Why YouTube Matters to Your Brand | Marketing Leaders Network Talk

Who am I and why am I talking about YouTube?

I am Simon, and I have worked on the internet pretty much since it started. I have got quite a young, exciting team and then a couple of dinosaurs working within it, me being one of them.

Over that time I have always been interested in programming, data and PPC, and that led us to the point of trying to become, or hopefully becoming, the go-to YouTube agency in the UK.

Why should you be looking at YouTube right now?

Because brands taking an omni-channel approach are struggling with Facebook and are actively looking for other avenues. It is becoming more and more clear in terms of top of the funnel that we are all trying to take an omni-channel approach, but some people are struggling with Facebook particularly, and brands are finding now that they are looking for other routes.

We do recommend a YouTube first strategy, but within that we obviously operate with other agencies and with internal teams, and use YouTube as one of the sources of traffic and conversion. We are finding it is an amazing source of traffic, great for conversion, and it just helps with your omni-channel approach to marketing.

What do the numbers say about YouTube as a platform?

YouTube is owned by Google, it is the second largest search engine in the world, and the crucial difference is that people actually pay attention. When you are watching YouTube it is what we would call lean in advertising. If you think of TV, it is on in the room. On YouTube people are actually paying attention.

The only caveat to that would be music, where people have got music on with YouTube in the background, but then you would not necessarily place ads into that.

The other thing about YouTube is that it is difficult for it to be full of ads. There are 300, I think 300 plus, hours of content uploaded every minute to the platform. Whereas Facebook is a sort of closed community, and although it is enormous it is running out of space to advertise into, YouTube has so much content being uploaded on a daily basis that there is a massive canvas for all those ads to go into.

Why does the advertising model work so well for brands?

Because you only pay for what is called a true view. Traditionally online you would have CPM, cost per thousand impressions. With YouTube the difference is that they will only charge you once your ad has been viewed for 30 seconds. That is not true for every single form of ad you can put on there, but the best performing ads at the moment tend to be what are called in-stream.

If somebody skips that ad before 30 seconds, you as a brand are not charged. So you have got 29 seconds to educate someone, get them warmed up, tell them about your business and the offer and what problems you solve for them. But if they skip, you do not pay. You get massive brand awareness on that side, and I have seen campaigns get millions and millions of impressions while the brand is only getting charged for hundreds of thousands.

The other thing is that once somebody does watch past 30 seconds, it only costs you roughly a penny. If you think of traditional PPC, that might be 50p, a pound, and in some industries 15 or 20 pounds a click. This way we have had somebody's attention for more than 30 seconds, and there is no limit to how long you can go on for. I have seen clients have ads that are 10 minutes and 20 minutes long.

Because you have interrupted somebody's viewing, you have come into the middle of what they are paying attention to, and they are now paying attention to you, you could go on for as long as you like. There are formulas as to what the best length of ads are, and they tend to be roughly between two and four minutes at the moment. That is where we see the best retention rates.

What has to happen in the first 15 seconds?

You need a good hook, because the first 15 seconds decide whether anybody sees the rest. You need the first 15 seconds of that ad to really engage someone and tell them the benefits, otherwise they are going to just skip. I have seen campaigns where people deliberately ask viewers to skip after 15 or 20 seconds to save budget.

The difference between traditional PPC and YouTube is that you have got the opportunity to educate someone. You have got a real chance of explaining a product or a benefit, and then you can tell them more about the business, the product and what problems it solves. You are selling there and then, rather than running a text based traditional PPC ad, where typically we see people clicking, going back, clicking other ads, clicking two or three ads, and then maybe finding what they are looking for.

It is great for awareness, and it has obviously got a measurable ROI, because you can track everything from end to end. Providing you are using proper UTM tracking, Google Tag Manager, all these sorts of things, you will be able to establish a proper cost of acquisition, whether that is a sale, a download, a video watch, or engagement with your other social channels.

How do you structure the ads and campaigns?

