← Next in Media
Next in Media
Dhar Mann Wants to Make YouTube Shows With Big Brands
00:36:47
Next in Media talked to Dhar Mann, Creator and founder of Dhar Mann Studios, and Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, about building one of YouTube's most successful scripted content operations. They discussed creating family-friendly scripted series at scale, working with brands beyond traditional advertising, and expanding their studio model to support other creators. Mann and Atkins also covered why scripted content is breaking through on YouTube, their Samsung TV Plus deal, and positioning as the future of creator-driven media.
Loading summary
Transcript103 lines
- [00:00]
A
Looking to get more out of your YouTube advertising? With ViewPlanner, you can buy with total confidence and clarity. View Planner is a verified YouTube brand, suitability and contextual targeting partner in the YouTube measurement program. Recognized by Google as a trusted independent leader in driving and measuring performance on YouTube, their advanced technology gives you a clear edge. Only with View Planner we're talking custom curated contextual collections, exclusive content strategies, transparent reporting and AI driven optimization to deliver real results. Don't let your budget go to waste. Partner with View Planner and experience the difference. Visit viewplanner.com now to unlock your full advertising potential on YouTube. That's Vue Pla N E R.com this week on Nexty Media, I spoke with Dhar Mann, one of the biggest creators on YouTube, as well as Sean Atkins, a former MTV executive who's now CEO of Dhar Mann Studios. Dar, Sean and I talked about how the company is able to crank out tons of scripted series at low cost. Now the newly established studio is trying to branch out by nurturing the businesses of other leading creators. Darren Sean also discussed why scripted series may have finally be having a moment on YouTube and how they plan to bring more brands into the full beyond basic pre roll ads and product placement. If you're hoping to understand where creator media is headed as it becomes way more professionalized, this is a great episode. So let's get started. Hi gentlemen. Thanks both of you for being here.
- [01:23]
B
Yeah, thanks for having us.
- [01:25]
A
Dar. This probably gets old for you because I think it's funny I mentioned to my kids that I was talking to you and they were like seriously, you're talking? And then. But if I mentioned your name to people in the industry, I think they would oh, that's the YouTube guy, right? Depending on their age and experience. So give us the quick like you're a creator, give us a little bit take of like who you are in your content without giving us your whole story. I'm sure that gets gets tiresome.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, for sure. You know, I'm just a guy who has gone through a lot of different kinds of hard times in my life and I decided to use my personal stories of the challenges that I've been through and have overcome to try inspire others. In the beginning I was just talking to camera trying to give life advice, but that didn't really work out too well. Not too many people were interested in just hearing a guy on screen give them advice for a few minutes. So I kept trying to switch formats to figure out what would work and eventually I landed on a Scripted storytelling format where we have actors in videos, just like traditional linear tv, where we have dramas play out, they're relatable storylines, but every story teaches some sort of positive life lesson that's a takeaway for people. So constantly, I hear, especially from parents, they're so happy that content like ours exists because it allows kids to learn from real social settings, like real social interaction interactions, you know, through the dramas that we play out, but in a format that's actually digestible for them, that is actually entertaining, that they enjoy to watch. I've been trying to get my children to learn this lesson for a long time.
- [03:08]
A
Right.
- [03:09]
B
They won't listen to me when I say it, but that if they see it played out in a doorman video, suddenly it clicks. So it's educational enough for parents to be happy that their children are watching and entertaining enough for young people to keep them engaged.
- [03:25]
A
It's funny. I have lots of problems to share as well, but I have no. I have no solutions for anyone. So I don't have any advice. So that might not be the right format for me. But I want to come back to the idea that you're doing scripting, which I think is interesting. But when do you go from this is something I'm trying to do and see if there's an audience for this to. I got to figure out how to become a, you know, an ad sales guy at a. I'm building a business. And how does that sort of play out for you, Dar?
- [03:49]
B
Yeah, I mean, when it started, I had no intention on actually building a business, you know, expanding this beyond my living room. Again, it was just started with the mission to try to help people that were going through a tough time. And then, you know, because of the content itself was so novel at the time especially, there wasn't like a digital first scripted studio that was putting out new content that you've never seen elsewhere.
