Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

My two-year old son has become enamored with a colorful character named Blippi. He's one of the hottest rising YouTubers who has quite literally swept the children's educational market on the world's most popular video platform, soaring well past the billion-plus view mark. By curating content specifically geared towards helping children during their most important fundamental developmental stages, he's effectively carved a massive niche and a surprisingly large following.

One day, as my son sat enthralled by one of Blippi's videos, where he sings and dances and teaches children about all the various parts and components of a garbage truck, I knew that I needed to learn more. As someone who's entrenched in the online marketing industry and obsessed with things like passive income, I knew that what Blippi had achieved was nothing short of fascinating and amazing.

In fact, what I discovered from a rather extensive interview was even more amazing to me. Let's set aside the millions of dollars of revenue that Blippi has made, which is the brainchild of Stevin John, a creative professional from Washington State who once worked in Hollywood's film industry, behind-the-scenes, and let's look at the bigger picture here. From a branding and merchandising perspective, Blippi is sheer brilliant....

A puppet of a cockroach lies on its back, flailing its arms wildly. A mouse cursor hesitates over an order on the website “Poison Depot” before changing it from one bottle to eleven. A gleeful Victorian marriage proposal goes awry when lightning strikes a nearby tree.

Each story is told in just six seconds of video. And there are more than a dozen such short recreations of classic books from the Western canon, all promoting YouTube’s new brief pre-roll ad format.

Those three vignettes, of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (famous for its protagonist waking up one morning as an insect), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (spoiler alert: everybody dies) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (with its romantic symbolism around a split chestnut tree), join similar takes on George Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and more....

I was recently offered a free cable subscription and I said “Why? I don’t have a TV, and all my shows are on YouTube.” I would like to think that none of the stereotypes listed here apply to me. Fortunately, usage statistics can shed light on the reality of negative stereotypes of YouTube users.

The stereotypes in this infographic are really stereotypes of internet users, or Internauts, in general. I think these negative generalizations came out of the fact that computers were largely marketed as toys for boys when personal computers were first coming out. Of course, computers, and the internet, are much, much more than that, but when people kept interacting with this thing that had been presented as a toy, it was interpreted by the wider public as immature and unhealthy.

As this infographic on the growth of the internet shows, internet use exploded in the decade between 2002 and 2012, and is only increasing as more and more of the world comes online. Sterotypes of internet users are going to die pretty quickly as the vast majority of people on earth join the ranks....

It’s no secret that video is quickly becoming the #1 priority for both social media platforms and marketers alike. As consumers, we spend more and more time glued to our smartphones watching one video after another. 

By 2017, it is estimated that video will account for 74% of all internet traffic in the world, making the upcoming year make or break time for any company that’s betting on video. As competition heats up, some of the most well-known platforms have rushed to report impressive statistics. While they may be staggering, such numbers tend to be cherry-picked and don’t necessarily show the full picture....

When I was just a wee lass and HubSpot was first starting to make a name for itself, inbound marketing was a brand new idea. Marketers were learning that they couldn't just publish a high volume of content -- it also had to be high-quality and optimized in ways that made it as discoverable as possible through search engines.

And once upon a time, that content was largely limited to the written word. Eleven years later, that's no longer the case -- a comprehensive content strategy includes written work like blogs and ebooks, as well as media like podcasts, visual assets, and videos.

That last part -- video -- continues to be on the rise. According to the 2017 State of Inbound, marketers named video as a huge disruptor. "I mostly write content right now," one respondent said, "but I'm afraid it may begin to diminish more and more with video." And with the rise of other content formats comes the need to optimize them for search. One increasingly important place to do that is on YouTube, which is a video distribution website used by the masses (HubSpot included).

But how does that work? What are the steps you need to take to optimize your YouTube channel for search? We've outlined some major tips below. And if you're short on time, no problem -- check out the video summary here....

Though it has some competition, YouTube remains the premier video site on the web. With a staggering amount of videos uploaded every day, some people even make a living from the service. No matter if you’re a casual YouTube user or go looking for the craziest channels you can find, there are all sorts of ways to tweak YouTube to make it just right for you. Let’s look at some URL tricks to get more out of the service....

Youtube is one the most powerful marketing channels at our disposal. Videos rank well in Google and often have rich snippets that attract more clicks and brand awareness.

While it's a very effective platform to build readership and following, it can also be quite overwhelming. There are too many parts that come into play. How to create videos? How to build up views and subscribers? How to produce quality and stand out.

Luckily, there are tools that make the process easier. While easy video creation tools have beencovered earlier, here are a few video marketing tools that let you discover more opportunities and allow you to achieve better results....

Recent research has shown that half of 18-49 year olds turn to their mobile device first to watch video. Even in the living room, many people prefer to watch on their smartphone – for the control, personalization and ease it offers. And as viewing habits change, we are working to introduce new formats adapted to these habits.

That’s why today we’re announcing Bumper ads – a new six-second video format, sold through the AdWords auction on a CPM basis. Bumper ads are ideal for driving incremental reach and frequency, especially on mobile, where “snackable videos” perform well.

Given the succinct nature of the format, we’ve seen Bumper ads work best when combined with a TrueView or Google Preferred campaign. In early tests, Bumpers drove strong lift in upper funnel metrics like recall, awareness and consideration. We also see that Bumpers work well to drive incremental reach and frequency when paired with a TrueView campaign....