Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 2)

SM: What is the barrier?

JA: There are actually two barriers to entry in doing YouTube and doing it well. Number one is you must be creative enough to come up with something that will have an entertainment element to it. It’s not guaranteed that you always have to have that, but the likelihood is if you want to maximize views, there has to be an entertaining element to your YouTube videos. Frankly, not everybody can pull that off. We can all sit in front of our Web cams on top of our computers, and we can all post videos to YouTube. But there are 24-hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. So, the odds of your Web cam self-done video getting seen are somewhere between slim and none. The first barrier of entry is there needs to be a creative element to it, an entertainment element to it. Most people can’t pull that off without the help of somebody else, somebody who is a professional or somebody who is a good writer or somebody who has a great sense of humor and can translate that sense of humor into a script.

The second barrier to entry is unlike email or Facebook or Twitter, there may be some budget requirements. In other words, Orabrush has a budget. I’m not allowed to say what it is, but it’s thousands of dollars per episode to create a video that’s entertaining, that goes online, that attracts subscribers and attracts viewers. So, these are the first two barriers to entry just on the creative side. You need to make videos that are attractive enough to people to get them interested in watching and also get them interested in passing along your video and suggesting that somebody else ought to take a look at it. Does that make sense?

SM: Yes. It makes sense. I think what you’re saying is true as far as a lot of the consumer videos are concerned. I think you’re emphasizing greatly on entertainment value and humor. But I think there are other kinds of videos that are also going viral, so to speak, that have other types of content, right?

JA: That’s correct. But if you go to a professional conference, for example, you’re not there to be entertained in the strictest sense of the word. You’re there for the content. I’ll give you an example that I love online. As I’m watching online, I’m watching YouTube for things like How to Build an Electric Car, for example. That would be a content video. It would not necessarily have to be humorous. Nevertheless, having said that, if you can do a higher quality presentation that has an entertainment element to it, your chances of achieving a higher virality factor go up. You’re not trying to be funny necessarily. Entertainment isn’t your primary motivation. Nevertheless, if it is entertaining as well as informative, the likelihood that it gets shared is good. The same thing is true if you go to a professional conference, and they have 16 presentations going on or four concurrent sessions. If you’ve got somebody presenting who’s a professional speaker with a skilled presenter who’s both entertaining and informative, his class is going to fill up.

SM: I think the quality of the video, the quality of the message are important, absolutely. I think you’re absolutely right, and entertainment value and humor do very well from a viral spread point of view. Somebody I was just talking to has a company in the Midwest, in the Chicago area. It’s a $100 million e-commerce company called OpticsPlanet. They sell all sorts of optics equipment, including telescopes and binoculars. They have used YouTube very well. What they do, by and large, is infomercials on highly specialized equipment. One of their segments is hunters. I looked at their videos and an infomercial on a certain kind of binocular has 55,000 views. Again, it’s highly targeted, but 55,000 views of a particular product video is not bad at all, right?

JA: No. Again, the numbers are going to be all over the place, depending on your segment. The beautiful thing is that it’s so highly targetable. So, 55,000 views, we would look at that and say, “That’s pretty good.” By comparison, Orabrush has channel views of over 40 million.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative
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