- [04:16]
A
There's lots of creators, but maybe not the studio thing had not really been a thing yet.
- [04:20]
B
Exactly. Now we're starting to see scripted creators become its own ecosystem. But, you know, when I started, that never had existed before. And so the secret to our success was just the virality. So many people were sharing our videos with their friends and WhatsApp groups and Facebook community pages. And so we were very fortunate to be able to get a lot of views pretty early on. And then one day I realized that you can actually monetize viral videos. I didn't know that when I first started. So after I turned monetization on our first Month, I think we made like $172 or something. Our second month, we made a couple thousand dollars. And then just every month, it kept going up and up to the point where, you know, we became the number one highest earning creator on Facebook within our first year of starting. This was back in 2018. And then we started shifting our focus more towards a YouTube audience. And in order to do that, we started going longer in our storytelling, right? Increasing the quality. We started having storylines that catered to more young people. As we started realizing that we have a very strong co watching audience between adults and young people. So as we started getting more traction, as I started seeing the real impact that our videos were having, I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, this could become, you know, this is becoming a global movement. And so if we have the right infrastructure in place, this could be the new age digital studio that, you know, is aiming to put positivity and good in the world. So that vision really inspired me. And then, you know, I decided a couple of years ago, I started getting acquisition offers, investment offers, and I got real close to considering selling the business. But then I realized, like, what else would I want to be doing with my life? Like, I get to create content, I get to inspire people, I get to build an amazing community. You know, I love what I'm doing. There's nothing else I want to do. So from that point, I was like, all right, well, if this is what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life, I want to take this to the moon, right? Like to. I want to try to hit this out of the park. And in order to do that, I need to bring on the best of the best people to join me in this mission. And so I was very fortunate enough to meet Sean, who I truly believe was like the best person in the entire planet to take on the role of CEO to lead us to new heights. And ever since Sean has joined and other executives that he has brought on, our company has been growing quite a bit. So it's been a really exciting time for us.
- [07:05]
A
Okay, so that you let me perfectly to answer, Sean, you joined the company roughly a year ago. What's your like, what's your mission? Day one? What is the last year been like and what were you trying to maybe what kind of infrastructure did you build and what opportunity did you see there?
- [07:20]
C
You know, there is a moment that happens when we bring people to see DAR Studio. It's the same moment that I went through this sort of was the inciting incident rejoining is where you come in. And even having worked for over a decade in the creator space, working with, you know, hundreds and thousands of creators, I just hadn't seen anything like Dar had built. Right. Like you're talking about three sound stages, 66 sets. It look like in my imagining, it's like what I imagine it was like in the other side of burbank in the 20s, walking around at Warner Brothers and MGM and Disney, right?
- [07:50]
A
Like it has that feel of like what you talk about, the old studio.
- [07:53]
C
Model, model Hollywood, all this energy running out. A bunch of people are going out and sort of creating the industry. And I was like, that moment, I'm like, oh, this is, this is what the future really is going to look like. And so when I joined dar, the mission of the company was, is exactly the mission he found out. Our job is to put uplifting content into the world that resonates cross generation. I always sort of refer to people, I said like it's sort of old school. Walt Disney and Tyler Perry had a baby, right? Only it's from a digital first.
- [08:23]
A
Thank you for my headline.
- [08:24]
C
Yeah, thank you. But at the end of the day, our charter is to take that unbelievable mission and the unbelievable efficiency that allows us to make five television shows per week at scale for a very, very efficient cost point and move that to as many places as possible to reach the audience. As many places as possible. So you heard us launch. We're doing a Samsung TV plus deal, doing our first mass channel with them. They ordered original content from us. You see us going into that space. As Dar mentioned earlier, our Facebook business and our YouTube business are both very significant. We moved on to some new platforms like Spotify. We are working on a PODC to be launching relatively soon. We've gotten Dar back on doing short form content both on the B2B platforms and on consumer platforms. And then we're exploring all the things you'd expect someone like us to do, including we launched an agency called Fifth Quarter that actually uses all that infrastructure and knowledge that DAR has built and sort of by building a long term creator driven business to help other creators expand their business and generate revenues without having to be on camera all the time. So really taking the nexus of making positive content and moving into as many platforms and scaling it as efficiently as we can.