Two to four minutes as a rule, with pattern interrupts, and placement that is chosen rather than sprayed. I have got clients that have some ads that are 10 or 20 minutes long, but two to four minutes is the rule. We use things called pattern interrupts quite often, and the placement of the ad matters enormously.

If any of you watch YouTube a lot you will see brands like monday.com, depending obviously on what you are viewing. There are a lot of people on the platform at the moment who are just putting ads in with a spray and pray approach. They will put ads absolutely everywhere with a massive budget, relying on the skip so that people disappear and they are not charged.

We would much rather take an approach where the ads are fully targeted and the audience is profiled, and we do get the engagement, because it is the engagement that matters massively. The amount of engagement is the signal we are looking for. We want people to stay as long as possible.

We use what we would call a test, learn, reason and reiterate approach. We have a system that I built which is called IDAR, which is intelligence driven ad results. I would love to say it is AI, and a lot of people would say it is AI, but it is not. It is programmatic with human intelligence overlaid on top of it, mainly my human intelligence, because I built most of those campaigns and I built a lot of that tech.

What it is really doing is testing the placement of an ad, testing the engagement, and whether we are getting conversions or click-throughs, whatever the objective is for the campaign. The placements that are not working are dropped, and that is automated to bring in new placements, learn, and continually develop the audience so that it improves the campaign.

What are the hidden benefits of advertising on YouTube?

Your content does not disappear, and it earns you SEO benefit at the same time. The difference with Facebook is that your content is there and it is gone. On YouTube your content is there effectively forever, and because it is linked to Google, Google is giving massive SEO benefit to people who are using YouTube.

You can rank videos at the top of YouTube pretty much straight away. With traditional SEO you might wait months, or even years, to get to the top of search for a competitive term. With YouTube, because there is so much real estate available and so many views available, YouTube will allow videos that are coded correctly and have great content to come to the top really quickly.

Where is Google taking search next?

It is absolutely Google's strategy to move from traditional text based search, blogging and web pages, through to video, and then on to voice. I do a lot of work with answer engines, so Cortana, Bixby, Google Home, Alexa, all these sorts of things.

At the moment, if you ask Alexa a question, most of the time it will say I do not know, or here is something I have found for you on the web. If we go back five years that did not exist and you just had text based search with a bit of video. Google sees video as the bridge between text and voice, so engagement rate is what they are looking to measure.

I tend to use the example of best barbecue. If I am looking for a best barbecue, it is going to be a different barbecue to the one the guy who is 20 years old is looking for, because he has not got the same income as me. We both searched best BBQ. When you look at a video about barbecues, we would engage at different rates on different content, and that is what Google is using as a signal, tying my demographic data into my engagement to show me the right content.

Eventually they will be able to use the content within video, and the questions that live within there, to use it with voice search. But that is anybody's guess. It could be five years, it could be ten years, or it may never happen. It will do at some point, but who knows.

How does video improve your ordinary Google listings?

Embedding video on your pages using question and answer schema boosts your ordinary Google listings massively. Question and answer is massive at the moment, because so many people are searching that way.

Even my mum, who is 72, went on to YouTube and says it is fantastic, because she is always searching on there for how to do this and how to do that. Obviously she has got intent. So if a product comes up in a how to video, and it has got a product in it, or it is recommending a product, people then go on and buy that product based on the recommendation of that video.

Google absolutely wants video to be served to the top of search as quickly as possible. The issue is that there is not enough video yet that people are actually strategically placing into search. So there exists a massive opportunity for people now to rank video, rank it quickly, and have their organic listings, their traditional style SEO, come to the top as well. It rewards you like that.

What does a proper YouTube funnel look like?

It starts with being ready to run ads at all, and most brands are not. A lot of what we do talks about being ready to run ads, and a lot of the brands we talk to are just not ready.

I was talking to an e-commerce brand yesterday. They have between 150,000 and 200,000 people visiting their site every month, and they have no remarketing loop. I explained to them, if you are getting 200,000 people on your site every month and you get a three percent conversion rate, you are wasting 193,000 or 194,000 of those people, because they have been on the site and you could have remarketed to them. If remarketing loops are done properly, you will probably see three or four times the ROI from that loop compared with the cold traffic.

