Zag Ep. 61 - Consumers vs Cannes & What Mr Beast Can Teach You

🧐This Week

🇫🇷 We’re in Cannes this week, not on a yacht unfortunately… but Mr Beast was on a $1bn yacht and almost broke YouTube (We’ll get into it). Also in today’s Zag, you’ll get the key stats from our original research on what marketers believe vs what consumers believe about a number of this year’s favorite Cannes themes such as AI, Metaverse and Privacy, and a bunch of Cannes veterans answer your marketing questions including how to make the most of the festival if you aren’t on a yacht - That and other yacht marketing related insights for challengers this week!

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🤩Sorry did someone say Cannes?

🗣️ Oh you didn’t hear? We’re in Cannes this week along with all the other movers and shakers from Marketing & Advertising, but this year, we're bringing the consumer's perspective to the mix…

Our series of #RivalSpark research will be investigating precisely what real consumers outside the beachside advertising bubble think about the trends and topics we’re most concerned about as marketers, including:

• Brand purpose
• AI & Metaverse
• Consumer Privacy

👉You can check out all the research here 👈

📝 And follow the live report that DuBose will be doing everyday answering questions that marketers have each day at Cannes.

Or if you’re in Cannes and want to chat about all the trends, meet us for a coffee on La Croisette or a beer at Gutter Bar - just message Jenna, Eric or DuBose - You might even be able to grab one of the limited edition postcard packs with all the stats on them! 📈

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🛥️ Mr Beast vs A Yacht (How MrBeast's New Video Became the Second Most Watched in 24 Hours in YouTube History)

🎧 In each edition of ZAG, we bring you a brand breakdown for a challenger brand which is breaking convention and driving incredible marketing effectiveness while doing it.

This week, it felt fitting to do a quick breakdown of Mr Beast’s Yacht video which secured the 2nd highest YouTube view count in 24hrs in history.

There’s of course a myriad of technical and financial things Mr Beast does that make his videos go viral but there are still so many quick wins we can apply if we analyze this video from marketing principles lens.

💪 Concise, Curiosity Creating Headlines  

Like any good copywriter, Mr Beast has doubled down on what’s worked for him before. First, he and his team have noticed that including monetary figures in the title of the videos drastically improves the clickability of the videos.

Secondly, they’ve recognised that whenever luxury items are involved, people want to see it, whether it’s private islands, planes, or cars, so they make a point to mention this and highlight the yacht in GOLD in the thumbnail just in case you don’t read the title. Yes, you’ve likely never seen a gold boat in your life so it’s automatically a pattern break for your brain.

There’s a third part to the title formula that Mr Beast has perfected: the ability to let the viewer make a positive inference. The title of this video is “$1 vs $1,000,000,000 Yacht.”

This lets you know there is some form of competition happening here, and as humans, we’re naturally wired to want to see the spectacle of competition so it piques our interest. But, the true magic of this title is that it doesn’t give anything extra away about the type of competition that will take place, because it doesn’t want you, the viewer, to subconsciously filter yourself away from this video. Think about it, if the title of the video was “$1 vs $1,000,000,000 Yacht Race”, the word “Race” would remove all the potential viewers who don’t believe that racing content is valuable to them. Mr Beast does a great job of letting the titles generate just enough curiosity that you fill in the blanks and don’t remove yourself from his audience.

⏱️ Pacing/Retention

In this video, Mr Beast perfectly times the speed of the video interlacing tension and humor perfectly so that there isn’t an opportunity for viewers to turn away.

Like most of his videos, this video starts off very quickly with multiple cuts in the space of 10 seconds, and within the first 30 seconds, you’ve already had the reveal of what the $1 boat looks like and the yacht sinking with Mr Beast and his friends on board.

The ability to deliver “micro drama” at an exceptionally fast pace allows him to compound the impact of multiple stories within the 15 min video. He layers shock factors, such as when he orders a pizza via Uber helicopter and the helicopter has to land on the helipad of a moving yacht…Insane right? But they don’t dwell on this scene for more than 30 seconds before they throw you right into the next story arc making it impossible for you to consciously turn away. Most creators and brands would dwell on the big reveal but Mr Beast does the complete opposite.

He also doesn’t immediately compare the $1 Yacht to the $1bn Yacht, he has different stages of yachts or “Characters” along the way, specifically, Yachts which are priced at $1, $1m, $10m, $50m, $300m, $1bn so he can create mini stories around each of them.

📲 Social Credibility

Which marketer doesn’t love a bit of social credibility? Right at the moments when the tension is lacking other boat owners speed by and then shout “Mr Beast we love your videos!” Or “I’ve watched your videos!” adding to the allure for a first-time viewer that this video is something other people are also going to see so you don’t want to miss it.

This ability to interact with the audience and fans is something which really separates him and has allowed this video to fly into the stratosphere.

For the final big reveal, he invites 400 subscribers onto the $1 Billion Yacht and pays for them to have a 3-night cruise and ends it by telling you to subscribe so you can come to the next one…. I mean… who doesn’t want a free cruise?

This creates the social credibility and shareability that people will send this video around, meaning he’s driving social shares instead of fully depending on the algorithm to get him to the top spot.

💎 Celebrity factor

He also doesn’t mention the 2 celebrities in the video in the title or the thumbnail. At all.

Instead, Mr Beast brings in Pete Davidson for the $50m dollar boat story and then Tom Brady shows up on the $300m boat and knocks a drone out of the air with a football.

At each level of the video, he steps up the content with these “bonus surprises”; by not telling the viewer that there are celebrities in this video, the viewer naturally thinks “if this celebrity wasn’t mentioned, there must be some more surprises that I don’t want to miss”  

Trust me, if any of us had Tom Brady in our videos we would be labeling it literally everywhere.

📦 Product Placement

Of course, he mentions his own chocolate brand “Feastables”, but it’s done so quickly and interactively that you almost don’t mind the intrusion in the video.

For example, they feed the chocolate bar to a friend whilst getting a massage on the yacht and then go around delivering Feastibles to all the local boats whilst they are in the ocean.

💸 Wish I had some chocolate… and a yacht.

🧐 So, condensing this all into a few useful takeaways you can actually apply:

1. Make sure the copy drives curiosity and leaves some space for your audience to fill in the blank.
2. Don’t be afraid to layer multiple storylines together.
3. Make sure you keep social credibility front and center.
4. Use surprise content that keeps the viewers around longer.
5. Place your product in a way that feels natural and do it quickly.

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💭 CMO chatter (one piece of thinking to help you be a challenger)

📆 This week’s edition of Punchy we had the legend, Barney Worfolk Smith 🦩-Smith join us to answer questions about how to make the most of Cannes as a first-timer and how to survive budget cuts as a startup marketing director. They also discuss the impact of Apple’s Vision Pro, AR/VR strategies, and the retail media gold rush. Check out the full episode below:

Listen 🎧 to this episode on your favorite platform here

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Watch 📺 the full episode here

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