Creator Marketing

00:00:00: In the end, creator marketing will always be a branding tool, and if you use your branding with simple and lazy ads, people will fricking hate you. This is the Commercial Content Podcast – what marketing decision makers need to know about the future of content. In this episode, Norbert talks with Mathias Richter about creator marketing and about social media and advertising in general.

00:00:26: Mathias is a digital native who has supported brands, agencies and media houses in their market-strategic alignment and implementation for over a decade. After holding positions at companies such as Twitter, Studio 71 and Axel Springer, he co-founded the Anti Boring Content Club in 2022, a content marketing agency enabling brands and agencies to collaborate with top-tier creators for content experiences with genuine value.

00:00:53: Ladies and gentlemen, let's dive right in. Here's Mathias, and your host: Norbert. I'm happy to be here – basically at home, but I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on the Commercial Content Podcast.

00:01:19: Thank you. We've already put the hype train on, so we know what we're talking about today. To get started, I have a little format called Seven Questions, which I'll ask you so we get to know a little bit more about you, beyond the intro.

00:01:37: So we start from the beginning. Which media had the greatest influence on you as a child? Was it television, games, books, cinema or social? Being a millennial, it started with TV, of course, since we didn't have anything else – and then shifted very quickly into YouTube, to be fair.

00:02:01: Mainly YouTube. I think all the English you're hearing today is based on YouTube videos – skate videos, tutorials, very autodidactic. Learning how to do something, how to tune a guitar. You'd turn to YouTube and watch that. My biggest influence was YouTube.

00:02:25: Interesting. So that means switching from television to YouTube. When was that? In my teens. I almost exclusively used the PC from my dad in the beginning – DOS games and stuff. And then at some point I had my own PC, we had internet – which sounds like I'm coming from the Stone Age, but I am from the Stone Age.

00:02:57: Having my own PC was big, since I was also doing music at the time and needed it for producing. Having the internet and then joining YouTube – I think I joined YouTube the year it started. Everything was in English as well, so that helped quite a lot for the language.

00:03:24: It was a genuine switch. I have a TV in my kids' room that I never used. I haven't watched TV for about 20 years. Of course I know a bit about what's happening – I look at TV stuff on YouTube or different platforms like Netflix, Prime Video – but I never tune into live TV anymore.

00:03:50: Interesting. It's crazy. When I was a kid, we had a Commodore 64 at home. And my cousin, who is a music producer now, started his career on an Atari 1040 ST, which is cool. We had those little data cassettes you put in tapes – it's ridiculous how it changed, and how fast.

00:04:12: What do you remember as your first conscious encounter with advertising? I think literally there was a commercial for Media Markt with eatable phones. I think it was kids chewing on their phones.

00:04:41: It was a TV commercial and they had the tagline "Banana Split." They pranked people into thinking phones were eatable. That was the first thing I literally remember watching on TV and thinking: yes, I want to have that.

00:04:59: Of course I want to have that – eatable phones, it's amazing. And of course it was a prank. I don't remember all the specifics, but someone was biting into their phone. It sounds like something from that era. But you asked what first comes to mind – that's it.

00:05:19: Interesting. We should actually talk to the strategists at Media Markt – the fact that you still remember it says something. So, where do you currently prefer to spend your time? Movies, social, or maybe the console – are you a gamer? It's a combination of many things. Gaming, yes.

00:05:42: I'm a console peasant – I am not a PC master race gamer. But I still have my PlayStation 5 and my Switch, so some time goes in there. About a quarter of my time, maybe. Also into the classic streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video. I try not to have too many at the same time, but I switch from time to time.

00:06:09: But most time still goes to YouTube. I also don't have TikTok on my phone – I think it's genuinely bad for the system. If you're watching this, TikTok, I'm sorry. I actually don't have TikTok either – I just use it for work, but not on my phone, because I'm very prone to doom scrolling.

00:06:38: And just burn time there. I have Instagram, but more for communication with friends – like WhatsApp, being in the DMs and stuff. Most time is YouTube, then the streaming platforms, then gaming. The funny thing is, when you say YouTube – in my age, that's basically watching TV.

00:06:57: So if you're on YouTube, what is it? Is it like a search engine? Are you watching series, shows, short form? It's a combination of things I like. It's shorter than Netflix and other platforms. I don't watch that many series.

00:07:21: I watch more movies because I'm very bad at committing the time for a whole series. I can be blamed for that – there are very important series I've never seen. Let's not talk about which ones, because there are many.

