Tag: Paul Greenberg

Content Marketing is No Joke (Unless You Work at College Humor)

Posted on by Drew Neisser

A rabbi, a priest, and a content marketer walk into a bar…. Bet you want to know what happens next, right? Well, patience, Vine-brain–you’ll just have to wait until I’m good and ready. Before then, I must establish why CollegeHumor may be the best source for lessons on content marketing in the known universe–lessons I gleaned from a recent interview with their CEO, Paul Greenberg. (Author’s note–this article first appeared several months ago on FastCompany.com and is more relevant than ever even though Greenberg has since moved on.)

Greenberg took over as CEO in 2011 and since then CollegeHumor, a division of IAC, has laughed its way to the bank as site traffic has jumped to 15 million unique visitors per month and annual traffic was up 40% in 2011 and 20% in 2012. With over 4.5 million subscribers, CollegeHumor is also a top-ranked YouTube channel. Along with the 100 million monthly video streams, CollegeHumor fans also devour a smorgasbord of non-video content like comics, articles, and even a feature film,Coffee Town, that’s coming out next month.

So yes, there’s some funny business going on over at CollegeHumor. Their videos seem to go “viral” more often than bunnies make bunnies. Their 1 million Facebook fans are maybe the only happy army in the world, sharing silliness with serious consistency. Okay, with their bona fides established, here are the 18 things CollegeHumor can teach you about content marketing (and 1 they won’t).

1. Start With Talented People

Before you say, “Duh, Drew, I hope the other 17 aren’t so obvious,” let me just remind you that most marketer-created content is unadulterated dreck and the good stuff is more rare than an amusing mortician. Great content starts with great writers. Period. Explains Greenberg: “We have a phenomenal team of very creative people who are very good at what they do.”

2. Get Out of the Way

With content marketing becoming an increasingly important part of the mix, it might be natural to involve senior management. Not so fast, bored-room-breath–if the CEO of a company that is in the business of creating content stays out of it, then perhaps you should, too. Reports Greenberg, “I don’t see any need to micromanage the content team–I just get obstacles out of their way and let them do what they do.”

3. Don’t Start at the Bottom Line

Long before he became CEO at CollegeHumor, Greenberg had firsthand experience as on-air talent (radio announcer, voice-over artist) and with production at MTV Networks. He believes these experiences set up him up for success in his current role, adding, “If there is someone who has never been a creative before and never been on the talent side, you’re going to make decisions purely based on the bottom line–and probably the wrong ones.”

4. Foster a Fear-Free Zone

Even with a talented team, not every piece of content will be a huge hit and some might even bomb. Greenberg admits that even CollegeHumor only expects two or three of the 50 videos a month they produce to generate multimillion views. “You can’t be afraid to fail; you have to be willing to put yourself out there every day with something new,” he advises.

5. Crank It Out

While you need not create as much content as CollegeHumor unless you, too, are only in the content business, you still will need to produce a lot more than one (albeit scintillating) blog post per week. Reports Greenberg, “We’ve got [a video] that comes out every single day and sometimes more than once a day.” Even B2B brands will want to publish a steady stream of quality content, especially as your audience grows.

6. Muster All the Mediums

In addition to creating lots and lots of content for your primary channel, whether that be a blog or YouTube or whatever, you are well advised to be wherever else your customers and prospects might consume your stuff. “We actually do a fair amount of articles, comics, and funny pictures that drive 30% of our traffic, which adds up to three to four original non-video pieces a day,” says Greenberg. “We have a well-oiled machine that is constantly making sure that we’re getting our tentacles out everywhere,” he adds.

7. Master All the Mediums

Even though you’re now thinking broadly about your channel options, don’t think you can simply make hay by putting the same stuff on each platform. Greenberg has a separate production and writing staff for the articles like “8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need,” an article that got over a million views, “because it just got shared everywhere.”