On this slide you can see multiple traffic sources for an omni-channel approach: Twitter, Instagram, Google Ads, display, Facebook, and at the bottom we have got YouTube.

The interesting thing we do with YouTube is that you would probably have a broader audience than you might think at the top of the funnel. People who watch video one and skip under 29 seconds we can ignore. If you have got a four minute video, and we then take the people who have watched three minutes, so three quarters of that video, we can show them another ad, a different ad or a different piece of creative.

Where that is great is that you can take people on a journey. You can warm them up along a funnel, and there is no stopping that. You can be four, five, six, seven, eight, ten videos deep into a journey, not that you probably would. Four tends to be the best strategy, so you might show people four pieces of content depending on their industry. At any time they can click through and convert or buy or enquire.

Once they have watched four videos, in certain campaigns we identify the people who watched video four and put them into a CRM, and that is when sales teams can call that person. We understand that you have been watching, and we know you are effectively ready to buy. It cuts out a lot of the time wasters and the effort. You cut straight to the conversion at that point.

On the back end of this particular funnel we have got ActiveCampaign set up. It sends emails out, it sends emails with videos in again, and you can see who is watching which videos and how long they are watching them for. That then drives people to what I call a VSL, a video sales letter, where somebody lands, enters their details because they want to see the content, and at that point they get to watch a sales video. It is more information, it is come and buy, sign up, enquire, whatever that tends to be.

The great thing about this visual model is that you can overlay the data onto it, plug all of the UTM tracking links into it, and visually see people moving along the funnels. You can also use it as a forecasting tool. Put your spend on the left with your traffic sources, enter the percentages at each step, and you can visualise how many conversions you are going to get for your budget.

What results have these campaigns produced?

Two recent examples, one B2C and one B2B, both from around the end of last year. The first is a fitness and lifestyle coach. She came to us wanting to start a channel, with under a thousand subscribers. Her dream was effectively to become famous, and she wanted to start an app and acquire app registrations.

We took her up to over 20,000 subscribers pretty quickly. She got 37 million brand impressions, and the cost per view on that was under a penny. The cost per acquisition of an app user started out at £11 and has been driven down since. That example is from September last year.

The other one is B2B. This is a global Microsoft distributor, and they were trying to get people to watch a webinar. They have got a three day seminar online, which is not the most compelling offer, well, not for me anyway. If you are a geek out there in the Microsoft space and you see a webinar about envisioning workshops and retail transformation, I suppose you might get excited about that, but it is not necessarily one for me.

These guys did have a big budget. They converted over 8,000 people onto that webinar, they had 10 million plus views, and the cost per view on that was 1.4 pence. If anybody wants stats after this, I can send you loads of examples of different campaigns in different sectors.

Who is behind the business?

My business partner, Andy Price, has been the creative director for a lot of the big northern agencies and has worked on a lot of national brand campaigns. As I say, I have worked on the internet since the start.

I had a big e-commerce business 15 or 20 years ago and sold it seven or eight years ago, when Amazon and eBay really started to wipe me out. I then went and worked agency side and client side, and I have worked on a lot of big national brands.

We have a young, dynamic team. There are only 12 of us at the moment, because we started this business nine months ago. It was spawned out of a full service agency I had, where in reality we were running a lot of ads for Facebook clients in the main, and I wrote what I think is one of the better Facebook ads manager courses in the world.

Why did we move from Facebook to YouTube?

Because on Facebook every man and his dog is competing, and you are always battling the algorithm. There are lots of agencies, lots of one man bands in bedrooms doing Facebook, and everybody purports to be the best of the best.

The challenge is that Facebook continually bans accounts, you struggle to get creative away, you struggle to get consistent conversions, and you are always battling the algorithm. With Google, once you reach what I would call the golden circle, you get to a point where you have got a guaranteed cost per acquisition, you can properly scale, and providing the market is big enough you can scale infinitely.

