What You Need to Know About YouTube Ads | Simon Young and Gabriel Jude

This is a conversation between Simon Young and his guest Gabriel Jude, known as Gabe, a YouTube and video marketer, about what actually matters when running YouTube ads.

How did Gabriel Jude get into YouTube marketing?

Gabe has been running his own businesses since he was seventeen and a half, after dropping out of high school, and his first six ventures failed before anything stuck. In August 2008 he got into internet marketing after watching a friend travel the world funded by passive income from affiliate marketing. That friend told him success online really comes down to mastering one of two things, traffic or conversions, and Gabe chose to focus on traffic because he found it more creative.

A separate contact, John Ly, who was known for making videos that could take a channel from zero to over a hundred thousand views in under 48 hours, introduced him to YouTube marketing properly. Gabe describes it as "love at first sight", in contrast to SEO, which he calls technical, unsexy and "quite boring and quite mundane". He started as a freelancer in 2008, launched an agency in Australia called Easy Peasy Marketing in 2011, and expanded it into an agency called Real Media in 2013, working with brands including Heinz, one of Australia's largest debt agreement companies, and Formula One Grand Prix. In 2015 he stepped back from agency work to focus on teaching others, because, in his words, "I don't believe that YouTube marketing is the future, it's already here."

Why are so many big brands still getting YouTube advertising wrong?

Gabe puts most of it down to a lack of proper education and support. He describes a pay-it-forward culture in the industry, using his friend Scott Simpson as an example: Gabe mentored him around 2012 or 2013 on his family vlog, and Scott's channel has since passed 120 million views and close to 400,000 subscribers, earning through AdSense and leading him to start his own video marketing company that helps channels grow organically, with clients including Russell Brunson.

Gabe argues that a lot of agencies are "running blind", taking on clients for SEO, YouTube ads or Facebook ads without a clear idea of how to hit the KPIs those clients actually want. He points out that big names such as Chevrolet, GEICO, Grammarly and Starbucks are already on YouTube, but that their targeting is "all over the place", a spray-and-pray approach chasing free exposure and eyeballs rather than precise, conversion-focused audiences.

What does the Chevrolet example show about targeting?

Gabe says that over two or three weeks he was shown the same Chevrolet car advertisement on YouTube repeatedly, despite not being in the market for a car and not even holding a driving licence, which he takes as evidence the brand was not using in-market audience segments or capping how often the ad was shown to the same viewer. He contrasts this with YouTube's ability to target people who are genuinely "in-market" for a car, and argues many advertisers spend heavily without ever refining who sees their ad, then lose faith when the results disappoint.

Why can YouTube ads scale further than Facebook?

Simon and Gabe agree that scaling on Facebook is unpredictable: Simon says that pressing the "spend more" button on Facebook can take you from making twenty grand a day to losing twenty grand a day, purely because "Facebook feels like it". By contrast, they argue Google shows advertisers properly how a campaign can scale as the account learns.

What is Vidnetics?

Gabe describes his own product, Vidnetics, as a cloud-based platform that helps YouTube advertisers find existing videos to place their ads against, matched to exactly what a target customer would search for. His example is a car enthusiast searching for how to customise a particular car: Vidnetics would surface the videos those searches lead to, so an advertiser's ad appears in front of traffic that is already highly relevant, down to a radius around a specific local dealership or people known to be interested in something like golf.

Is the future of search really video?

Gabe believes it already is. He says that from around 2011 or 2012, Google has been steering YouTube to become "the next TV", and that changes made since then all reflect that goal. He cites data he had seen showing that 68% of people who bought something said they were influenced by a video they had watched on YouTube, and that close to 90% of the US market had been exposed to a new brand or product through the platform.

Do you need expensive equipment to make a YouTube ad that converts?

No, according to both guests, it is the message that converts, not the production values. Simon references a talk he gave in Singapore in 2013 called "How to Produce Highly Converting Videos Without a Blockbuster Budget", while Gabe says his own affiliate marketing campaigns were built on nothing more than animated videos or footage shot on an iPhone. Simon adds that in a small company, employees rather than a CEO or marketing director can appear on camera, and that platforms such as Fiverr make it affordable to hire actors "for pennies on the dollar" if nobody in the business wants to be filmed. He also points out that phone cameras have improved dramatically over the past decade, from 720p a decade ago to 4K today, removing the old excuse that video is too expensive to produce.

Why are brands moving from Facebook ads to YouTube?

Gabe says that in the couple of months before this conversation he had seen "loads, tons" of brands jump ship from Facebook, referencing a list of 600 big multinational brands sent to him, and that after personally reaching out to many of them on LinkedIn he had replies saying Facebook "isn't right for us anymore". Both guests point to weaker content moderation on Facebook as part of the reason, referencing concerns raised around the Black Lives Matter period as well as hate speech and scams, and contrast it with what they see as YouTube's stricter moderation of what gets shown.

Where do Simon and Gabe think search is heading next?

They touch on answer engines such as Cortana, Siri and Alexa, though Simon says he doesn't think people will move fully away from typing over the next few years, since it can still be quicker to search online than to ask. He raises the idea of an "emotional selling proposition" rather than just a unique selling proposition, arguing that only video can properly show how a product makes a customer feel rather than simply listing what it does. Gabe closes by saying that being able to build precisely targeted audiences, what he calls "audience creation", is going to become even more valuable over the next few years.