How to Be Heard: Casey Neistat on Marketing’s New Normal

Editor’s Note: The following transcript is from Casey Neistat’s HYPERGROWTH 2018 presentation. It has been edited and condensed for clarity. Ready for HYPERGROWTH 2019? You can preorder tickets here.

In his talk at HYPERGROWTH, Casey touched on the following:

  • The transformation that’s taken place in marketing and media over the last decade. Particularly, in order to be heard, in order to connect or market to someone, you must harness what Casey refers to as the brave new world of media.
  • So what does this brave new world look like? Well, the viewer, whether that’s someone thumbing through Twitter or sitting down in front of their TV, has complete agency over the type of content they consume. 
  • The only real way to break through today is to put content in front of people that they actually want to see. If not, they’ll find a way to tune you out.

Read on for more on how to stand out and be heard in this new world from Casey Neistat.

So, I’m having a baby in like, two weeks. It’s pretty heavy, and I want you guys to know that I seriously considered coming up here and spending like, my whole 35, 45 minute talk just playing videos about my kids and talking about being a parent, but then I figured that would probably be a waste of everybody’s time, so instead, marketing and how to be heard being the theme of this talk, I wanted to share with you not, sort of, any of the prophetic understandings I may have as a marketer because I feel like that would be disingenuous. I work in the world of marketing, and even though I’m mostly known as a filmmaker or as a YouTuber, how I’ve made a living, and I’ve built several businesses around my understanding as a marketer, and the reason why I say it would be disingenuous to share with you some vast understanding is because I don’t have some … I don’t know any real secrets.

Instead, what I have, I think, is a unique path to where I am, now, in the world of marketing. A unique trajectory that took me from an aspiring filmmaker to now being in a position where I’m able to work with brands, work with companies, and have their message be heard by speaking to an audience, and I’ve been able to organically build, and I do describe my trajectory to get there as entirely accidental, and I think that that accidental trajectory just happens to perfectly dovetail with this inflection point that the world of media has been going through in the last decade, and now, in order to be heard, in order to connect with somebody in order to market to someone, you have to be able to harness, in some capacity, that brave new world of media that we all live in, that I accidentally tripped, fell, and dove headfirst into.

So with that, I want to walk you through a little bit of what my career path, very accidental career path, looked like. And I kinda want to start with this understanding of like, you know, when I was first talking to the organizers of the event, and they kept ringing this bell, which was how to be heard, how to be heard, how to be heard, I couldn’t help but to think back to my own childhood, when I first, kind of, struggled to be heard, and when I think of where, like my passion to share ideas and share perspectives came from, it was that childhood.

I’m one of four siblings, and I always say there’s my older brother, who’s the first born, and he’s the most handsome, and then, there was my sister who was the only girl out of four boys, and then there’s me, and then there’s my baby brother, and after my baby brother was born, my dad had the [whistle 00:03:22], which meant there were no more kids. He was the baby, so I was this really, kind of, forgotten accident between the baby and the only daughter, so in order for me to be heard as a kid, I had to scream, and I really think that that is where my, sort of, desire to speak loudly and be heard came from.

So with that, I want to show you guys some videos, some short videos, from my career that I see as real pivot points. Real moments in my career that took me from A to B, and they all have one thing in common, which is every one of them reached an incredibly big audience, and I will the sort of asterisk to that is accidentally. None of these videos were made with the intention of reaching millions of people, but they were all made with the integrity of me wanting to share an idea or a perspective.

This first video I’m gonna show you is three minutes long. It’s a really stupid video, but you guys look a little hot, and maybe like, you’re a little bit dozing off a little bit. Eyes, your head’s kinda down, so this one’s kinda funny, but it’s pretty stupid, and this stupid three minute video that cost me $40 to make maybe had a bigger impact on my career than almost any other movie I’ve ever made, and that’s why I say, and I will forever say that my success in the world of marketing was accidental because I made this movie for one reason. I had something to say. I wanted to be heard. It wasn’t made to exercise a prowess or understanding or some deeper purpose around marketing or political or anything else.

All right, you guys want to see this three minute movie? All right. I guess I’ll take … that was like, kinda, that was kinda light, guys. It’s kinda … okay. Let me. Does anybody see my cursor? There it is. Wait, there it is. Okay. Okay, it’s three minutes long. If you guys get super bored, just go to the bathroom or whatever, okay?