- [09:40]
A
Yeah, I should, that's. I want to be clear that, you know, maybe initially you were thinking about building a support system for just Udar, but this is becoming a company that is supporting lots of different creators with lots of different Needs. I guess this is probably for both of you, but you know, why? What's strong, what's drawn you to that? What do the other. Other folks in this business need? And maybe how do you avoid some of the pitfalls of the past where we see companies try and build these kind of things?
- [10:06]
C
So I think the first thing is, like, what makes Dar's business very different than other creators is that Dar is pretty much other than, you know, young kid. Animation is the only scaled creator that doesn't have direct talent dependency. Right. Whether you look at the dude Perfect or Mark Rober or Jimmy, they are the business. Right?
- [10:26]
A
Yeah.
- [10:26]
C
And in Dar's case, to use my kind of Tyler Perry and Walt Disney, like, he's the face of the business. The audience loves him. They like when he's on camera. But he's not in everything. Right, Right.
- [10:35]
A
Because that is not. That is not scalable.
- [10:38]
C
There's a 2000 episode library that doesn't have Dar in it. Right. There is. There is a. And so you can see how the business.
- [10:45]
A
From the start, you were not. It was not just your personality and your.
- [10:48]
C
He's in some of the content again, like he can be, but like the audience does not have an expectation that every frame has darts. So that puts him in a very different space than a lot of the creators who are on the hamster wheel 247 trying to figure out how to. So the first thing I was like, how do I sort of pick up some of your learnings to build the infrastructure around me so that my business and my community, which is the most valuable thing for all these careers, because remember, their community is their distribution. What makes the creator businesses different than say a production company or a traditional studio is that a creator is the marketing, is the talent, is the production.
- [11:21]
A
A channel or carriage deal they have or something. Right.
- [11:24]
C
And is the distribution all in one entity?
- [11:27]
A
Right, right, right.
- [11:27]
C
And so that's just never happened before in kind of traditional media structure where all that's sort of sat in one entity. And then with, to Dar's point, with the barriers of entry being so low and so other creators would look at that and be like, wow, I want to figure out how I don't work 100 hours a day. Right. And what did Dar figure out? You know, Dar works 98, not 100. Right. So like, how do you get that sort of efficiency when you get in there? I think the second piece of it is that because we're scripted, that's a really heavy hard lift. Right. Like, I've done Scripted. I've done unscripted, I've done live. I've done all those things. At the end of the day, scripted is more expensive. It's more complicated.
- [12:02]
A
You can't just turn the camera on and go.
- [12:05]
C
So just think about the fact that Dar cracked making scripted content at the volume that he does and by the way, at the audiences that make his content on any day of the week would be the highest viewed scripted show in the United States television. You think about that, right? But operating at nowhere near those economics, right. You're talking about. You know, I, I tell people this story of like the logarithmic curve of efficiency, right. Takes thousands of people to make a feature, hundreds of people to make a broadcast TV show, tens of people to make a cable show, and a person to make a creator show, right. You know, the sort of scale of efficiency that comes. And so, so you think about trying to follow that scale and scripted, it's harder to pull off than it is in an unscripted environment.
- [12:50]
A
Darth, you might have thought, like the conventional wisdom I think is, especially if you don't live and breathe YouTube, it's UGC, it's, it's, it's vloggers. It's like, you know, the pre, it's not really premium depending on the eye of the beholder. These kids don't want scripted shows, right. Like they don't want to have narrative. And what, why did you think that was a good idea? What did you learn there that maybe which would kind of surprise, surprise people that don't grasp this as closely as they maybe should?