00:07:44: But that's the thing – I've seen lots of movies, but I've never seen a series like Game of Thrones. Not one episode. A movie is 1.5 to 2 hours, it's done. A series on Netflix has eight episodes, each an hour. That's a whole working day of storytelling, which is great, but not for me.

00:08:04: YouTube is even shorter than that – and most videos are standalone, not part of a series, which makes it easier to commit. And I'm also part of the millennial thing of watching Let's Play videos. Since I'm a console peasant, there are a lot of games I can't or won't invest the time to enjoy. Same for me.

00:08:32: But it's super fun to watch people who are actually good at a game and get the storytelling out of it – especially since I'm missing the thousand hours they already spent. I didn't become a gamer because my last PlayStation was a 2, and I always failed at the boss fights – I never reached that point.

00:08:57: But interesting – we can talk about that later regarding format. Long form, short form – that's really interesting. I also come from movies, and I watch series even if they're longer. The trend of watching very short form right now – we can dive into that later.

00:09:21: So if you were on an island and could only use one channel or app – YouTube, I guess. Yes, that's a quick one. So how do people outside the industry usually misunderstand your job?

00:10:11: Since we do a lot of influencer marketing, creator marketing and content, I think the creator industry is very misunderstood – but not completely wrong. From the outside it's very flashy, very fast – it seems like all those people are super wealthy, super important.

00:10:38: Famous, and everything's great. But it's still hard work. I don't want to over-romanticize it. The industry is very comparable to other advertising or media industries. But from the outside it looks like someone's just holding something into the camera and getting a lot of cash.

00:11:07: "Yeah, I live in Dubai." And of course some people do, but that's a small percentage of the whole industry. The main misconception is about the lifestyle – most people outside our bubble would say: we just send them something, they hold it into the camera, and they get a ton of cash.

00:11:33: And to be honest, it's not only people outside the bubble who think that. That's actually a topic for later – coming from advertising, where you make a film from a storyboard, there are people who think influencers just hold something into the camera and you can storyboard that. We'll come back to that.

00:11:59: So if you were no longer allowed to work in content, what would you do? I think about this at least twice a week, because I'm very fed up sometimes. If I couldn't work in media at all, I think I'd make my wish come true: buying a small farm in Italy and selling produce – vegetables, or maybe just herbs – once a week at the market, driving home on my Vespa or one of those three-wheelers.

00:12:41: Going back to being extremely simple in life – because this one here is so complex. And having a farm and growing herbs might actually be one of the future skills people need. Not even vegetables – just herbs.

00:13:00: Thyme, rosemary, something like that. Go to a little café – not even coffee, that's too much; you'd need groceries, milk, customers – just herbs. Dry it, sell it. That's it.

00:13:20: Maybe someday. Because when you said "I'm fed up twice a week" – that's an interesting take. If you're fed up twice a week, what do you do to clear your head? YouTube. Oh come on.

00:13:42: No, but it's a combination. I still think even as a founder, or someone in a leading position, you should stick to hobbies you actually have. So I do exactly that – different hobbies. Sports, going out with friends.

00:14:04: Whatever it is – pottery, whatever – use the free time. In my daily work it's a combination, or what do we call it – work-life blending. When you work in advertising, you're never not working. You go outside, see a billboard somewhere, and you think: "Oh, interesting."

00:14:32: And most of your friends are from the industry. Exactly. So you have this blending of free time and work time. Having hobbies – that's what keeps you sane. Great. That was the opening part. Before we start with the main part – I'm a little nervous about the camera, let me just check it.

00:14:56: The good thing is we can walk around for this one. It's running. It looks good. You look amazing.

00:15:03: Just to make sure everything is in place. Good. Let's dive in.

00:15:15: The first question: where are we in social media advertising at the moment? How would you describe the situation? I come from television advertising – 30-second ads – and some of our listeners might as well. Before we go into the mechanics of the club –

00:15:43: Let's take a step back. There's a step in between – social, how it started, influencers and all that. Could you give us a quick roundup? I think the question is very big, to be fair. Where are we now?

00:15:58: Coming from 30-second ads on TV – I did that in my past, also for digital and social channels. And coming from YouTube as well, where you have your 30 or 20-second ads – I think what we're trying to move towards is going from external advertisement to internal advertisement. The ads are in the content themselves.

00:16:30: That's basically the direction we're going. Of course that has existed for about 100 years. You have advertisements in movies, in series – product placements and whatever. Basically that's the same until today – the platform just changes.

00:16:53: And on the other hand, the laziness is getting bigger and bigger. That's my biggest concern in advertising right now – how lame and lazy people are getting. It's literally holding a bottle of shampoo into the camera and pretending to like it. In the past, in movies, they thought a little more about it.

