The WimLex Show #5
Spryker & Dept present you the Hottest International Podcast Series about all Things E-Commerce
Dad channels with Jordan Watson, creator of ‘How to DAD’
Having amassed over 220 million views for his ‘How to DAD’ parenting channel, Jordan is now followed by over two million people on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. The father of three from New Zealand started out three years ago with a video which became an overnight viral sensation; this early success spurred him and his wife on to start making regular weekly videos. He now has two instructional books on the market and cooperates with a range of brands. In this podcast, Alex and Willem take a peek behind the scenes of influencer life and find out about the various possibilities for commerce.
“Even I was like: ‘I have merch’?’”
03:10
Alex: Usually, we invite people onto our show who sell products. Here, you are the product – you and the babies! I guess you need to have one every year so that you’ve got all the different sizes for your video. The two things we’re interested in here are data and commerce. First off: is ‘How to DAD’ something you can really monetarize?
Jordan: When we started, it was all a bit of fun. We didn’t have a plan to become a massive business. Yet within a few months, we’d already had one or two videos go massively viral – I’m talking 25 million views worldwide! That’s when your inbox starts filling up with e-mails from people wanting to work with you, so I decided to find an agent to help me: I just had no idea what making a video and putting on my page was worth.
One of the first paid videos we did was ‘How to fly with a baby’, sponsored by our local carrier Air New Zealand. They got in contact because they wanted to do a video with me and, working with my agent, we were able to put a price on that. They paid a certain amount for me to brand-tag them on my Facebook page and there’s also some subtle signage for them in the video. Apart from that, I just did it in my own style. As a corporate sponsor, they didn’t have any script input, but more brands started contacting me nonetheless and it became a thing.
A lot of people think that, as a YouTuber with a million views, you must be a millionaire! But YouTube monetisation doesn’t pay out as well as everyone thinks it does.
Alex: Yes, the last figures I read were around $1000 for one million views.
Jordan: Right, so you can’t quit your day-job off the back of that. And for me, my Facebook page is much bigger than my YouTube channel – annoyingly, because you can’t monetise Facebook as well. I think that’s changing – Facebook Watch lets you insert ads halfway through – but for years, YouTube was considered the one you could make money from.
For me, I average around NZ$400-500 per YouTube video, which would definitely not have been enough to leave paid employment. What we worked out was that Facebook was where you can grow your brand, and the more eyeballs I got on our page there, the more companies saw that there was something in what we were doing. I now do ‘How to DAD’ full-time and the biggest money-maker is working with brands.
6:40
Willem: Something I’m sure lots of our listeners are dying to know: what is your secret recipe for making a successful viral video?
Jordan: That’s the funny thing: I never sat down and came up with a recipe. I’ve been doing these videos regularly for two and a half years now, and to this day, there are videos where I think “This is great!” – and then it does alright. Then there are videos which I think are bad – or, well, average – and they end up being some of my biggest ever.
What we have learned is that there are two types of videos. One of the ‘How tos’ I did was ‘How to put a baby to sleep’ and played 10 different roles of various types of dad personalities. That makes it highly tag-able because people can post it to their friends and say “Look! You’re that kind of dad that hops in the cot and tries to cuddle it to sleep!” Or “You’re the dad that rocks them”. Or the “Shhhshhh!”-dad. That is a very share-able video.
Then there are the ‘one-beat’ videos. So in one about how to make a go-cart for a kid, I taped a bicycle to a recycling bin that had wheels. That’s all it is! A very Kiwi approach, a lot of DIY. It only has that one element in it, though, so it doesn’t have the same potential to be shared as something with ten different dad personalities. So it’s the ‘dad personality’ videos that do better, and I know that, but I can’t do them every week because they take much more time to make; and I still like my one-beat videos, too. ‘How to build a tree hut for a kid’ is one of my favourites; it didn’t do as well as all the others, but I love it.
(Jordan explains how the video reflects the New Zealand mentality and stresses that he still makes videos just for enjoyment, given that viral success can’t be planned anyway. Asked by Willem whether he has an acting background, Jordan explains how his affable, rural Kiwi on-screen persona is drawn from real life and how he learned to impersonate stereotypes around him.
He draws a distinction between his low-key, bloke-ish approach and the excessive enthusiasm of standard-issue YouTubers – “Hey guys!” He starts every video with a mumbled “Ah yeah, g’day, welcome to this instructional video on…” and ends it with an attempt to get a high-five from his kids (with varying degrees of success) and the line “No kids were harmed in the making of this video.” These stock beginnings and endings structure the video and are popular with regular viewers.)
12:30
Alex: Your story reminds me in a way of JP Sears. Rather than his online videos, his shows, which he publicises through Facebook, are actually becoming his main income stream. Could you see yourself going on stage (with or without kids)?