8. Plan On Having a Penurious Plan

Knowing all the channels and types of content you’ll be creating gets you a few steps closer to having a content marketing plan. CollegeHumor plans out their content on a monthly basis and from one production budget. Greenberg tells his staff, “Here’s your pot for the month; some of you are going to spend more on some and less on others, and you know what you have to do.”

9. Seek Out Your Series

I may be going out on limb here, but chances are you aren’t rebranding your company or product every week. Then why the heck are you creating content pieces that are essentially one-offs? Says Greenberg: “We try to be consistent and let people know when things are coming out–that’s the best way to build an audience.” Creating a series of videos or articles will also increase the odds of building up a fan base over the long term. “People will discover ‘Very Mary-Kate‘ on its tenth episode and go back and watch all of them,” he notes.

10. Show Some Patience, Young Lucas

As they say up in Alaska, “Nome wasn’t built a day.” Accordingly, even if you are lucky enough to land on a great idea for a content series and go on to produce fabulous segments, don’t expect the whole thing to be an overnight sensation. “With the series you are less apt to get into [a topical] zeitgeist really quickly, so you’ll build an audience over time,” Greenberg cautions. “They’re not all going to be gems, but you get enough hits so that people start to realize, ‘Wow, these guys have something interesting going on,’” he adds.

11. Listen Like You Have Two Ears and One Funny Bone

Once your content is flo-ing like Progressive’s spokesperson, it’s more than an insurance policy to listen to your audience. By way of example, Greenberg tells the story of CollegeHumor’s live-action “Dora the Explorer” parody that started out as a movie trailer. “The Dora trailer was an enormous hit and our fans wished this was a real movie… so we made a 12-minute movie in three installments,” he explains.

12. Plan for the Unplannable

As they say in the latrine business, “Humor happens,” and when it does, CollegeHumor is prepared to squeeze it for all its worth. Greenberg points to “Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends,” which they released right after Election Day. “It went crazy because it hit a nerve–it was really topical and it was well done,” he recalls. Like CollegeHumor, marketers also need to be prepared to execute quickly when topical opportunities arise.

13. Experiment Elsewhere

Not all content ideas are ready for prime time, so it’s a good idea for brands to have a safe haven to experiment. CollegeHumor accomplishes this by having a microsite called Hardly Working. “It’s a sort-of playground for us, so that’s where we put these weird ideas in motion,” notes Greenberg. Brands can accomplish the same thing by sharing content ideas with a carefully picked customer advisory group or via an employee-only intranet.

14. Support It in Social

Obvious O’Brien here just wants to remind you that once you’ve created your splendiferous content, don’t forget to share it on your social channels and monitor those channels accordingly. Greenberg has one manager “who spends all her time on social networks, is completely in the loop on what’s happening, and [also] pushes stuff to our PR partners.”

15. Dive Into the Data

If there’s something funny about your data, it’s probably not a good thing unless, of course, you work at CollegeHumor. “We have a lot of data [and] we spend a lot of time analyzing it,” declares Greenberg. “We’ll look at the ratio between likes and views: Is this getting shared a lot but not watched a lot?” This data also helps determine if a new piece of content should be serialized or given an extra boost (see next point).

16. Be Prepared to Push

If you take but one thing away from this article, let it be this: Viral doesn’t just happen. Even the best content needs a catalyst–a spark, if you will–to start the fire that, swears the arsonist, just happened. Admits Greenberg, “Once [a video] gets to the half a million level, we start to really pay attention and ask, ‘Do we need to give it a little push somewhere?’” Such a boost could be featuring it on the homepage again or reposting it on their various social media channels.

17. Lighten Up, People

If your content falls in the forest and nobody reads it, even your mother won’t care. Content marketing only works when your target wants to consume it and share it, which is why a touch of levity can turn your dry opus into liquid gold. This doesn’t mean you need to start hiring class clowns and making videos about college kids puking, but it wouldn’t hurt if your writers knew the difference between a punch line and punch bowl.