00:17:29: Of course – the characters are getting into a nice shiny car and you think: okay, that's the advertisement. The bad guys are driving this brand, the good guys are driving that brand. You can see it – though mainstream audiences might not, because they're not thinking about it.

00:17:50: But in the creator era, it's much more blunt. It's very obvious that it's fake. And that drives me nuts – I don't understand why we have to watch stuff like that. A YouTuber with an audience just promoting a soft drink sitting on their table or a shampoo on the shelf.

00:18:19: "Oh look, there's a sample on my shelf. Oh, I actually use it." It's exactly that. It still exists. And of course it depends on the country. In Germany we have strict laws – you have to declare what's an advertisement and what's not.

00:18:37: In the US the rules are not that strict and you can bend them a bit more. But in the end, what I'd like to see is more storytelling. What we're seeing instead is very lazy advertising, because it's quick money. You're talking about seamless integration of the product into the storyline – or actually building a storyline around the product in a way that's not cheesy.

00:19:11: If everyone's always driving a car or always on the phone – there were examples in the past where brands financed movies and you'd always see the same product. Our company is essentially founded on the thinking that movie makers already had.

00:19:30: Like: you have a James Bond scene in the mountains with a ski heist. The producers know this is happening. And the salespeople go hunt for brands that produce skis – "Hey Salomon, do you want to be part of this heist? The good guy will have your skis, great brand reception, maybe you sell more skis because James Bond is using them." It makes total sense.

00:20:00: What's happening right now is the exact opposite. A YouTuber, TikToker or Instagrammer goes on a ski trip, drives down the mountain, turns to the camera and says: "Hey, by the way, when I'm skiing, I also like to drink this flavored water." And you're thinking: no you don't.

00:20:19: Yeah, really. So let's dive in directly – how is it actually happening? Because to any marketing executive, this is a one-sentence explanation of why it doesn't work. Most ads right now are disturbing the content rather than enhancing it. That's basically it. It's a disturbance.

00:20:42: What we try to do – and we're not successful every time – is give it more value. To use an advertiser to add value to the content, to the story, to what's happening, to the possibilities the creator has. Not to be a disturbance. Because ads are needed to produce content – ads drive revenue, and revenue drives spending on more and better content. But it's always a disturbance, and we try to eliminate that.

00:21:18: The funny thing is there's a parallel with TV ads in a movie. You have to watch this to continue – it's the same mechanic. An influencer saying "Oh, I drink this" is the same non-working pattern in a different medium. Repetition again and again.

00:21:46: I understand the mechanic from TV – it goes back to the soap opera era, where content was built around ads. But taking it to a new medium is a chance to change the pattern and make it smarter. So why isn't it more intelligent? Are the people commissioning these things so disconnected from the channel that they don't see it?

00:22:12: I don't want to be too harsh about this, but basically: we learned that these ads work at some point – the 30-second ads and everything around that. And in the beginning, when creator marketing came to Germany – we've been doing this for almost 15 years now – the ads were actually what we were hoping for.

00:22:41: When we started, you had your 30-second ads on YouTube and other platforms, or in the content itself, and advertisers actually tried to tell a story. I remember when content marketing was a new thing – everyone was talking about it.

00:23:21: And it was advertisement, but it was still content you'd want to watch. At some point – around 2017, 2018 or so – it shifted into this placement era. And I'll tell you why: because it's easy and lazy. If someone tells you they can guarantee the same ROI with a third of the work, you do it.

00:24:14: You have your views, your clicks, your sold products – but way less time and energy is spent on the content. The art basically dies. But it's the same with everything else – if you can maximize output while minimizing work, that's capitalism. You could spend €100,000 on a production with a crew, produce content with creators and have a show everybody loves.

00:24:40: Or you spend €50,000, they do everything, and you have the same results at the end. Of course you'd consider the easier way. But is the art dying? And why would a brand's marketing manager care? They're spending less money, getting better results in less time.

00:25:10: And doing their job well by those metrics. But the question is what the ROI actually says when people in front of the screen realize the quality is going down. They know the product, they know the brand, but they're not as entertained.

00:25:31: So the question is also how to explain to marketing executives what the leverage is – why people actually prefer better content. But how do you measure that?

00:25:50: Exactly. And this is what I tell everyone: maybe the same amount of people have seen your ad, but everybody hates it. And of course some people are willing to click, some will even support their creator by clicking the ad, maybe they even buy the product.

