and so has Reebok, and so has Adidas, and a lot of these other players out there.

You know, it's it's interesting because to me, the Jordan brand started as a personal brand, but like as it's evolved, like you don't really see him in the media or anything. To me, it's become more of a corporate brand. Like people can make the argument that you know Louis Vuitton or Christian Dior and Christian Dior Chanel like. But we don't know any of these people.

No.

They're just corporate brands now.

Yes.

Yeah. And so if you were to go back in time now, starting NP Digital brand new today, what would you do about all the time you spent with the personal brand? Would you still do the same thing?

Well, I would still leverage it because I think a personal brand is a great way to kick off your marketing. But if I had to go back even further, I would have done 2 things differently. One, I would have never focused on building a personal brand. I would have I would have focused right away on a corporate brand. 2, I wouldn't have the corporation named after me as an individual. My agency was originally called Neil Patel Digital, then NP Digital to get away from Neil Patel. And believe it or not, people don't always associate NP with my name, which is great. And I would just focus on building a corporation that, you know, just has its own standalone brand.

What do they associate NP with now?

Nothing. They just look at it as random initials. Like if you ask people about IBM, and I'm not saying we're anywhere near the size of IBM, we're tiny. In comparison. But most people don't know what IBM stands for.

Yeah, what does IBM mean?

International Business Machine? Yeah.

Well, 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.