- [13:19]
B
Yeah, for sure. Again, it started with just, you know, the goal of trying to put out positivity into the world. Right. Like it all. When I started making videos, every time I'd open TikTok or my news apps, all I saw was like doom and gloom type headlines and you know, obviously like mental health issues are at an all time high. Everybody has personal stories of somebody dealing with that in their life, especially a lot of young people. So it's not like I started with the business plan to say, hey, here's this growing market. You know, the cost of, cost of production is going up, the supply is getting oversaturated. There's this little niche in the market, right. It was more so that the world needs more good. That was my goal. And so I, that's what got me started as I started going on this journey, then others started telling me, oh, wow, you're the first creator to tackle scripted content. I don't even know what scripted content meant. I didn't know what category I was operating in.
- [14:15]
A
You didn't have a plan to zig against everybody necessarily.
- [14:18]
B
Exactly. And so I think starting with the mission in mind first is what led to our success and it's what kept us going during the dark days.
- [14:27]
C
Right.
- [14:27]
B
Because anyone's journey, you know, when starting any sort of business or product or being a creator, it's not all butterflies and rainbows. It's a lot of ups and downs. And if I was in this, like, strictly because of the economic opportunity, I would have long given up whenever those hard days came. But because the mission has always been to try to inspire people. That's why I was like, we always have to be putting out content. And in order to make this work, in order to carry out that mission, okay, we really have to manage our economics well on the production costs. We really do have to find niche audiences and figure out ways of not only catering to our existing user base, but also to bring in new audiences. This whole idea that, you know, oh, certain types of media are dead, right? People are shifting towards live streaming or podcasting or whatever it is, I don't agree with that. I just think that media is becoming more democratized than ever. And now people have so many choices, you know, when. Wherever they want to get their content from. And people such as myself and our audience, I think will always enjoy scripted content. Is one of the biggest audiences in the world. If you think about scripted fiction, family friendly, right? That's the whole Disney audience. So even if, like trends are changing, I think there's still massive opportunities within each space. And you know, because we're mission led, that's what always drives everything we do right now.
- [15:59]
A
Sean, you spend time in the traditional media world. They've, you know, for better or worse, they've sort of tried to like, can we build a, you know, either we'll make an acquisition of a maker studios or a full screen or try and build something with creators that brings these worlds together. It hasn't gone very well. Or generally speaking, why haven't they been able to do this? Why does this maybe need to have to happen outside that system? Or could that. Could those worlds come together?
- [16:25]
C
They absolutely could come together. I mean, look, if you look at any of the major media companies, they are built by acquisitions, right? It's not like Disney made the sports division, they bought it. It's not like Disney made a broadcast network.
- [16:37]
A
They bought Marvel, they bought.
- [16:38]
C
Yeah, right. And so it's not like CBS built the syndication division. They bought Kings World, right? So like the notion of. And by the way, that's not exclusive to the media business. It's not like, it's not like Facebook built Instagram, they bought it, right? So the notion that once you get to a certain amount of scale that it's hard to invest at the kind of innovators dilemma area is not new news, right? And so I think, you know, Disney was not wrong in their acquisition of maker in terms of the hypothesis behind just is at that stage of creators, they weren't at stage where they're now where they're, they own the intellectual property. The scale is big enough, right? And so, you know, we often, Dar and I often talk about that. One of the things that we, we look at is that if you follow the patterns of any media, radio, print, newspaper, theatrical, choose, choose your poison. It all goes through an entrepreneur class. Sprints in, right? At one point there was like 50 theatrical studios, right in, right. Who go in and learn all the things and build businesses. Then some of them get bigger than others and that's okay. That's the normal state of competition. And, and then at some point consolidation starts to happen as the market starts to mature. Now the creator business is still in that kind of like embryonic stage when you really think about it in terms of what's going on. Because all media goes through these patterns as creators are doing an accelerated pace. So we often talk about that. The challenge isn't like, is the future of a media or tech media tech company going to be creator driven? Everyone is like, yes. We're just debating what the timeline is, right?
- [18:12]
A
How would, how it's structured, how it's.
- [18:13]
C
Going to be structured. Because the, because on any metric you look at and the audience, the business always follows the audience, right? So everybody knows the eyeballs are on creator content, right? The time spent is on creator content. The platforms on mobile, the people are sitting on YouTube more than they're sitting.
- [18:28]
A
YouTube's on TV in a bigger way than ever.