00:26:25: But there's a big difference between branding and performance. More and more brands are trying to do performance on creator channels, which is possible – but it's like saying TV could be a performance channel. People tried that – "Call now and get..." – you know those ads.

00:26:50: They always try to push more and more performance into branding channels. But in the end, creator marketing is always a branding channel, with opportunities to include some performance. Or, for example, using creative content and then pushing it through paid media for a performance layer.

00:27:13: In the end, creator marketing will always be a branding tool. And if you use your branding with simple and lazy ads, people will fricking hate you. If you look at NordVPN, AG1, and all these digital-first brands on YouTube – everybody knows them and nobody's really buying, because they're disrupting what people want to watch.

00:27:45: If you spend millions of euros, you'll get some ROI back – but most people will have a negative association with your brand because you're disrupting what they want to watch. Like this video running in the background here, without ads – because I have YouTube Premium.

00:28:07: Most people don't buy YouTube Premium. So what happens: you search for a video or the algorithm recommends one, you click it, you get two ads, you wait 60 seconds, and then you watch the content you actually wanted.

00:28:30: Maybe there are even more ads in between – mid-rolls – and then the creator is also talking about a product you don't care about. People will hate your brand, or just skip. You can even see in YouTube's analytics where people have skipped – there's always a big spike at the end of the sponsored segment, where viewers jump past it.

00:28:54: There's a big wave where people skip through, because they don't want to see the advertisement. And then the targeting is obviously so bad on top of that. I get retargeting for stuff I literally don't need. I understand the system – I don't have Premium, so I have to watch it.

00:29:16: I tried a few days ago to rewind a video because I wanted to watch a part again, but it was impossible – the same ad kept coming every time I tried to rewind.

00:29:37: Let's talk about what an ideal campaign or setup would look like. You have an influencer, content, different channels. And this also touches on the world I come from: when social came up, people made edits of the TVC for YouTube pre-rolls with the logo in the front – so the audience at least sees the logo before they skip. I was always thinking: why don't we make content so interesting that people don't skip?

00:30:17: And that's been a long road for marketing decision makers to adapt to. But of course there's not only one piece of social content that you can run on every channel. So how would you set up a campaign with different assets?

00:30:38: That's a big question, and it strongly depends on your budget and your goals as a brand. To help you understand, I need to tell a little story from when we worked at a different company.

00:30:58: We worked a lot with Ubisoft, the game publisher, and we did something for Assassin's Creed. We used exactly the method you just described on YouTube. I don't want to over-focus on YouTube, but it's a great example.

00:31:20: We created videos 10 to 15 minutes long, and we used the first five seconds – before you can skip the TrueView ad – to fit in as much advertisement as possible, but also as much reason to keep watching as possible.

00:31:41: It totally works. You saw the creator's face, you saw what would happen in the video, but still had the advertisement for the game in those five seconds. You saw the logo, saw there would be action and storytelling – it was going to be a high-quality video, which wasn't normal for YouTube ads at the time.

00:32:07: What we did was push this video organically with the influencers we worked with, and then ran a TrueView retargeting campaign on people who hadn't seen it yet. In TrueView you can skip after five seconds.

00:32:27: I think we still hold the German record for the longest watch time – across the whole campaign, the average watch time was 60% of a ten-minute video, so about six minutes. The average person was watching this advertisement for six minutes because it was so entertaining.

00:33:08: People could skip after five seconds, but they watched organically for six minutes. What that tells you is: if it's entertaining enough, people will watch an ad for more than six minutes. And you'll still sell. But it sounds like an exception. I have a case in mind – some time ago, an insurance company in the US called Geico.

00:33:32: The unskippable Geico ad. Exactly – the "damage" was shown in the first five seconds, like a dog jumping on a table. And the remaining 25 seconds? Literally nothing was happening. Just people sitting, eating.

00:33:51: Very smart concept. Still one of the best. It was some time ago and won a lot of awards. But why didn't more things like that follow? The logic is pretty simple – why don't these ideas happen more often?

00:34:08: I still think it's laziness. People learned to do spots and advertisements in a certain way, so they just do it. And there's also genuine fear – many agencies and brands are scared to try something new because they haven't tried it before.

00:34:33: I'd be scared too if I had to spend €50,000 on a test that might go wrong, or give up control over something that will happen with my ads. That is the biggest fear in working with creators – giving up control. I understand that completely.

00:35:00: But what many brands forget is that working with creators means working with people. Everyone has their own mind, their own knowledge about their community. It's always different. To come back to my favorite type of campaign – to make it simple, you have a decent budget.