Jordan: It’s an option that I’m very much aware of, yes. I mean, I’ve quit my job now, this is my full-time thing, so we’re thinking about what else we can do with it. When I say “we”, by the way, I mean my wife and I. A year ago in New Zealand, I got asked to do a TEDx talk, and that opened the gateway for me to do more public appearances. I suddenly realised that I had another string to my bow and that I was now a “professional” speaker (emphasis on the quotation marks at this stage, though!).
That became a thing, so I got invited to speak a lot in New Zealand – and now here I am in Amsterdam having just done a twenty-minute talk at the Dept. Festival. We’re looking to start a tour in New Zealand to answer the number-one questions I get asked every time I speak: “How did you get started?” “What camera do you use?” “How do you schedule social media posts?” “How do you run your Instagram page?” So we’re going to do 90-minute talks about my story where I give the audience insight into how I do what I do (although it might not work for everyone). So that’s a new income stream.
Alex: Apart from brand sponsoring and tours, what about merchandise?
Jordan: So merch’ is something we do, although it can be annoying in the YouTube/social-media environment because every single person whose even got a tiny bit of a following is always plugging merch’! But I got asked by a New Zealand company whether I wanted to do a product range, and right now, I’m wearing a bush shirt that has a ‘How to DAD’ logo. We had merch’ for about six months, but I never saw it as a money-maker, rather as something that was quite funny. People were like: “You’ve only just started and you have merch’?” And even I was like: “I have merch’?”
The issue with it was that the company was a small Kiwi set-up and that my largest following is in America: New Zealand is at the bottom of the world, and so people were buying a t-shirt for $30 that then cost almost the same price to ship! I was getting lots of awkward e-mails from people saying “I’d love to buy your products, but it’s so expensive to ship it…” So I pulled the plug on it. It wasn’t a big loss, though.
Alex: Wouldn’t it make sense for a company selling diapers to brand it with you, though? After all, you influence young families.
Jordan: It would, and I’ve pitched that precise idea a few times. So if anyone listening is out there in the nappy game, get in touch! I have this very cool, tech-savvy genius idea – and I’m not going to explain what it is – that will get more dads changing diapers. Thus far, no-one’s jumped on board, though!
(Alex asks, hypothetically speaking, how much a company making nappies or babygrows would need to pay to get products in Jordan’s videos. At first, Jordan deflects the question by going into detail about what kind of endorsements he offers: subtlety is key, with no cheesy lines like “Oh, I love this X!” The most important thing for companies is the Facebook brand tag. If he can’t integrate the company into a ‘How to DAD’ video, Jordan offers to make straight-out, tongue-in-cheek over-the-top infomercials instead and describes an example of this format in detail. What YouTube and Facebook users hate, he says, is not being told upfront that what they are watching is sponsored, as Casey Neistat found out with his Samsung ad.)
20:30
Alex: But can you give me a price range here? I’m just getting into all this Instagram and influencer stuff and finding out how expensive it is for brands…
Jordan: That depends on what company you are. We know that Air New Zealand aren’t short of a dollar or two, whereas a small start-up company is something different. For us, a ball-park figure is NZ$10-15,000 for a brand tag video. Now, that not might seem like much, but I’ve been to YouTube conferences in Australia and America where they talk about prices, and there’s no way you’d ever get that in New Zealand. There were people in America with the same numbers of followers as me getting $40-50,000 per video. That’s mind-blowing!
Willem: You mentioned in your talk that you are going to air a YouTube series. How will that differ from your regular videos?
Jordan: It was pretty cool. Google teamed up with the government-funded organisation “New Zealand On Air” (they support the production of films and TV shows in the country). Four YouTubers with a certain amount of followers or more were to receive $100,000 to create web series with a story arc. So we submitted an idea, got funding, and made it with a full TV crew.
23:30
Alex: One thing I forgot to ask: is there a team behind your videos, i.e. for cutting, editing?
Jordan: No! My wife is my sounding board, if you will. She tells me if she thinks I’m going to cross the line (“You can’t show yourself accidentally dropping a baby!”). But as mentioned earlier, I signed up to an agency for us “social media influencers”, as I believe we’re called, quite early on. So when brands come to us, I forward them on to the agency to talk money. Ideas, filming, editing, posting: I do all of that myself.
When I started two and half years ago, I didn’t have a plan. I created a YouTube channel and a Facebook page and posted the video on both channels at the exact same time. Facebook went crazy – I now have 1.7 million followers there – whereas YouTube has been a slow burner, with about 250,000 subscribers. Thinking about it, it makes sense: every parent has Facebook, whereas YouTube is that bit younger. Facebook parents don’t care about YouTubers. So my audience is really on Facebook. I’m on YouTube to grow, and they’ve been telling people to post content more frequently, so I’m now up to putting up three videos a week there.
Alex: Do you have enough ideas to do that?