I have got clients I have taken from spending a thousand pounds a month on YouTube to £50,000, just based on the fact that we know they get conversions at three pound, four pound or ten pound depending on the industry. At that point you can turn the budget up, turn the taps up on the campaign, and it scales properly.

I would not want to work in a silo. We do work actively with people's agencies alongside them, often as a technical partner, so our strength is building the audiences correctly.

How do you target the right people on YouTube?

You can run into placements, audiences, topics, keywords, competitors and apps. One of the really great tactics is to create an intent based audience, so people who are in the market for a product, and then overlay that with all of your competitors' URLs.

So we know somebody is shopping for a product, and we take a list of all the competitors. If somebody has been on all these websites and they are looking for this, that is where we place the ads. That works really well, but again, you have got to test and learn. It is all about the data within that.

Which B2B brands are doing this well?

Almost nobody, which is why it is virtually virgin territory. A few of the big guys are in the space, but we do not talk about being an agency. We talk about being a media buying and planning partner, so we would like to be treated like a MediaCom. We typically save people at least 20% of their budget on their traditional PPC and on their YouTube ads, because there is massive opportunity to waste budget as with all of these things.

One of the challenges I get asked about all the time is, well, people over 40 do not watch YouTube, do they? We ran a campaign for a German screwdriver manufacturer before Christmas, and it was only for December. He had a budget of eight thousand pound, and in terms of ROI on that campaign he sold one order of £900,000. That was a B2B sale, and he had a further 123 enquiries, brochure downloads and phone calls, that sort of thing.

When I did some research into the top 150 Facebook advertisers, I could not really find any of those doing it properly on YouTube. You will see a lot of the SaaS products out there at it, and a lot of coaches do it, so there are a lot of people in that space. I have just signed a global brand who are going to run an influencer campaign plus ads.

Do you need a YouTube channel to run YouTube ads?

No. All you need is a Google Ads account, and yes, a YouTube channel, but it does not need to have anything on it other than an ad. Typically when people come to us they are not really running YouTube, because the misconception is that you need a YouTube channel.

I was speaking to somebody at a brand recently who said to me, well, we do not have an active YouTube channel. They thought they needed content going out all the time on YouTube to even run ads. You just upload your video as your ad and away you go. You can promote it from day one.

Where do I think YouTube is heading?

I have an opinion that YouTube will move to a lot more of a collaborative space. If you wanted to look at my YouTube channel, for example, nobody wants to watch me all day long, or my staff, or us talking about YouTube all the time. You would probably much rather watch a channel about marketing.

If all of us on this group had a channel and we all contributed to it, one of the benefits would be that with a hundred odd members in a group you could say to each person, we need one piece of content off each of you every other month, and then it is no real challenge. Whereas if you are running the channel independently you run out of ideas. You want the content to be really good and engaging, but you also want variety, because nobody wants to watch me all the time, or even a particular influencer.

So I think YouTube will move away from individual influencers to an extent. If we ran a YouTube channel all together, we could be the Netflix of marketing effectively, if you had enough people in the group.

How long does it take to know your cost of acquisition?

We normally say to people that you have got three months to get to that golden circle, where we will know where your cost of acquisition sits. It is not that you will not get conversions in the first month.

The bidding strategies on YouTube are the reason. We would like to get to target cost of acquisition, so Google will serve your campaigns based on a target cost of acquisition, but it has to learn what it can get you a conversion for. To start that process off you have to use a strategy called maximise conversions. I do not want to say open your wallet and play the game, but they want to know that you are serious.

Facebook took the strategy of just letting anybody hit the boost button, and they will take anybody and everybody. YouTube want to keep the quality level up, a bit like LinkedIn does. Keep the quality level up, keep out all the dross, because otherwise we are all going to start seeing all sorts of ads for anything, and it is just going to turn people off the channel. The biggest thing Google is worried about is losing people, or losing people's interest, so they do not want content going everywhere.

What happens month by month when a client starts?