00:35:22: You don't need millions – it also works with smaller budgets. But I think the smartest thing you can do is start big and go smaller. Screen size, I mean. If you do a social-first campaign, I'd go from the biggest screen to the smallest. A friend's agency uses the term "content stack" – I like it a lot.

00:35:53: It means stacking the same content from biggest to smallest. You start with the YouTube video. Then you don't use the whole video for your short content or 9:16 content, but you cut it down so it works.

00:36:30: Basically you go from organic 16:9 to short-form 9:16, to maybe even faster short-form for TikTok – if it matches your target group – and then also use this content for paid media. A 16:9 version for YouTube ads, get the buyout from the creator, and then recut versions of the 9:16 and so on.

00:36:53: You have organic and paid, different funnels, but all going in the same direction. That's my favorite type of campaign setup.

00:37:22: It sounds smart. It reminds me of when social first came up and we were shooting TVCs. We had to decide on framing – the matte box and the safe area and all that. So how do you technically achieve that? Because if you shoot in 16:9 and then need a lot of vertical assets –

00:37:42: We've had different approaches. One is shooting with two cameras simultaneously if you already know you'll need a lot of 9:16 content – one camera for 16:9, one for 9:16, both on one rig. We've done that.

00:38:04: If it's possible, do it. You can also recut to 9:16 in post – you'll lose a lot of space, but it's possible. Or shoot additional content specifically for the platform, because there can also be a quality difference between 16:9 and 9:16.

00:38:25: Story is more important than looks on 9:16. On 16:9 – on a big screen – looks matter more. That's not my claim, by the way. But on mobile phones, story is more important.

00:38:46: So maybe if you're shooting at a nice location with high-quality equipment, you could also have a phone with you and just shoot your 9:16 on that. It's more authentic, more story-driven, less polished. You can do it however you want – but it's about planning beforehand.

00:39:14: If you know you need a lot of 9:16 content, think about how to integrate that. If you're not sure, use B-roll or be creative. On 9:16 you can also stack the 16:9 format three times above each other – it looks terrible, but if the story is right, it works.

00:39:34: Or blur the background. Some people use the trick of telling viewers to turn their phone 90 degrees so the whole video goes 16:9 on a 9:16 platform. There are tons of possibilities.

00:39:53: When I was shooting, we'd shoot 16:9 and everything else would be cropped later. But in your industry right now – is it equal, or are you shooting more vertical? It depends on the campaign. But what I'm aiming at is: social was always a byproduct of TV commercials years ago, and maybe even still now.

00:40:19: Maybe there are very successful social videos that, as a byproduct, also run on television. I think I've seen that in the past – some videos ended up in TV commercials or parts of them. But I would try to separate that as much as possible, because it just doesn't work combined. I'd always create content for the platform you want to share it on.

00:40:47: If you want to do something on TikTok, shoot for TikTok. Instagram, shoot for Instagram. TV, shoot for TV. I'd try to view everything separately – not just to gain the trust of the community, but to give it the natural feeling that it belongs on that platform.

00:41:08: The problem was – I remember reading that a major brand had the most successful video spot on YouTube with 50 million views. And I thought: sure, they took their TVC, put it on YouTube and pushed it with ads.

00:41:38: That's not an achievement. That's just how media buying works. Everybody was impressed – "50 million views!" – but if you pump millions into it, of course you get 50 million views. That's basic math. And that's what big brands still don't get: create content for the platform and for the people.

00:42:04: Platform first, people first. The TVC will not work on social media. This is why you do a cutdown for 20 seconds and make it unskippable – because people won't watch it otherwise.

00:42:45: But before we go to the medium question – on social you also have the participation layer. A lot of content we've talked about is aired in a break or whatever – is it entertaining, is it a show? But on social you can actually participate. I'm sometimes missing that, because it's still mostly: watch this and buy this product.

00:43:07: That's exactly it. Coming back to the Ubisoft example – what we wanted to achieve and did succeed at: what I'd love to have, even if it's not possible every time, is to really use the reactions, the comments.

00:43:34: What I love most is to see comments like: "If that's advertising, I'm only watching advertising from now on." That's basically what I wish for in the campaigns we do. When we also worked with Max from your previous podcast on the Chuck Norris campaign –

00:43:56: You have comments saying "this is a bit much" and "we hate it" – but then there are people saying "the marketing team at this company should get an award." That's what I want to hear. That's the goal – not just "haha, funny video," but people actually appreciating the work and the time put into it.

00:44:17: And that's also very meaningful for brands – if their advertisements actually engage people, not by doing a raffle where you can win an iPad and people comment to enter. Having real engagement because the advertisement was actually good, well made, integrated into the story – or it just made sense.