- [18:30]
C
More than they're sitting on anyone else they're consuming on tv. So those things all are coming together, together. And then even the conversations I hear people say, I've been doing this for a long time, right? Like when people talk about like, oh, I don't think creator content is good enough. That is the same things they were saying when I was doing cable. Those are the same things they were saying when I was doing unscripted. Those are the same things they were saying when I was doing podcasting. Because by the way, if we got a time machine and we all went looked at the movies in 1905. We'd be like that stuff is nothing like Altar kicks the crap. Yeah, well of course, because time and economics. But to, to. What I would say is that besides the creators being a great equalizer because they bring the audience and the passion and the hands on, you also have this AI wave coming in that I don't think is going to be as directly in aggregate job destroying as everyone's worried about. I think the jobs are going to be as often technology that is rebalanced. What's going to happen is that all of a sudden this creator class that has directed has the same economic capabilities of making tentpole films, right? Like 11 hundredth the price point.
- [19:34]
A
Right.
- [19:34]
C
And all of a sudden that gets pretty exciting from a creative perspective.
- [19:38]
A
Dara, so what, what happens today? You know you've got, you got this like there's not a lot of, like you said, there's not a lot of family friendly content in general media. The co viewing thing is hard to pull off. So you probably have brands coming at you left and right that want to do stuff with you. You can certainly just plug in monetization from the platforms. But I imagine you want to work with partners but do it in the right way. How do you figure that out? If there is a balancing act or if that's something you just stay away.
- [20:05]
B
From completely for the longest time? We were very fortunate to just grow and achieve our company objectives through platform revenue. And we have been bootstrapped since the beginning. We've been profitable since day one so we've been able to build a very meaningful business. That's the support to our 125,000 square foot studio the size of two football fields, 200 plus employees, all through platform revenue. And now there is more ambitious projects that excite us such as feature films. We are at a point where when a lot of folks are discussing how can we do one feature holiday film, we think more so like how can all of December we release one feature film every single day leading all the way up to new 41 days of Christmas. So we just think bigger about making more impact. And in order to achieve that I think we would want to bring on brand partners to make that possible. There's also a big transition that's happening. Obviously media moves a little bit slow and brands, you know, they follow their audiences but there's a little bit of lag in between that. So even though, you know, scripted content from creators on YouTube and such has Been popular where folks like us are averaging over 25 million long form views a day. Brands have still been somewhat slow to adapt and follow their audiences. Yeah, but we definitely have seen a shift, you know, within the past year where brands are now shifting more of their budgets towards creators. So we're seeing more, much more inbound than we've ever had before. And the conversations that we're having, the brands are in much deeper levels of impact. Before it was more so transactional, where they were going to hire, they wanted, you know, a one time mention of.
- [21:52]
A
Their let's do a zillion integrations at once and a bunch of channels.
- [21:56]
B
Right, exactly. And now it's more so, okay, like what if we actually built the studio together? What if we actually release a whole slate of films together? What if we have this partnership with the WNBA and we actually told the stories of the 80% of athletes that actually don't get much media attention? We have the ability to do that because we move so fast at a scale that scripted content has never moved at. Whereas traditional studios, they move, you know, at like year plus timelines. We're actually on a 21 day cycle from script to screen. So we can actually move in real time for the first time ever where if things are trending culturally or on social media, we can actually move and within 21 days have a whole scripted series for a brand around whatever's happening while that trend is still hot.
- [22:50]
A
You almost have to teach brands how to buy that way or think that way. Right. Like they're not ready, they're not always ready for that.
- [22:55]
B
Exactly. And I think the brands that are going to be the first movers are the one that are going to reap the biggest rewards, just like it always happens. So you know, the brands that we have been in conversations with, they are the ones that are usually first to market with new types of products, new types of messaging. They're on the cutting edge of culture. They have massive communities that are very engaged on social media and they're looking at doing deeper, longer partnerships with folks like us. So yeah, it's been a combination of things. Number one, I guess our ambitions for content have gotten bigger where it makes sense for us to take on brand partners. Number two, brands are embracing creators more than ever before. And number three, they're just realizing like this is where their audiences are. So if they want to reach that person, then they need to be on YouTube, they need to be on TikTok and Instagram and they need collaborating with creators such as us, Sean or Really?