18. Short Is Sweet

Now it’s go time. You’ve got a plan, a channel or six, social media on standby, a newfound sense of humor and even an epic writer lined up. The only problem now is that your writer penned an epic. Cut. And I mean cut. When it comes to videos, short isn’t just sweet, it’s like being a Doritos salesman when the munchies set in. Confirms Greenberg, “We try to keep [our videos] under 2 or 2½ minutes–anything longer and people really just glaze.”

There you have it–the 18 things CollegeHumor can teach you about content marketing. As for the one thing they won’t… It turns out that they have something called “The SIV” that Greenberg describes as “our secret formula for viral videos that makes sure that certain videos have certain aspects about them.” Bummer he won’t share. As they say over at Electrolux: “It really sucks.”

As for the rabbi, the priest, and the content marketer, you’ll need to bounce over to this other post on TheDrewBlog for the rest of the story. I dare not sully these pages with such inanities. More importantly, you’ll also find my informative interview with Greenberg.

Going Viral

Posted on by Drew Neisser

paul_greenberg_largePaul Greenberg is CEO of CollegeHumor, a division of IAC that is growing faster than you can say Rodney Dangerfield. At this point, it is easy to believe that Greenberg’s mission for his organization, “To be the best and largest multimedia multi-platform comedy studio,” will be realized soon enough.  In the meantime, I thought you would appreciate more insights from Paul on making viral videos, budgeting, how marketers can work with CollegeHumor and lastly, how to lead a creative organization.

Drew: Is one type of video more likely to viral than another?
Often the ones that go really viral are new sketches. Because it is a new idea, it gets introduced, people latch onto it, they love it and they send it around.  And so for example, we did one that was called, Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends. The thrust is, let gay men marry each other because if not, they’re going to marry your girlfriends and they are going to be much better husbands than you would ever be!

Another one that went really viral was called Look At This Instagram (see below).  And it wasn’t again in the Zeitgeist per se but it was a great take on how people use Instagram and it really kind of turned it on its head and parodied it beautifully and people just kind of I know I’ve seen those pictures a million times, I know what they are talking about, and so we really hit those.

Drew: Are series any different from a virality standpoint?
With series you are less apt to get into the Zeitgeist really quickly and so you build an audience over time.  So we’ll often see in a series episodes further down the chain do better than the original ones or we’ll see them catch up. People will discover Very Mary Kate on its 10th episode and go ‘oh wow, I didn’t know about this, and I am going to go back and re-watch all of them. We see binge-watching all the time, people just come in and they watch fifteen videos at a time, and a lot of times it is going back to start series when they’ve come in the middle.  Not that everything is serialized in terms of its plot, but it is just obviously thematically serialized and so we want to make sure that people love to go back and check it out.

Drew:  So how do you budget for production?
We work a monthly basis. So, I say to the team, ‘here is your pot for the month, some you are going to spend more on some and less on some and you know do what you got to do.’  And we work very closely as a team to make sure that if, for example, we are going to go for broke on a Batman video, we are going to do a couple of more Hardly Workings or batch-shoot those and try to do things cheaply. Overall, we’re very efficient in terms of costs.  We have figured out lots of ways to cut corners: we shoot in the office so we don’t have to pay location and we batch-shoot sometimes. It’s very efficient.

Drew:  Are your videos the primary driver of traffic and new users? 
To an extent, although sometimes the non-video content gets shared just as much as the video stuff.  For example, the article Eight New Punctuation Marks That You Need got over a million views because it just got shared everywhere. And now there is interest in a series of it. So it really depends, [non-video] content can really drive a lot of view as well.

Drew:  Do the video creative team also create the other stuff? 
No. We have a separate production team including separate writers who have to be very topically driven.

Drew; Okay, do we get to the point where there is a cable station called CollegeHumor?
No, I don’t think so.  I mean I feel like being the multiplatform studio that we are, we are as close to a new age cable channel as you can get.