00:44:40: A creator who loves pizza, and you do a pizza advertisement – they go out and give pizzas to their community. That just makes sense. Everybody thinks: okay, this is a great collaboration, everybody knew what they were doing. But if you don't have a driver's license and you do a car advertisement – that's the difficult part, finding the right match.

00:45:03: But that's our job – that's why we're here, to get that match so you don't do it wrong. On the participation side – when people comment, there's also the chance to react with the next piece of content based on those comments. Which is the opposite of where I come from – on TV it takes four weeks to react because of all the loops. How fast can you actually react in your world?

00:45:39: Max told you that for the Chuck Norris campaign they produced quick reaction videos to comments, and then Chuck Norris himself commented on those people. That's something very special and not normal in a campaign. For community management, I'd actually recommend someone who does that specifically – there are great companies doing it really well.

00:46:00: I think community management as a brand – on brand channels or on a creator's channel where you're running ads – is something you can and should do. And a friend of mine always says: real brands talk out loud. Basically what US brands do very well is community management.

00:46:24: Someone is seen eating a Kit Kat bar, and Kit Kat is immediately in the comments saying "Hey, if you do that again, we'll send you 2000 bars." Or in a comments section debating Oreos vs. Kit Kat, Kit Kat and Oreo join in and start a fight. People love it because they become part of the discussion.

00:46:47: I think conversation is very important – that's what we as a society and as people do. We discuss things and we talk. These conversations are crucial for achieving high engagement. What we also do for some clients is outbound community management – interacting as a brand with other brands or users. We've gotten hundreds of thousands of likes on our comments that way. But that's another topic. So you have creator marketing, productions, paid media, community management – there's so much to it in our world. It's quite complicated to navigate. And coming from the TV ad world – booking channels through a media agency – this all seems pretty difficult, or even impossible to orchestrate. It's happening in real time. I totally understand marketing decision makers who say: we don't know what's happening there, it costs money, and we can't control the output. But the reward is actually good. How do you tell people what to do? Social in general is extremely complicated to do right. I'd start small and stick with it – it's a cliché, but it's a marathon, not a sprint. Start and dedicate a part of your marketing budget to creator marketing. If you want to start, start with just social media. Start only with Instagram, build it up, then maybe TikTok, then other channels.

00:49:13: If you want to start with influencers, maybe start only with content on their pages or channels, not your own. Do you want your own channels? Not necessarily – start somewhere and build it up over time.

00:49:29: If you want everything at once, it's possible, but it'll cost more and you need someone to guide you. I also don't think you should do influencer marketing, social content and community management all at once from the start – it's almost guaranteed that something won't work. And that's fine, but you're burning money. That's also the reason there are so many black sheep in this market. It's so complicated and so hard to distinguish what actually works – people use that lack of knowledge as profit. They take advantage of you because you don't know how it works and tell you: "Yes, that's €50,000." Similar to every other industry – there are opportunists everywhere.

00:50:01: What also happened in the past with creator marketing is that people tried it, didn't get great results – not necessarily scammed, but just taken advantage of – and then brands and marketers said "we tried it, it didn't work." And that built up a wall. What I'd always recommend, even if it works against our interests as an agency: build knowledge inside your brand.

00:50:31: At least one person should know what they're talking about – so when an agency comes to you and tells you how you should do everything, there's at least one person who can say "hold on, let's start with this first segment, and the rest will build up over time." But that raises an interesting question: how old are the marketing decision makers you're talking to?

00:50:57: I'm 52, I have TikTok just to check it sometimes, but I'd never really understand how it works. You need someone in the team who actually uses this all day. That's also a shift that needs to happen in marketing departments – people who actually know what they're talking about, or at least can judge what agencies are telling them.

00:51:19: It massively depends. We're talking to people in their 20s and 30s, but also clients in their mid-50s or even older. It strongly depends on how familiar you are with the platforms personally. Do you use them in your private time? Do you have kids who use them? That gives you knowledge too.

00:51:48: And of course your media consumption background matters. If you watch a lot of TV, you may have a stronger disbelief in social media and be more hesitant about working with creators. But if you use these platforms regularly and follow creators for cooking recipes or climbing or whatever, you have a better sense of what works and what doesn't.

00:52:13: And it strongly depends on your ego too – if I tell you your idea is great but I'd do it differently, you can acknowledge that, or you can do whatever you want because it's your money. But I can tell you: if you do it your way, it will fail. And when it does, you'll tell me it's my fault.