Jordan: Oh yeah, I’ve got a wall at home where I put up the post-it notes on which I scribble down all those brainwaves you have in the middle of the night, in the shower, etc.
(Jordan describes some of the shorter-format extras he develops for YouTube, before Alex asks the $64,000 question: do Jordan’s kids like being on video? Jordan talks about how he makes sure his kids are in the mood to be filmed – it’s a timing issue – and how he scripts parts of the shows; nevertheless, the spontaneous moments are the best bits of the videos. Currently, his two eldest are fighting over who gets to be in which videos. Willem wants to know how Jordan’s wife feels about it. She never wanted to be on camera, answers Jordan, and everyone wants to know who ‘How to MUM’ is. Her elusive Instagram page has a quite a following despite her invisibility. Jordan goes on to muse about the difference between clock-on, clock-off employment and running your own business with creative control. Now he understands why entrepreneurs work so hard. The point has now come, he concludes, returning to his children, where he has begun weaning his eldest daughter off the videos. He doesn’t want them to grow up as “YouTube stars” who get recognised everywhere they go. Lots of YouTube parenting channels have been taken down in the last six months following controversy, he adds, but he stands by ‘How to DAD’ as a positive body of work.)
30:05
Alex: Do you ever get e-mails from child protection organisations?
Jordan: Rarely, but there’s nothing controversial in the videos. The only one I did get a lot of negative reactions to was ‘How to wash a baby in the sink’. A lot parents do wash their new-borns in the bathroom or kitchen sink, you know, but I had some fun and made a joke along the lines of “Next time you’re washing up, no need to worry about running extra water, just plop your baby in…” So I pretended to be scrubbing my baby with a washing up brush along with a pile of dirty dishes. She had a fun time, but I got a lot of people saying “I’m gonna get this video taken down!” or “I’m contacting Mark Zuckerberg”!
I’m so lucky with my audience, though. There is a lot of trolling on the internet, but for 99% of my content, I never get any trolls. With that washing-up video, I didn’t have to comment myself, because my followers were posting saying “You know this guy isn’t being serious, here, right?” A few people can’t take a joke, but I always hope that most will catch on to the humorous side of it quickly enough. And, overall, we have very few complaints.
Alex: I can think of lots of monetisation strategies for you – the easiest one being to move to the US! But I can see that that would be a difficult decision. So what have you got planned for 2019? Is there anything you’re really excited about? Maybe ‘How to MUM’ will get some sponsoring deals…?
Jordan: We’re always open to new ideas. I’ve quit my day-job, we have kids, and we don’t own our own home, so…
Alex: What was your day-job?
Jordan: Behind the scenes in television building props. That helped because I had a basic knowledge of things like focussing a camera, editing footage. So when that first video went viral, it all came together because I had some production and editing skills.
But we’re always open to new ways of making money. A lot of YouTube followers will be like “No, man, just do it for the fun!” – but I’ve got kids! This is fun for me, but I’ve got to do what I can to make a living out of it all the same. I’m not going to be a sell-out and we only work with brands who align with what we want to do.
Willem: Have you ever said no to a brand?
Jordan: Yes. One example is an Australian brand with a GPS unit for hiking – and they were offering double the figure I mentioned above. But I asked them how they thought we could do a hiking-related how-to video and it just didn’t work: “How to go hiking in the mountains with your baby and a GPS unit”? I can more or less tell within the first five minutes of a company contacting me whether it’s going to work or not. So, no word of a lie, we’ve said no to over 10, maybe 20 brands: they all want to pay the normal price, but they just don’t fit (i.e. the product is wrong – like alcohol – or we just can’t make a successful video with it).
I’m very aware that you make one wrong move, and your empire comes tumbling down! Just one post of me yelling at my kid in the street, and I’m done. So we have to be conscious of what we do.
Alex: Are there a lot of copycats – like ‘How to UNCLE’ or ‘How to GRANDPA’?
Jordan: I love getting e-mails from people who, in a really round-about way, are trying to tell me that they’re imitating my concept. “Hey! I’m a dad and I’m not ripping off your content, but I wanna start something – check out this video!” And then you look at it and it’s so obvious: “Hi, I’m Michael and welcome to my how-to video on…” Because they’re new and they’re so excited about it, though, I just say: “Go for it, mate!”
(Jordan explains that he too has been accused of plagiarism simply for having the words “how to” in his name because of ‘How to basic’. He goes on to mention his two bestselling book as an additional source of income in addition to public speaking – something which he is, despite residual stage-fright, starting to feel more comfortable with. ‘How to DAD’ parenting stand-up is a concept he is toying with while pitching new TV shows – without the kids. He doesn’t want to do ‘How to TEENAGERS’. The most popular video he did last year – ‘How to support your wife through pregnancy’ – didn’t even feature his wife.)