Drew:  So tell me about Coffee Town, your upcoming movie—did you write this in-house?
We actually did finance it but we didn’t write the script. Our agent UTA found Brad Copeland who was the writer for Arrested Development.  Brad wrote his own movie script and was looking for somebody to help to allow him to produce it and direct it.  So we were the studio. Brad wrote it, directed it and we produced it.  We went out to LA and hired a film crew, a real legitimate movie crew, etc.  (see trailer here)

Drew: I would suspect you are hoping to rally your army of CollegeHumor fans to see the movie, right? 
Yeah, oh yeah.  We’ll definitely use the army without question. A big part of this is the fact that we can mobilize 20 million people immediately to say or to at least raise awareness if not to get them off their butts into the theatres. And if we put it on iTunes, we can say, hey click here and you’ll be able to watch CollegeHumor’s movie.

Drew:  What exactly is native advertising and what are you doing in this area?
Native advertising is when the advertising blends more with existing content and it becomes less distinguishable as an ad.  We’ve been doing that for five years whether we called it branded entertainment or branded content or branded advertising or native advertising, About a year ago, we reorganized an entire group around native advertising.  We hired two comedy writers just to write branded content and native advertising pieces and we also reorganized a production team so now we have a native advertising production team that just creates videos for advertisers. Out of those 50 videos we create in a month, maybe less than half are advertising video.  But it still feels like CollegeHumor content and people — advertisers [like KFC, AXE & Listerine] come to us because they are interested in our sensibility.

Drew Neisser:  What’s the best way for marketers to work with CollegeHumor? 
Great question. We need to understand what you are trying to do.  Are you trying to increase sales?  Are you trying to just increase your brand perception?  Are you trying to increase relevancy?  Are you trying to activate an audience to go do something? Is about getting more Facebook likes? What do you want as a brand?  And then we can help you come up with content that fits that goal.

Drew: How involved are you in the content decision making process?
Not that involved, at this point, certainly not day to day. We have a phenomenal team of very creative people who are very good at what they do.  I get involved at a high level making sure that we have a strategy and we are trying to follow it and everybody knows what that strategy.  I’ll get very involved if something is questionable from a legal perspective or a taste perspective. But on balance, and that’s how I try to manage my team – hire the best people you can, hopefully people who are smarter than you, and who are experts at what they do and you get obstacles out of their way and you let them do what they do.  And so I don’t see any need to micromanage the content team. Besides, I’m not that funny.

Drew: Have you gotten funnier since you joined?
Much. Much funnier–I’m hilarious.  Actually it is intimidating in a way because these guys are really funny. And they are so quick. We have our weekly staff meetings and even a lot of the executives are standups [comics], and they are just hilarious. I mean it is like somebody took all of the best class clowns and put them all together in one room, it’s hysterical.  It is a really fun place to work.

Drew Neisser:  Do you ever say to yourself, ‘I can believe I have this job?’
Yeah.  Yeah, it’s awesome. I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way.  That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Drew: How about a few secrets to your success?
One is, never stop working ever; just be as aggressive as possible and want to win and do your work your absolute hardest because there is always somebody who is going to work harder than you are and ideas are wonderful but they are a dime-a-dozen.  Everything comes down to execution and doing it right and doing it well.

Drew: Do you have any advice for new or aspiring CEOs?
The advice somebody once gave me for managing is, only do what only you can do and spend your time doing that.  To that end, I wrote an article on this recently that identified five things that CEOs should spend their time doing:

    1. Set the strategy for what the company needs to be and what we are trying to accomplish and what’s our mission and where are we going.  And that’s not done in a vacuum per se, that’s done with the team but ultimately the leader has to be the one who puts his or her stamp on it and say this is the direction we are going to go.
    2. Then it’s making sure that the strategy is communicated very well and that everybody knows what’s going on and that there’s absolutely no misunderstanding. And making sure that everybody is coordinated so that ad sales and editorial and marketing and PR all know what each of the other ones is doing, to help support that overall strategy.
    3. Then its hiring and firing.  Personnel.  Putting the right people in place, and making sure that they are — smarter than you, they’re experts in their field and they are great.
    4. Then it is getting obstacles out of their way and letting them do their jobs and not micromanaging them but making sure that if there is something wrong, that you are there to help them.
    5. The fifth thing is making sure there’s enough capital to run the business and making sure there is a business plan that can be executed.