- [23:53]
A
Both you guys? I guess what role does, you know, YouTube is trying to play? They go back and forth between how active they want to be involved in brokering these kind of deals. But then you're also seeing some creators almost doing like an upfront type like cycle. Do you think either of those are going to take hold with, you know, there's only so many giants, I guess, that can play in that space. What do you think that's going to look like?
- [24:15]
C
We think it's a yes. And you know, if you look at any business as it's going through the cycle, right, the audience shifts and then the odd. Then the, the advertising infrastructure has to shifts later.
- [24:28]
A
Right.
- [24:28]
C
And partially just because, you know, if you think of how an advertising, the advertising flow works, right. I'm a cmo, I have a vision and then I impart that vision. And then my directs, like there's the head of, you know, comms and the head of paid media and the head of social and then they break into component pieces and they. And they have an agency of record and that agency of record represents like 20 other. So by the time it gets through from the CMO's vision, it gets down to like, I must buy 200 of X at Y CPM.
- [24:56]
A
Right.
- [24:57]
C
So, and that's not the CMO's fault. It's just because that's the infrastructure. And so you can imagine in this new creator world where creators are a TV network and a social good platform and a comms platform and a live event, like they're all the things it's interesting that a CMO wants. Their infrastructure is actually, you got to.
- [25:16]
A
Talk to four or five different parts.
- [25:17]
C
Of the infrastructure is actually count. So like, so you stock directly cmo, like I totally want that, but their infrastructure is counter to that.
- [25:24]
A
Yeah.
- [25:24]
C
The second issue that's starting to resolve is that again, this business sort of grew up in, the creator needs some money to make a video, they beg a brand, they give them some money, they make something and they kind of just keep going down the way. Now creators don't need that as much anymore. And so that sort of transactional creators are a commodity. Sort of DNA sort of still sits in the system. But creators are not that open to it anymore because it's not true to the authenticity of their audience. But the other challenge was that if you're a CMO, right, you could be in the top 50 biggest creators in the world and your footprint and cultural impact is bigger than LeBron James. But the CMO is not Herman.
- [26:04]
A
You Right.
- [26:05]
C
Which is just interesting.
- [26:06]
A
Yeah. That is, I don't, I don't know if that happened in the past where you didn't know. I don't know. You're the. You may be not in the. You you knew the Beatles were even though you're older. I'm trying to give a weird example. The cultural gap is there that doesn't.
- [26:19]
C
Exist really in the world. And so the challenge is for a cmo, like, they're basically relying on someone who relies on someone to tell them what's relevant, which is not the most efficient. But now I would say there's probably 300 to 5, 500 creators on a global basis that are big enough that any cmo. Right. Sort of like by the time we get the 500 cable networks, like, you know that if you're the CMO of like, you know, Cabela and you're doing outdoor goods, you're like, I'm pretty much going to spend my money on Discovery and History Channel and National Geographic. Right. And so now if you're, if you're like a consumer package.
- [26:54]
B
Good.
- [26:54]
C
And you're trying to reach multicultural women, you're probably like, all right, I probably need to be like on Dar because I'm going to get the moms, the middle class moms. And I probably need to go over and get like Hope Scope because she speaks to these people. And I probably, you know, I need to get Rebecca Zimone. You can basically nail down your three creators who are scale worthy and so it becomes a little bit more manageable. And to Dara's point, we're starting to.
- [27:16]
A
See it doesn't feel this like overwhelming this 5 million. I don't know where to start to.
- [27:20]
C
Realize, like I can start creating some creators as if they're a network buy and do like a multi year, you know, oh, I want to work with Dar. I don't really know what I'm doing Q3, but I know that Dhar can move so fast. He can do it on Q3 and he can, he can make something different. And then I'll do, of course, the spray and pray. Just like I buy remnant inventory also on television. I think that's ultimately where it's going to evolve, where the CMO is going to have like their three to five creators that essentially they can just pick up the phone and be like, I got a crisis. Can you do something? Or we got a new product launching. Can you do something? And they'll just sort of be part of the ecosystem.