Month one is a readiness for ads audit, because I am not going to run ads before I know their setup works. That includes having the remarketing and the omni-channel approach, everything in place before you press go. There are a lot of people still just turning ads on and sending in the traffic. Yes, you get a level of conversion, but it will never work as well as it should do.

In month two you are running ads, the campaigns are learning, and we are learning which audiences are working and which placements are working. But it is then about the quality of the conversion. It is not just about having conversions coming left, right and centre. It is which channels, which ads, which creative and which emotional hooks are actually driving the quality conversion, as opposed to a phone call that is a waste of time.

Then in month two of running ads, which is month three of the campaign, you are at the point where we start to refine it, we have got it running, and we can then scale it.

How quickly can a brand new video rank?

If you launched a YouTube channel today with a video ready to go, you could be ranking at the top of YouTube tomorrow. Let us say the video is questions and answers. One I did yesterday for a client had 10 questions in it, all on a topic, and the video was 10 minutes long.

If you go on to Google and ask questions you will see People Also Ask, and you can pull all the questions out that people are asking. Those are the questions they want answering, so there is your content. We made a video ten minutes long, brand new channel, put the video up, and that video within 24 hours was number one in YouTube. I should say found at the top rather than just ranked, because this is the SEO power of YouTube.

Google will serve that video straight away because it wants to see how good it is. It is not going to let it languish in the depths. If you do a search on YouTube you will see videos listed that are three years old, one year old, and you might see one that is two weeks old, but there is so little fresh content coming through on topics, even though there is so much getting uploaded.

The majority of what is getting uploaded is stuff people are trying to monetise, obviously, because the opportunity is enormous. If you get millions of views you get paid thousands of pounds, and that is the game at the moment. Tons of people are doing that. But in the business space where we operate, trying to get B2C or B2B conversions, there is very little content still being produced that is designed to go and rank.

Take the envisioning workshop example, for the Microsoft distributor. That video ranked within 24 hours at the top of YouTube, and YouTube will send views to it because it wants to understand people's behaviour.

What makes a ranked video stick?

Engagement, which means your view through percentage. If the video is no good, as in it is not engaging, it is just slides, that is where you lose it. That is one of the golden rules: do not use animation and slides or stock footage within it, because it turns people off. People want real. They want a bit of engagement and they want it to feel real.

That video goes to the top, and if people engage with it, the signal goes to YouTube: we will keep this here because people like it. If it answers a question for somebody, or multiple questions, even better. One of the tactics you can do is time code the different sections of the video within it, based on the questions being answered. People can then click, and Google will rank you for the question, and that puts your content straight to the top of YouTube and straight to the top of Google search. It outdoes any SEO technique that anyone can ever recommend.

I did not mention it earlier, but I would like to say that I am still one of the world's best people at SEO, and I have done SEO for over 20 years. Applying traditional SEO techniques to video, the opportunity now, over the next two or three years, is creating content that ranks within a day. I have ranked videos within 20 minutes at the top of YouTube. Getting it to stick is the game.

How you do that is you make good content that people want to watch and engage with, so your view through percentage is really important, and then it will rank and it will stick until somebody else makes a similar piece of content that is better.

What about brand safety?

There are settings that let you exclude sensitive content, and most of the risk sits outside YouTube itself. Someone asked about brand safety, having previously ended up as a family rated brand with advertising appearing next to extremist recruitment content on another platform, and about concerns on YouTube around inappropriate content targeted at children.

There are ways and there are settings that you can exclude that now on sensitive content. Where a lot of budget gets wasted is when people run stuff into the display network or the app store, and that is your biggest risk. That is where you see a lot of content that there is no control over. I do not think Google has the control it would like of the app store or the display network yet, because there is that much content that they just cannot keep on top of all of it.

They are doing really well on banned words and on particular content now. Because of Covid, we have seen over the last three or four months a big tightening up. When you launch an ad there is a lot more scrutiny, and I do feel there is more scrutiny on the content that is going out there. I have run into that issue with some clients.