Drew: You’ve been on both sides of the creative development process including being a voice over talent and a radio announcer. Do you think that has helped you as a leader of a creative-driven company?
Yes. If there is somebody who is never been a creative before and never been on the talent side, you’re going to make decisions purely based on the bottom-line and probably potentially the wrong ones.

Note: this is the 2nd part of my interview with Paul. Click here to see the first part. 

Funny Business: Humor Within Content Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: So, a rabbi, priest and the content marketer walk into a bar.  The bartender asks, “well gents, what’ll it be?” The rabbi glances around the crowded room lamenting, “I see you are serving some of my tribe here, would you mind sending them to temple on Friday night?”  The priest, echoing the thoughts of the rabbi, says “yes and if you would send my flock over on Sunday that would be most kind.”  The content marketer, ignoring his companions’ discretion, jumps onto the bar and shouts at the top of lungs, “Drinks on me everyone, our ‘Sobriety Rules’ video just went viral!”

Paul Greenberg stillNow that we’ve established there are no jobs for me in comedy, let me introduce you to a veritable lion of laughter, Paul Greenberg, the CEO of CollegeHumor Media (owned by IAC). Paul and I had a lengthy chat a couple of months back about the inner workings at CollegeHumor, part of which is transcribed below.  I think you will agree after reading this that Paul has one of the best jobs around, working with funny people to make other people laugh AND making money doing it.  Look closer and you’ll also see how I was able to glean a few of the 18 Things College Humor Can Teach You About Content Marketing for an upcoming FastCompany.com post.

Drew: When did you join CollegeHumor and how its been going since then?
Sure, I joined two and a half years ago.  I was brought in to help grow the company and we have grown 40 percent year over year in traffic over the past two years.  We’ve also grown our revenue and we’ve grown 40% in traffic, we are now the eighth largest YouTube channel with over 4.5 million subscribers; we have 15 million monthly unique visitors which again is up, way up over from where we were a couple of years ago; we do a 100 million video streams per month.

Drew: So you’re a lot more than a website?
Yes, look at us as a multiplatform, multimedia studio.  We’re not a website.  We create enormous amount of content and we publish it on our O&O website, we publish it on YouTube, we publish it to game consoles, we publish it to connected TVs and now we are starting to create traditional long-form television shows and are very close to several deals with major cable networks to do that.  We are also going into lots of other areas of business like publishing three books, numerous DVDs and have shot a full-length movie called Coffee Town that will be released in July (see trailer here).

Drew: Tell me about the video production process.
We do about 50 videos per month and it’s all created in-house.  We have a production team here in New York a team in LA. It is all original content; we have our own writers, we have our own directors, we have our own producers and editors and it’s all created under the banner of CollegeHumor.

Drew: Do have some kind of schedule for your series like Jake and Amir?
Yes. Jake and Amir comes out every Tuesday like clockwork and Hardly Working comes out every Friday.  Some of the other series we do more in seasons.  Very Mary Kate, for example, will have a run of 15 straight weeks with an episode and then it’ll take a break.  It really depends on the production schedule and the actors, the writers, and how we can work around their schedules. But we try to be consistent and let people know when things are coming out — that’s the best way to build an audience.

Drew:  I happened to watch an episode of Very Mary Kate (Drinking Party) and I have to ask, has there been any pushback from the real Mary Kate?
You know I can’t speak for her, from what I understand, completely anecdotally she is a fan and she thinks it’s very funny.