- [27:57]
A
Dar, you mentioned this deal. I wanted to make sure I touched on it. Why you might think you've got a great audience, you're able to kind of control your programming schedule and stuff. Why television? Why are we seeing so many creators like you coming to the fast space? Talk about what made you think that Samsung partnership made sense and what's going on?
- [28:16]
B
Yeah, I think for every creator, you know, they all each have their own reasoning. A lot of it just kind of ties back to. There's a certain nostalgia, you know, that exists where people, if they grew up watching Netflix or, you know, Samsung. Right. Devices or certain platforms, that there's just a certain excitement that comes to being on a platform that you grew up watching.
- [28:42]
A
Right. It feels big time. Like, look at this, it's a tv, it's on tv.
- [28:45]
B
Exactly. And it's funny, I mean, because I personally experienced this when I try to describe to people what I do that don't know who I am. And I'm like, oh yeah, I create scripted content. You know, we have this size studio, we have this many team members, we put out this much content and then they go, oh, well, where does your content exist? And I say, YouTube. They immediately check out like, oh, you're just a YouTuber.
- [29:06]
A
Oh, so you're not. Yeah, you kind of like in a minor leagues or something. Right.
- [29:09]
B
But then on the, on the flip, if I say, oh, well, we actually have a deal with Samsung, it's like, oh, wow, that's now all of a sudden I'm worth your time and attention and what I'm doing is real.
- [29:21]
A
Right, Funny.
- [29:22]
B
So I think, you know, there still is some sort of perception, like what Sean was describing is like the difference between being on traditional platforms versus being on YouTube. And then for us, you know, again, it's just what are more ways we can reach audience members to move them with our mission. So there's obviously audiences that are, you know, watching whatever their favorite platform is and we want to live in all those places. It's very hard to try to get people to leave one platform to go to the next, especially if they're already familiar with one using. You know, I personally have Samsung devices, you know, throughout my house to be able to turn on the TV and Samsung TV plus and our shows there, impacting, you know, millions of people around the world is something that's pretty cool. And then obviously the third is just the revenue diversification. Right. Like we talk about where YouTube was maybe 10 years ago, and we actually did a study as to Whoever the top YouTubers were back then, about 70 or so are not on today's top 10 list, by the way. I mean a lot of look at the Fortune 500 companies, right?
- [30:30]
A
Or like, sure, all these AI people guys weren't there. Yeah.
- [30:34]
B
But YouTube is. Is that on steroids? At least that's how it's been looked at traditionally.
- [30:39]
A
Right.
- [30:40]
B
Is, is that creators back then were chartering this new territory. They weren't doing things like investing in scaling up their team and building processes. And also revenue diversification. Creators have become a lot more sophisticated. We're bringing on, you know, executives such as Sean on that are entering this space. Some people are taking on capital, some people are looking to build a business to be able to eventually exit. In order to do that, you can't have 100% of your revenue depending on one problem. So I think it's also smart from a revenue diversification standpoint to be able to play in all the different areas.
- [31:15]
A
Makes sense. Last one for me, but both of you, I think you've kind of hinted at this during a conversation, but what do you like for. For my audience is very, you know, ad industry focused. What are you missing? What's missing? Like do you need better measurements, you need to figure out how to prove that your ads move products or do you need like something, something out there that's just. Would help things move faster or grow. Grow quicker for, you know, ad wise or other parts of your business?