It is easy to exclude placements. What we tend to do is run campaigns where we are automating the conversion and the placement. When you do that, that type of content would not convert, would not drive any ROI, and would end up being excluded, even if you got one or two brand impressions in that channel.

When you launch a campaign, if you choose keywords and overlay them with a custom intent audience, where those two things intersect is where your ads will appear. As soon as you launch that campaign, Google is probably going to choose five to eight thousand random placements to begin with, depending on your budget, and those can obviously be anywhere.

I was working with a national brand, and I am not allowed to say who because it is under NDA, that has a challenge with food. They are not allowed to show sugary snacks to people under 18, or 16, I cannot remember what the exact rule is. The law says you cannot show fattening foods to certain groups. The only way we could get around that was to choose a demographic over 18, but also to make sure we used phrases that only adults would in theory type in. The law says that as long as you can evidence best practice to avoid coming into a placement where you should not be, then obviously you are not liable if you have used all the best practice and you can show that.

What is the minimum budget to run YouTube ads?

If you want to run your own YouTube ads you can start on a pound a day. It is the same as traditional PPC. Just put a budget in and away you go.

In terms of testing, I would say personally you need probably 50 quid a day on a campaign. If somebody comes to work with us, we typically work at 5k plus a month, and they would probably be running four campaigns at 50 quid a day each. Google will not spend all of that to begin with, but that is the level where you get enough data to learn, and enough placements and exposure.

Again, it depends how niche your product is, what the audience is, and how broad you want to be. If you have got a really tight idea of the demographic and some really specific keywords and topics, you could start with 15 or 20 quid a day on a campaign and let it learn. It will just take longer for you to get enough conversions.

How many conversions does Google need before target CPA works?

Google really will not let you switch across to target cost per acquisition until it has had about 100 conversions on a campaign. So if your cost of acquisition is 10 quid, you need to spend a thousand pounds to get there.

But you are not going to get that from day one. You will not turn the campaign on and get 10 pound, 10 pound, 10 pound to start with. You will probably spend 50 or 100 pounds before you get a conversion, and then it has learned a little bit, and the next lot of conversions will come at 30 quid, and it will slowly come down. Once it is at 100 conversions you can turn it on to target cost per acquisition, and it will not serve to people unless it feels it can actually achieve that for you.

What is the difference between a conversion and an acquisition?

A conversion is any action you have told Google to count. An acquisition is the end result, the actual customer. This is where it can get really complicated, but a typical conversion would be a new customer or a sale, so the end of the funnel would be the true conversion.

If we turn a campaign on on day one, we might start off with a conversion being somebody makes a phone call or fills in a form. You can call that a conversion. It is not a sale, but you are more likely to call the end result an actual acquisition, hence target cost of acquisition.

All of the things that go in between can be conversions too. You could even have a page view as a conversion. You might teach a campaign that we want people to come on and spend a minute or more on a page, and count that as a conversion. So you could have hundreds of different types of conversions. What you are trying to do is, I will not say trick, but educate Google into what we want people to do, and what we know results in the actual acquisition.

So it might be that we need five form fills to get a customer. Five conversions at, let us say, 15 quid for a form fill. If we get one customer out of that, that is 75 pound per actual acquisition, but the conversions you have set are a different action. Eventually you want to move everything to target cost of acquisition, but you will have lots of conversions in the meantime of different actions that people are taking on your site.

What makes an effective call to action?

The structure is the first six seconds, and really the first three seconds, to grab somebody's attention. You have then got about 15 seconds to explain the proposition, or the problem, or the solution, or how you help someone, or the value proposition within the product. You are then about 21 or 22 seconds into that ad.

At that point we would probably say click through to find out more, come on to our site to download, register here for the webinar, or come and view our video. You would actually just physically ask at that point, depending on the audience.

The call to action buttons on the ads pop up in the bottom left hand corner as you are looking at the screen, so some people have arrows that point down at them. One of the ones I like is where someone says click here to come through and learn more about the product, but it can be a lot more subtle than that, just going back into an education phase.

If you are writing a four minute ad, and I know that can sound quite daunting, you are probably actually repeating yourself two or three times within it, and having multiple calls to action throughout.

