The Complete YouTube Ads Course: Meet Simon

The introduction video from the YouTube Ads course, recorded during Simon's s.media agency era and now republished free as part of the Question.Marketing archive.

Who is behind this course?

Hi, my name's Simon Young, and I really want to thank you personally for taking the course. I'm sure you're going to gain an absolute ton of knowledge — and if there are bits during the course you feel are missing, send me a message and I'll happily add them in and expand the course as we go.

A bit about me. I qualified as an accountant 25 years ago — a very long time ago — and luckily I was born into the generation that experienced the beginnings of the internet. I was a bit of a gamer: ZX Spectrums, Olivettis, BBC Micros. Then the internet started. At the time I was working for one of the first businesses in the UK to import recordable CDs — many of you won't remember those — and when the web really got going, we needed a website. Somebody said "how do we build one of these?", I had a go, and I absolutely loved it. I've never looked back, and I never jumped back into accountancy — although it has served me well, because it lets me show clients how I understand the numbers in their business. That's crucial to what you'll learn throughout this course: understanding conversions, and the numbers and data that come out of the back end of your campaigns, rather than just relying on what Google is doing for us.

What is the track record?

I've had some really successful e-commerce businesses — I sold one just as Amazon and eBay were really starting to impact its size. I then got asked to work for a big agency in the UK near Leeds, with clients like Hard Rock Cafe, Red Bull, BMW, Rolex, the European Tour and Stonegate Pub Group, and I helped grow the digital side of that business from me to 35 members of staff.

I left and started my own agency six years ago — full service, grown from just myself to 15 staff. And we struggled with what I call the agency merry-go-round: taking on clients, trying to do video, web, social and PPC for all of them, winning some, losing some — two steps forward, one step back. It becomes hard. Over the last 20 years I've had the chance to use a lot of client money inside the Google interface, and I still learn every single day.

Why YouTube first?

As a business we spent a lot of client budget over three or four years on the display network, and transposed those techniques onto YouTube just as it was really getting going as an ads platform. We're still in the infancy — there are so few people using YouTube properly. We pivoted to a YouTube-first strategy, s.media was born through lockdown, and the business exploded. Some of the things we've learned with YouTube ads are incredible, and you'll see the possibilities throughout the course.

There are a lot of agencies trying to get into YouTube ads. Only yesterday I saw an account spending £28,000 to £30,000 a month where the PPC agency running it was bidding purely on the client's own brand name — they clearly don't understand PPC the way they should. Throughout this course I'm going to try to widen the way you think about PPC, the way you bid on Google Ads, and the way you don't have to rely on what Google's telling you to do. Jump into the next section for an intro to the people leading you through this content — I hope you enjoy what we've got for you.