- [31:42]
B
I mean, I'll just say more from a brand perspective is what I'm seeing. And then Sean, you can kind of tackle it from our perspective or creative perspective, which seems reversed because you should probably be doing the brand perspective. But it's just, it reminds me of a recent conversation that I had with the cmo, like a major financial institution. And they're like, Dara, we are so tired of having to rent our audiences all the time. Like by paying, you know, in order to get viewership and engagement, we actually want to own our own audience. And I think a lot of marketing executives are feeling that paid media and earned media are no longer working the way that they once were. People are just waiting to hit the skip button for an ad that's popping up on whatever they're watching. So instead, brands are much more interested in owned media. How do I actually own the content? How do I actually own the audiences? But they don't really have the infrastructure or the DNA to create content that's going to get a lot of views and carry out their brand mission successfully. So the kinds of conversations that I've been having more so like we're talking with one of the biggest, biggest home improvement retailers in the world. We're talking with one of the largest cosmetic companies in the world about co developing a studio together where we support them creating content that they actually own and build their own audience. So I think that's one trend that we're going to start to see more of. We've already seen creators start to go into brands and like own different brands, but we haven't seen brands become creators to that same extent yet. So I definitely see that as like the next evolution of the future. And I think in order to do that well, brands will want to partner with creators, especially scale creators such as ourselves themselves.
- [33:32]
A
Interesting.
- [33:33]
B
That's not a shock.
- [33:35]
C
I think there's just a bridge off that. A couple trends that I think need to be seen. First of all, to Dar's point, because creators are brand supported, they're in with their audiences 24, 7. If I was a CMO, if you're thinking about trends that were not in my best interest, is that if you think about the, the old model of calling up a darn like, hey, I'll give you 100 grand in Q1 to do an endorsement and 100 grand in Q2 to give endorsement, spending 200 grand.
- [33:59]
A
A lot of one offs. Yeah.
- [34:01]
C
What you're essentially doing is training Dar to learn about your audience and learn about your product more directly than you do. So what happens is inadvertently CMOs, because they're treating these major creators not as partners but as sort of just a commodity. They're training them to know how to get to their customer more effectively. And so essentially what's happening over the next five years, I predict is every CMO will have at least two creator Challenger brands in their direct vertical.
- [34:29]
A
Interesting.
- [34:30]
C
Right?
- [34:30]
A
Because they don't want, they don't have, they don't want to create their own disconnects.
- [34:32]
C
They're creating their own disintermediation because of the way they behave versus if they said, hey Dar, I'm your cosmetic partner, I'm in for a million a year. We got a three year deal and someone comes in, hey Dar, do you want to be a partner on this cosmetic line? He's like, no, I got this kind of guaranteed cash flow and a strong partnership. And Right. So instead of what we hear normally is like, someone will come into Dar and I'd be like, hey, I'll give you a third of this Challenger brand. You completely control the social. It's already profitable. It's a very.
- [34:57]
B
Right.
- [34:57]
C
And we're like I'm just not vertical already. We kind of understand how it works. So that's the first thing I would say as a trend I would be a lookout on as a cmo. The second thing is I absolutely understand the complexity of being a CMO today. And you're looking for your return on ad spend and your ROI and your reach and all this. And you need to reset your way. You think about creators, you need to break it into the creators at scale. And like, like I said, go find your three to five creators that you're going to go deep, go long and you're going to go figure out how to own the audience. What really the return on ad spend is like if you sit down with a Dar or Mark Rober or Jimmy or someone, you can literally be like, I want to learn how conversion moves in broad based entertainment from short form.
- [35:43]
A
That's not. Give me some inventory at this price. That's really. It's very different.
- [35:46]
C
Yeah, I need this to work at this price point. If I commit to this amount of dollars. Can you give that to me?
- [35:51]
A
Yeah. Right.
- [35:52]
C
I want to like the conversations you just literally can't have at any other time media but that are your dream come true are possible and at scale. So I tell every single mom was like your dream you've talked about for like 15 years actually possible day. But you just need to go sit down with like find your three creators, bring them in the house, do a long term deal, sit down with them quarterly and you're going to not only get the return, but you're going to get a relationship that's going to let you be in with their community, which is the most important thing for you.
- [36:22]
A
All right, well we could talk about this stuff for forever. That's a perfect way to end it though. Gentlemen, thanks so much for an awesome conversation. Let's chat again down the road here.
- [36:29]
C
Appreciate it. Thanks for the time.
- [36:30]
A
Thank you both. Thanks again to my guests this week, Sean Atkins and Dhar Mann and my partners at View Planner. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. See you next time for more on what's next in media.
- [36:42]
C
Thanks for listening.