00:52:31: That happens every day. But it's the same with all media, to be fair. TV commercial budgets are the same – you spend a ton of money, air the clip, and nobody runs into your dealership. Of course not – it's branding. But branding is also hard to prove.

00:52:55: There's no button to click and buy. What's the measurement of success? It depends on the goal. There are views, engagements. In more performance-driven sections, you have link clicks and even purchases. You can track almost everything, as in classic digital media – but not in all content you produce.

00:53:27: In a YouTube video, you can't click a link within the video to get to a website, but you have the description below. On mobile, you're less likely to click a link to a website. Instagram stories allow click-through, but not Reels. So it strongly depends on which channel you're on and how much performance you can actually drive.

00:53:51: Having views, engagements and positive feedback on videos is something you can measure success by. But it's not as detailed as classic performance ads on websites. I have this discussion with big brands all the time – "we do out-of-home because we know it works." How do you know? "Millions of people are seeing it." Okay, but is someone standing next to the billboard counting who actually looked at it? No.

00:54:27: I was at a Marketing Club Berlin event once about out-of-home advertising, and it turns out it's actually possible – I don't know the technical details – to track anonymized phone data from people passing that area.

00:54:50: And also if they shortly after click on a link – that also gets tracked, though not in detail. It sounds dystopian. It is. But in the end it's still branding.

00:55:22: We measure reach, how many people we reach, how many views. On YouTube you can go even deeper – I can see what they watched, how long, what was interesting, where they skipped. Same on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. I can see a lot of data. And it's important to analyze that data against the goals you actually have.

00:55:49: If you just want awareness, maybe it's totally fine that people watched for a minute and then left. If it's five minutes and they skipped because they already knew what it was about – that's fine. And it depends massively on the advertiser and the product.

00:56:10: If you want people to know there's a new yogurt with a different flavor, 10 seconds of attention might be enough. But if you have a €100,000 car and you want people to understand why it's expensive but worth it, you probably want a few minutes of content that actually explains it.

00:56:31: So it vastly depends on what you want to achieve. And to be fair, one of the hardest things in our world is understanding what the goal actually is – because the advertiser often doesn't know. Many brands and advertisers can't tell me what the goal of the campaign is. Why are you doing it?

00:56:50: A lot of people say: "because we have to." We have to do something on social. Here's the budget. Great goal – we can only fail. But it's the same with TV and everything else. Someone sits in a corner office and tells their managers: "We have a million to spend, I want €100,000 on influencers." That's the briefing.

00:57:13: "We're launching this product and have €100,000. What do we get?" I don't know. What's the goal? Sales? Not possible. What else? Awareness? Okay, we're getting somewhere. But it all strongly depends on the goals, the knowledge, and what's actually possible.

00:57:30: It's also important to make clear for anyone listening: we understand why people get lazy in this field. They're so overwhelmed with possibilities and directions that they stick to the classic Excel spreadsheet. "What I understand as a marketing expert is: we book influencers, they hold something into the camera, we get reach and results. And the Excel spreadsheet says we were successful."

00:58:04: So they stick to that – because it's so overwhelming. In a two-minute board meeting you have to say: "This is what we did, here's the checkbox. We spent €100,000 and gained €110,000 in sales. Everybody's happy. Next." What did the TV advertisement do? "We spent five million." Okay. Same result, but more money.

00:58:23: But that's learned behavior. So talking about TV again – how do you see the segmentation of television, social and YouTube? And if you say television, YouTube and social – YouTube is kind of becoming television. The content I'm producing for YouTube is TV-level quality now. Same quality. How do you see this? What are people actually watching?

00:58:55: I don't want to make enemies, but: classic analog TV measurement is, I'd say, the biggest scam we have. You have these measurement boxes – I don't know the exact number, maybe 5,000 boxes for 80 million people.

00:59:35: If one box is on a specific channel at a specific time, that gets extrapolated to a massive number. Prove me wrong. I'd be happy to be schooled on it. But I think a lot of people are still watching TV.

00:59:56: I think it's very fragmented. A lot of people don't watch TV at all, some watch sometimes. And we can at least measure social – we know how many people are actually using it. Social media should definitely be counted more as a mass medium, because we can actually track that people are using it.

01:00:14: But also – why does there even need to be one dominant medium? It's so fragmented. Millions of people are watching movies in cinema, millions are on Netflix and Prime Video, some have connected TVs with Sky, and then there's mobile and everything else.

01:00:37: I think we live in a very fragmented time, which is totally fine. And advertisers now have more possibilities than ever to actually reach their target audience. I'd say it's more of a plus than something bad for advertising.