How much should you spend on production?

You can spend from a couple of hundred quid to as much as you like, and low cost content can be extremely effective. If you look at some of the L'Oréal ads that went out with the celebrities, they were just holding their phone. Okay, they have got some nice lighting and there is bound to be a director there and all of that sort of thing, but in the main, a lot of people just use their phones, because the latest iPhones and Android devices do some amazing photography.

Lighting wise it is an easy setup. The main thing tends to be the sound. Production quality can be really high from a low budget. Conversely, we have got clients where we would hire out studios and use actors, all scripted, like a proper TV ad.

I have used TV ads on YouTube and they do not tend to be as effective, because they are not structured for YouTube and they do not feel as real.

Is YouTube watched everywhere in the world?

Yes, pretty much all over the world, and we run campaigns globally for clients. We tend to set individual ads accounts up per territory or country.

The cost varies quite substantially between different territories. You will see the US and the UK at roughly a penny or two pennies a view, or two cents a view, depending on where you want to place your content. You can choose specific channels, so if I wanted the ads to appear on Sky News, Fox and some of the big influencer channels, you might have to pay eight, ten or twelve pence a view depending on the placement.

We do not tend to work like that. You are more working on what somebody is researching. So if somebody during the day has searched a particular keyword, or has within the last seven days, and they have also been on certain websites, and they are also in a certain age bracket, and they are also a homeowner, and they are in Dallas, you can show the content in anything they are watching. That would be a broad placement campaign, whereas you could instead choose specific placements or specific topics.

To answer the actual question, you can show in countries all over the world for parts of a penny per view, but you can also target right down to specific postcodes or radiuses around cities. It gets really interesting when you can see the different conversions from different countries.

What has it been like starting this business in the last nine months?

My previous business, which is still running, is called Institution Marketing and Advertising, and that is a full service agency. We moved to niche into YouTube purely because we were getting such great results from it.

I wrote the IDAR system a couple of years ago for the display network in traditional PPC, and I was getting results that were unheard of. It is a display network system, and it is something that normal PPC agencies steer away from, keeping it at arm's length, because it is very easy to waste as much budget as you ever want to waste in the display network. I was lucky enough to have some big clients who allowed me to do the testing to refine the system. I took that system over into YouTube, the results replicated, and because it gave so much better return on investment for advertisers, it just exploded. So we went all in on YouTube.

What happened when we approached the C-suite about YouTube?

We went out with a campaign in September and October last year, and my outreach on LinkedIn was to C-suite in the main, at businesses that were big global and national brands. The outreach message went along the lines of: we have been speaking to brands and most of them are admitting that they are neglecting YouTube as an opportunity, would you be interested in seeing a deck?

I started getting loads of people coming to me, global CEOs, people from brands like BT and Unilever. I was creating conversations with unbelievable size brands, but as you know, those types of deals take months and months to even get close to fruition, and we are still talking to quite a lot of those.

The overwhelming message was, not on this year's radar, we have got plans for YouTube. Then people started using the phrase YouTube first: we have got it on our radar and we will be using a YouTube first strategy next year. We targeted the brands that were coming off Facebook, because last year there was a big backlash with loads of brands coming off, and then they were all looking for alternative traffic sources. The one that most brands saw as the opportunity was YouTube, because it is so underutilised.

What actually stops brands from starting?

The barrier to entry is video, and specifically deciding what to make and who to put in front of the camera. If there is anything everyone could really get out of this call, it is that the opportunity is there with video.

There can be a lot of challenge around what video to make, and that is what we help people with: scripting, how to structure it, the strategy, how to grow your channel, how to rank your videos. But the challenge then is, who do we put in front of the camera and what do we create? That is what stops about 99% of these businesses. That is when the conversation will stop, because they say we do not know what to make, or we have not got the assets.

I can see the world changing massively already. I am getting absolutely overrun with enquiries, although I am not seeing an awful lot of that turn into business yet, but I can feel confidence coming back.