Drew:  How do the parody movie trailers fit in?
There are two kinds of videos we do; one are series, which we just talked about and one are just one-off sketches.  And a movie trailer for us is like a sketch.  It is just like a Saturday Night Live skit that we do and if it hits, we’ll do more and if it doesn’t hit, we won’t do more.  So for example, the Dora trailer was an enormous hit — not only was it a hit in the sense of people who said we want to see more of this kind of thing but we also wished this were a real movie. So we made a 12-minute movie which is out in three installments and that was responding to the community.

Drew:  How do know when to stop doing sequels to a sketch?
We now have three of the Startup Guys but that was enough. We didn’t want to beat the joke to death, So it really depends on the kind of life that a sketch will get, we have a series we call The Six which is The Six girlfriends you’ll meet when you are back home, The Six dads that you could have — we started off with The Six dads and that did really well so we thought, all right there’s something here and now we have a bunch of Sixes.

Drew:  When you say “really well,” what does that mean in terms of traffic?
Once it starts to get to the half a million level, we start to really pay attention.  And we don’t just look at views, we look at Facebook likes, we look at shares on Twitter and shares on Tumbler, we are a very social media oriented company.  We have a lot of data and we spend a lot of time analyzing data, loking at the ratio between likes and views, if this getting shared a lot but not watched a lot?  Do we need to give it a little push somewhere? Is it getting watched a lot on our site but not shared very much?  Is there something that doesn’t make it go viral? And we are very good at making content that goes viral and gets shared and so we are always sort of tracking those metrics about social media.

Drew:  So you’ll know pretty early whether it is going to be successful, and if you think you see those early signs do you then do more to fuel the fire?
Yes, absolutely.  We look at it and we say all right, we got to keep this on our homepage, or we need to make sure we post it again to Facebook or something like that.  Creatively we have something called The SIV, which is our secret formula for viral videos and so it needs to make sure that certain videos have certain aspects about them and we keep that very tightly protected, as you might imagine, but it is the sort of the secret sauce of how we create viral videos and we have a team that has honed that art.  You know, not everything hits, obviously but I’d say our track record on balance is pretty good and we are very happy with how it is doing and the team is great at it.

Drew:  Is there a dedicated team to social media?
We have one person who is a social media manager; all she does is spend her time on social networks.  She’s completely in the loop in terms of what’s happening and what is coming up in terms of our schedule, so she’s always out there pushing it to our PR partners. We have another person in our marketing group who pushes stuff to other partners, so we have a well-oiled machine that is constantly making sure that we’re getting our tentacles out everywhere.

Drew: How does Hardly Working fit in?
Hardly Working is a sort of playground for us.  That’s where we put the weird ideas into motion, the ones that we want to experiment with, so we are less concerned about how that does. It is totally bizarre and fun and interesting and it gives us a safe place where we are not expecting huge amount of traffic. We do get some that blow up like Startup Guys [which started as a Hardly Working sketch.]  Not everything starts there, but it is one place that things get started.

Drew:  So it really is all about sort of rapid experimentation?
Exactly. You can’t be afraid to fail, you have to be willing to put yourself out there every day with something new, and they’re not all going to be gems but you get enough hits so that people start to realize wow, these guys have something interesting going on and I’ll go along with them when something is not as great, but I know when I come back there’s going to something for me.

Drew:  If we look at, I’m just focusing on the video, we talked about 50 a month, how many of those have to be hits for that month to be a good month?
Two or three big hits, I would say.  Which is not as easy as it sounds!

Drew:  We’ve been noticing this with business related videos that length matters a lot.  What’s ideal for you?
Absolutely, we try to keep it under 2 or 2½  minutes. Anything longer and people really just glaze.

Drew:  Are you guys into Vine?  Must be tough to do any fun in six seconds?
We’ve done a lot of Vines actually and they are fun experiments. We did a very funny thing for the Oscars–we recreated every Best Picture nominated movie as a Vine.

Drew:  Do you ever say to yourself, “I can believe I have this job, this is so great?”
Yeah, it’s awesome.  I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way.  That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Footnote: Paul also appears in some Hardly Working videos as himself. Here’s one of them.