Marketing the Series | David Theroux

On July 6th, we launched the series on YouTube. As I mentioned, the series personifies the folly, the cost, the intrusiveness, and outright absurdities of government policies and promotes the Government Cost Calculator mobile app. It was redesigned, by the way, I should mention, to fit with the series, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Our initial goal was to reach 1 million combined views. Within a 6-week marketing campaign. The campaign included 2 components. The first one was a rather standard publicity campaign of op-eds, interviews, emailings, social media postings, and networking with hundreds of other organizations and individuals who might recommend it in social media, blogs, websites, and so forth. For example, Tim Draper very kindly tweeted it to his followers and got quite a big response. The second part of the campaign was a series of ads targeted at millennials on YouTube. But to pursue the campaign, does anybody know how many videos are on YouTube, by the way? A lot. Does anybody know how many are added per day? 1.1 million or something? It's something like about a million per day, and it's over a billion. Yeah, that's right. But to pursue this campaign, where do we go? What do we target to reach millennials? And what do we use to target them that would make them responsive to want to view a series they'd never even heard of from a group they've never even heard of? So we had to undertake A/B testing of many different millennial many different YouTube pages where we believed millennials would go. And we targeted that with different ads. And we boiled it down from hundreds of possible pages to about 20 to 30. And I can tell you quite frankly, I would never have thought that these particular pages by and large would be the ones that would be the most responsive. So for the marketing campaign, Within 4 weeks, we had already reached our 1 million goal. And the campaign, as I mentioned, was aiming to go as far as 6 weeks. So by 6 weeks, we'd reached over 1.5 million. In the process, we also doubled the number of subscribers on our YouTube channel, as well as the number of app downloads. The app originally was put up about 2 years earlier. And so we— That's a great story. Designed it using the Gov character as the foil. So if you go to the app and you click on different things, up pops Gov's face and he has some snarky comment. So it's funny, it's engaging, and yet there actually is information that you can really drill down to on any of these 5 issues about the series Focus. We also produced over 100 media articles. Postings of the video and so forth as a result of the publicity campaign. On the backside of the sheet that you have there on LoveGov, you'll see some of the quotes. We have hundreds and hundreds of quotes from all different kinds of prominent people and media and so forth. On September 25th, Jon Stossel devoted his entire program on Fox to the series, which was then aired 6 times that week. And we're currently working to organize a second marketing campaign to push the viewership far higher. We also intend to edit the 5 episodes into one half-hour program. You may remember that each episode is only about 5 minutes. So the plan is to edit into one half-hour program to make that available not just on YouTube, but on Netflix, other YouTube channels, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon Prime. Google Play Store, the prospective Apple TV if it ever develops, and other outlets. We also want to use it in conjunction with educators, business and civic leaders, and others. So in effect, LoveGov is intended and is indeed already proven to help everyone, especially millennials, understand in a storybook way the effects of government in an allegorical way too. As you may recall, it's a lighthearted approach to reach audiences on a personal level and to inspire them to learn more and take action through the app and so forth. The series is produced by Independent in association with a firm called Emergent Order in Austin, Texas. We selected Emergent Order as a result of an RFP That we sent out to different film producers, as I mentioned, and they won. And so we worked with them to develop the script, to do the filming, to do the editing, the casting, and all the rest. Now each of the Love Gov Series 5 episodes, as you may recall, follows Alexa's relationship with Gov as its intrusions wreak comic havoc on her life professionally, personally, and socially. Gov creates excessive student loan debt, expensive housing, unemployment, business failure, inadequate and expensive healthcare, and commits personal privacy invasions. Libby, that you mentioned before, is her loyal friend. So essentially Alexis has 2 friends. She has Libby and she has Gov. Does anybody remember what Libby is doing when we first meet her in episode 1? Going to school, dropping out of college. I'm sorry? She was planning to drop out of college. Well, that's Alexis, but what was Libby doing? She was supporting her. What was she doing when we first see her, do you remember? Was she supporting Libby? She was reading a book. Democracy in America. Democracy in America. Well, that was under the tree, but— That's right. Now, who wrote Democracy in America? Do you remember? There's a man by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville. It was written in the early part of the 19th century. Tocqueville is an interesting man. He's from France. He and a colleague came over to the United States at the time. They were going to study the American prison system. So they're traveling around the country, going to prisons, going from town to town. And one of the things that they discovered was that in all these towns, when something happened that was harmful— a barn burned down, someone lost their spouse, someone was injured, a child got harmed, or whatever it might be, a crop failed— the people in the town will pull together and create organizations to help each other. These are called mutual aid societies. And they found it consistently throughout American society. And they were just blown away from this because they knew in France this did not happen. Does anybody know why it did not happen in France but it happened in the United States? Decentralization of power. That's right. The reason was because in France, every organization had to be approved by the crown. In the United States, you just started it on your own with your neighbors. You started your own business. You started your own community aid organization. You pulled people together to rebuild someone's barn as I mentioned. And so he decided to write this book, not about prisons, but about democracy, democracy meaning self-government and liberty. And it's considered to be one of the greatest books ever written on the ideas of liberty and certainly on that period of American history. So each episode In Love Gov is about 5 minutes long. The characters, as you may recall again, are Alexis, Gov, and Libby are the main characters. There's also the drone. There's about 10 other characters who show up at different points. Alexis is named after Alexis de Tocqueville and Adam Smith, hence Alexis Smith. Gov, of course, is Gov. Libby is the idea of liberty. And throughout the series, if you watch it carefully, you'll find all sorts of little things dropped in. For example, in the first episode, it's not just about student loans. Gav is trying to convince Alexis to take out more student loans to do what? Do you remember? Go to Florence. They want— he's trying to convince her to go to Florence during the summer, which costs about twice the normal student loan rate. She's reluctant. Libby's trying to tell her not to do it. See, Libby is the one who knows what's going on, and so she's trying to advise Alexis not to fall for Gov's promises. So when Gov is making the case, he says, "I know people in every country, but don't believe what they say about me." Now remember, this is the government saying it. So the U.S. government is in almost every country, and many of these. Many of these countries, the people don't like what the US government is doing. There's also, there's other many different kinds of things throughout the series. There's a mention of Bitcoin. There is a mention about wetlands regulation by the EPA. There's all sorts of little things. At the very end of the first episode, when Gov is talking about how you have, you have a lifetime to pay off your student loan debt, right? Is that what you want? You want to spend the rest of your life paying off your student loan debt? He says, this is— I'm in favor of this. And so he makes then a positive endorsement about corn farmers. Do you know why? About what? Corn farmers. Because they get ethanol subsidies. Because they get ethanol subsidies, okay. So he is— he's making all these little remarks and if he's not saying things, what you want to do is look at his facial expressions and his hand movements. Because they will also give away what he's trying to get at. So anyway,