The future of agencies, YouTube for brands, and China scene report (pt 1)
The boards are not a mood.
Start an agency, they said
We’re watching a younger generation of savvy marketing, advertising, branding, and design agencies scale up in real-time on social media today.
Because of how fast things are changing—the rise of tools that make coding, development, and design faster and cheaper—and the increasingly global nature of creative talent... agencies that care about results (and aren’t weighed down by the traditional big-agency model) are maneuvering circles around the old incumbents.
In the latest episode of Oren John and Clayton Chambers’ series with Air, we sit down with our agency friends at Darkroom in New York. Oren shares some thoughts from his time as Creative in Residence at Shopify Platinum agency Vaan Group—and we explore what the future of agency operations could look like.
The global nature of future brands (China scene report)
Oren here. I was in China last week for Canton Fair, the yearly massive tradeshow where wholesalers connect with brands around the globe.
250,000 attendees from around the globe came to find new factories for their brands. When we were there, the conversations about tariffs and global considerations for brands, supply chain, and just politics overall were non-stop.
When we hit a temporary pause on the scenario this week, that leaves tariffs from China to the US at a modest 30%, it seemed almost inevitable.
But the conversations along the way had me thinking a lot about the future of brands and their hedges here.
A few notes
Most Chinese suppliers had written off the US market entirely. At the show, if you said you were from the US, the most common response was "Why are you here?"
The Chinese operators had basically written off the entirety of that business and accepted it. While the US people at the show mostly said, "this will be over soon, just give it a few weeks", and they were right.
This is a good indicator of the different approaches to business of the two countries - everything is fluid and will work out in the end, versus acceptance and long-term planning.
Another interesting anecdote comes from how fast Chinese companies were going global. I found an amazing cosmetics supplier, whose booth had a bolted-on sign "now producing in Indonesia".
They had started one week ago, less than a month after tariffs.
My friends at Crease Group were off to Vietnam to finalize a partnership there. My supplier for marble and home goods had worked out a partnership in Thailand.
A specialty activewear provider had their teams on the ground managing facilities to produce for them in Africa.
This change will be permanent. It is becoming easier and easier to find entity structures and agreements that make businesses global, connected by the internet and the never-ending need to hedge against global chaos.
This is happening now on the supply chain side, but it will almost certainly happen on the brand side.
Person Soul
We cruised through the boutiques of Dangshankou, looking at the increasingly well-executed local Chinese brands. They have great-looking stuff and content, but they can't figure out Instagram for their life.
At the same time, the Western brand selling in China can figure out that the play is also doing well. Seeing NARS cosmetics stores in the malls, more and more legit streetwear with Chinese retail, it seems inevitable.
But collaboration will come soon too.
Why wouldn’t popular streetwear collaborate with a chinese team to launch locally. Why wouldn't Chinese brands partner with local teams in Europe or North America to bring their styles there with western teams.
These are all internet kids, raised on the same blogs, following the same creators and designers, deep in the same internet niches, now congregating on the same social networks.
From tech companies to interiors to fashion, there is a world out there that crossed countries.
Workshop your content in LA with us
Oren and the team have been plotting a CUT30 live 2-day workshop for content strategy in LA, where brand social teams and existing personal brands can capture content and workshop their upcoming strategy in a small environment.
Interested? We’re collecting some info here around tentative dates and attendees.
YouTube longform content for brands
Brands that aren't creator brands have a hard time wrapping their head around YouTube.
On one side, it's a place to host tutorials, commercials, and launch videos. On the other side, to succeed with it organically, it's its own extremely particular ecosystem to understand and crack into—completely different than how simple it is to understand and develop a strategy for short form. It's why so many brands haven't done it.
When we partnered with Air on this series, I was mostly excited about it because it was a challenge.
I had spent the last six months getting to 60k on YouTube on my own channel, trying to figure out how to do it while establishing my personality, talking about topics I want to talk about, without getting lost in a singular niche or just repeating a topic that works without developing a full identity that I feel I want to represent on social.
Could we repeat that for a brand? And find B2B customers on there? Going through all the marketing, brand, and media initiatives we'd seen on there... it looked bleak.
Most series were not packaged or made to succeed on YouTube—and failed.
All of the big podcasts on YouTube were getting 95% or more of their views from running ads. No engagement, no community (besides our friends at Sweat Equity, who are a perfect example of a real ratio).
These aren't 100k view videos, but they're 10k view videos speaking EXACTLY to marketing team members that a company like Air is looking for—with good content they would want to tune into again.
So Clayton and I crafted a strategy we felt would work that had a few elements:
strong value to the viewer
topics based on key search volume in the niche (a big part of how I grew as a creator on there as well)
native thumbnail styles that look right for YouTube (we tested a few styles and found a winner)
a format that feels more like a TV episode, and moves fast between segments and people
a focus on topics and conversations that aren't on the internet elsewhere and are too long for shortform
a release calendar that feels like a mini-season—6 weeks in a row of regular releases that feed into each other and reference each other, so when we promote one, we know the others will likely cross into the viewer’s purview
It's an interesting category to play in. There is no agency for brands to turn to for YouTube the way there is for TikTok Shop. The payoff is much different, the play is more complicated—but the results are in the viewership. 30% of my viewers watch my content on their television. I have friends with 60–70% of their viewership there.
The fundamental shift of consumption happened in my household this year. My son prefers YouTube to Netflix. YouTube is now on our TV. I now watch YouTube on the TV. This is part of the broader shift from traditional television to streaming, and then to YouTube as a portion of that—a generational shift from streaming shows on service providers to streaming YouTube series and watching livestreams on Twitch.
The upside of being good at YouTube for brands that want to be dominant in five years is massive. There are no real providers who can actually help. That is a white space for creators, agencies, and brands to jump into and reap real value.
4o