01:01:03: It would also already be a great closing statement – but I was still thinking about the segmentation, because maybe it comes from the people. TV was always first – print, then radio, then television, that's the classic media hierarchy. And maybe the idea is that there has to be one main channel where all the money goes, and the others are secondary.

01:07:27: But from my point of view that doesn't make sense anymore, because even the discussion about what television actually is has changed. Is it TV if you're watching five hours of something on a big screen on a train? Or is television the signal from the wall?

01:07:44: It's the signal. I'd say it's the signal. This right here is YouTube. And I've worked for a newspaper, for a platform, and now in an agency. The fragmentation of content is a big plus, because it allows you to diversify your content and strategies even more.

01:08:13: Of course. And before we lose track of something important: we were talking about the segmentation of channels – what's on which channel. Because TV, obviously, has the same format it had from the start. How do you see the change in formats in terms of screen size, vertical vs. horizontal, length? Are there trends you can spot?

01:08:38: Yes. Right now there's the trend of micro dramas – everyone's talking about micro dramas. I like micro series because they're quick, fast and snackable.

01:09:09: But I think you can withstand trends through great ideas and consistency. If you want to build a channel with 50-minute videos in 9:16, I don't think it's possible. But five-minute cooking videos, well done and entertaining – it's going to work. And if the idea is good, it will work whether it's a ten-second 9:16 or longer 16:9 YouTube content.

01:09:45: There are always trends, and brands and advertisers jump on them. But in the end, people will always go to content they personally relate to and like. And that's also a plus of this diverse and fragmented landscape of possibilities. I can tell you about trends now, but these trends might be gone in two weeks.

01:10:14: You will always search for a cooking video on YouTube, even five years after it was released. What gets watched is increasingly random – things go viral, get trendy for a week, and then they're gone. It's very fragmented. I don't have a clear answer.

01:10:41: Actually – I just remembered: there was a 10-minute TikTok ad for Hilton starring Paris Hilton. And people watched it till the end because they could win something. Ten minutes. On TikTok. Which is the complete opposite of what TikTok stands for.

01:10:59: But you don't always have to exaggerate and do something super special as an advertiser. Sometimes you just have these ideas. We talked about the Geico ad – there was a trend on YouTube as well where people used the first five seconds before the skip for their classic ad, like "Hey, before you skip, you should watch this because..." and then the TVC followed. And it worked because it prepared people for what was coming. The skip rates went down.

01:11:35: You can play with the platform mechanics, and I think that's neat. So to sum it up – coming from the world of a 30-second storyboard shot for television, this seems to be the complete opposite: a variety of possibilities that have to be orchestrated in a certain way, toward a certain goal, with certain channels, to achieve measurable outputs. Different measurements, different mechanics. Seems complicated.

01:12:19: What we always want from our clients is: the product, the budget, and the goal. The rest is in our hands, because those three things help us massively. We can write a strategy – even a small one – on how to work it out.

01:12:51: If you're not in social at all, start slowly and build up knowledge in your company and agency. Get help – through us or through many others who do it very well. Getting help from agencies specialized in this area makes total sense. You also wouldn't do complicated electrical work at home by yourself – at least not in Germany, where you're not legally allowed to.

01:13:28: You can do a lot of damage if you do it wrong. Same with social media – if you do it wrong, you get a shitstorm, or you just burn money without achieving anything. Just get help. It's as simple as that. And try not to get scammed by the people who help you.

01:13:52: If you need recommendations, I'll give you addresses of people and agencies doing it fantastically – strategic agencies, production agencies, whatever is needed. There are a lot of great people out there doing amazing work. But knowing who's doing it right requires being inside this specific industry bubble, which is difficult from the outside.

01:14:15: That's maybe also why there's so much that doesn't work. This is the reason I said at the beginning that I want a small farm in Italy – because I watch the content others produce, or what big agencies produce, and I'm just shaking my head thinking: wow, €100,000 just burned because someone told you that was a great idea, and it's not.

01:14:42: And then the next time you're in a meeting and say "what are you doing?" – "We tried that." Yes, exactly. After they spent a ton of money and burned everything to the ground, we're sitting in the same rooms as before, telling them how it should work.

01:14:57: And they say: "Yeah, but we tried that. It wasn't what we expected, so we're not doing that anymore." Great. So coming back to your farm in Italy – maybe we do the next episode there, growing some herbs.

01:15:15: Yes, man. Thank you very much. I'll link everything in the show notes – your profile, company profile, LinkedIn. Great. Maybe some of the cases we talked about too. Thank you very much. See you in Italy then. Thanks for having me. First podcast from home. Great. Thanks.