The Value of User Generated Content (UGC) in Advertising | Augie Johnston

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Augie Johnston, CEO of Vidchops. Augie is an ex YouTuber and former professional basketball player, cool, turned entrepreneur. He is currently making waves in the video editing industry as a result of his promising startup called Vidchops. Vidchops assists video creators, influencers, and digital marketers by carrying out the hard work of editing their videos. This allows them to focus more on the content side of their productions to therefore help them create more videos and better videos for their channel or brand. Augie, thank you for joining me today. Augie Johnston: Hey, thanks for having me on. Thanks for the little intro. I'm excited to talk some business. David McBee: Me too. All right, so a lot of the Simpli.fi TV viewers leverage pre-roll videos and streaming television commercials as a part of their advertising campaigns. How important do you think these strategies are in 2023? Augie Johnston: Super important. I'm a big advocate of just online video in general. I think that back in the day, it was hard to create videos. I mean, you had to get the camcorder from Mama and go out there and try to make some kind of video, but now everyone has them on their phones, they're easy to make. And so you can really grow a business through online video at a much cheaper cost than it used to be back in the day. And so I'm a huge advocate for any kind of online advertising, whether you're using video for ads or whether you're using video for a VSL, a Video Sales Letter, you are using video as content. It's really what powers the internet these days. So if you're not creating any kind of videos, I think you definitely should start to consider it. David McBee: Yeah, I think it goes without any... You don't need to do research to know that video is how people are consuming the internet these days, right? Augie Johnston: Exactly. And with pre-roll ads and all that kind of stuff too, there's new opportunities. There's just different kinds of video ads and stuff that are popping up and maybe not super new, the whole pre-roll ads and stuff like that. But a little bit newer, a little bit newer space than some other kinds of online advertising ways. David McBee: True. And especially with streaming TV. But let me ask you this. A lot of advertisers are stuck in a place where they want to do a pre-roll ad, or they want to do streaming television, but they're stymied by strategies for producing those videos. And I understand Vidchop might solve some of those production headaches. So can you tell us about that? Augie Johnston: Yeah, so I would say a lot of people are worried about creating the most professional video. They're like, "Oh, we need to hire this big crew. We need to do all this." Well, I don't agree with that because you could do that. You could spend $100,000 on an ad or $50,000 producing an ad, but then when you release the ad, what if it doesn't convert very well? What you really want to do is be able to iterate on your ads and make changes on the fly. So I don't know if you've heard of UGC, User Generated Content, but these are normally what kind of trending right now, but normally it's kind of the highest converting ads. So these are ads that people are just creating with their smartphone and it's user generated. So let's say you sell, I don't know, let's say you sell a car and you want to make an ad for the car. Well, the best converting ad for that would actually be somebody with their smartphone who said, "Hey, guess what? I just purchased this new car. Look, it has this feature and this feature." That's a great ad that's very low cost. And the cool thing about it is if it doesn't perform that great, you can say, "Okay, let's just re-shoot that." Or, "Let's shoot that in five different ways." And then choose the best performing version of that ad. So for anybody that's kind of nervous about, "Oh, I don't know about the production side, the cost," I would recommend that you try to create a UGC, User Generated Content ad. And then as far as editing and producing it, that's what we do at Vidchops. So we have an affordable solution that could help you do that. David McBee: So what you're saying is an ad made up of a bunch of cat videos that people took on their smartphone, an ad for cat litter would be better than one of those high production versions? Augie Johnston: Definitely, yeah. And you'll see it as far as maybe not pre-roll ads on TV and stuff, but TikTok ads and you're seeing Instagram ads, you're going to start to notice that, I would say, the majority of them are user generated content where it's a customer doing a review or using the product. And that's kind of a direction that you were starting to see ads going. David McBee: That's pretty cool. All right, well, without getting too commercial, why don't you tell us how Vidchops helps solve some of those problems? Augie Johnston: So we're a video editing service for YouTubers mostly. So most of our clients have a content marketing strategy that they're using and they're using video to create content, put it on Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts, Facebook reels. Those are all the vertical video platforms that allow you to create those 9 by 16 tall vertical videos that actually get really good reach in those algorithms right now. So you could go and have a small account, 100 followers, post a vertical video and get 20,000 views on it if it's good content. So we edit those kind of videos. And also more specifically, we edit the wide horizontal videos for YouTube, 10 minute long, people teaching you how to cook some certain recipe. And they're trying to market their recipe book or maybe a product that they have. So those are mostly the clients that we deal with and they're releasing anywhere from four videos a month to all the way to 16 or even 20 videos in a month. And like I said, this is part of their organic content marketing strategy. But we do have clients as well that are agencies, a digital marketing agency who works with a bunch of clients. They run ads, they run Facebook ads, and so they will send us content that we need to edit for a Facebook ad, where they're going to put some ad spend behind it and try to convert people into customers. As far as pre-roll, we've talked a little bit about pre-roll ads on different platforms and stuff. YouTube has pre-roll ads, you got to skip it, or some are non-skippable. So we edit some of those ads and we run those kind of ads on all platforms, all these ads we're talking about as a company, to get leads. For our business, we run those ads as well. So I'm very familiar with the online ad space and I recommend it. Like I said, you could build a multiple million-dollar business really using nothing but videos. It could be the product, the ad, the sales page, it could be the onboarding process, all through online video. So as you can see, I'm a huge advocate. David McBee: Yeah, you're a believer in video, which I am as well, so I'm really glad you came on my show. Augie Johnston: Yeah, yeah. And one thing I'll mention about is I got started in 2009 on YouTube making videos. So it's kind of led me down this whole path and I've seen all the changes with the platforms and just how people have gotten creative to use video to make money for their business. So it's a cool industry. David McBee: Awesome. Well, I have one more question for you I'd like to ask all of my guests. Do you have a mentor or a podcast or a book that you feel has helped you become successful? Augie Johnston: Yeah. So as far as a mentor goes, when I was about 16 years old, I started lifting weights with an older fellow. He was probably about seven or eight years older than me. And I would hang out at his apartment every now and then, just as friends. And he was a digital marketer, so he's the one that kind of mentored me and got me into it. He was making, I remember $30,000 a year doing affiliate marketing. He had a full-time job. He had just a great life. But that was the first time I learned about it. So he's mentored me through it. But as far as books go, the thing that inspired me to start Vidchops is a book called The Seven-Day Startup by Dan Norris, and it's one of my favorite books. Another good book is Traction by Gino Wickman. And I forgot the last part. You asked, what was it? Book? Mentor? David McBee: Or podcast. Augie Johnston: I do have a podcast. It's called the Video Creator Podcast. It talks all about YouTube and content creation. David McBee: Yeah, that's kind of how I found you, so you're doing good work over there. Augie Johnston: Thank you. David McBee: Well, Augie, thank you so much for being on Simpli.fi TV with me. Augie Johnston: Yeah, thanks for having me on. David McBee: Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simply.fi. Thank you for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.