So, look. At its core, that is nothing more than a stupid video, but what that video was was me, just another like, regular guy. I felt like I shouldn’t have gotten that ticket. It turned out I shouldn’t have gotten that. I was improperly ticketed by that police officer, and I had this sort of sense of helplessness. And I felt like, you know, when the cable company screws you over or something, and there’s like, no recourse for action. There’s no way to fix the situation, so I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was share my story in a way that was palatable and funny and stupid enough for me to make a video that I thought was interesting enough to post online. There was nothing more to it than that. It was just my friend and I shooting that video. If we hadn’t broken the bike’s front tire, we would’ve made that video for $10, but it was $30 to fix the rim halfway through the shoot, and that was the total summation of that production. And I posted that online, and this was at a point in time when I had a very small YouTube channel.

This was at a point in time when YouTube was still very young, and that video did, I think it was 5 million views the first day. It did another 5 million views the second day. By the third day, the then mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, had to respond to a question about that video in a press conference as if he didn’t have more important things to focus on, and ultimately, it went on to do a whole bunch of views.

It gave me a kind of attention that I had never had before. It shined a spotlight on what I was doing. It was big. Probably the biggest thing to come out of that is I got a phone call from the New York Times, and they wanted to know if I would make videos for them, and I was honestly in disbelief. I was like, “Wait, are you sure? I’m the guy who crashed the bike into the cop car.” And they, you know, ’cause they’re smart … they said to me, they’re like, “Well, what we saw is you taking a complicated issue, which is the way police in this city address cycling and things like that, and you simplified it in a way that was clearly interesting enough for 10 million people.” And I was like, “Oh, that sounds intellectual and smart. Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant to do.”

In any event, that was the beginning of a multi-year long relationship that I had with the New York Times, which introduced my work to a whole new audience and gave my, lent my videos a kind integrity that I had never had, before. And again, at its core was just me with an honest desire to share a message, something that I actually cared about, and on the other end were all of these things. Again, accidental that I fell into that.

How I Fell Into This

So let me zoom all the way back and give, kind of an abbreviated, a very abbreviated biography of how I fell into this space. I’m a high school dropout. I dropped out of high school in the tenth grade. I lived in a town that’s actually equidistant from Boston and from New York City, so half the kids in my high school wore Yankees hats, and half the kids wore Red Sox hats, and small town. I ran away from home when I was 15 years old, and I knocked up my first girlfriend when I was 15. I had a baby when I was 16. I was on welfare at age 17 living in a trailer park, getting free diapers and milk and money from the government to support my family, and I felt very, very small, and when I talk about being one of four kids and living in a household and feeling like my parents never heard me, I never felt smaller than when I was living in that trailer park. If you are a teenage dad who lives off the state and is fighting against homelessness, no one gives a shit what you think.

That only bolstered my ambition to be heard, and you know, about a year later, I went and visited my big brother, who had just moved to New York City, and he had gotten one of those … you guys remember? There’s a slightly older audience here. Remember the iMac that was like, the funny shaped one, and it came in all those colors. It came out in 1999. Like, the original iMac? That was the first computer you could edit video on that was marketed towards consumers, and my big brother showed me how you could edit video, and I just remember it blowing my mind, and at the time, I was a dishwasher at a restaurant. That’s how I made money, and I saved up. And I took my tax return, and then I took two credit cards, ’cause my limit was like, $200 on each credit card, and all of those things, and I spent every penny I had buying one of these machines. I spent all day, every day making videos about my then baby son, and I fell in love with this process. I fell in love with telling stories, with sharing perspectives and sharing experiences.

Just as a small caveat, how you shared videos, how I shared videos in 1999 was to export from my computer to my camcorder, from my camcorder to VHS, get in my car, drive to people’s houses, make them sit down, put it in their VCR, click play, and then stand there while they watched my videos. That was going viral in 1999. But I fell in love with it, so much so that … and I now, as an old man, as someone who can look back at my career, realize how lucky I was, but it was at that moment that I found my passion. Was at that moment that I fell in love with something. I washed dishes because I had to, not because I wanted to, and all of the sudden, I was investing every free moment I had in making these little videos, so when my baby mama dumped me … by the way, I’ve looked it up. Baby mama is, in fact, a PC term. If you’ve got a more PC term, I’ll take it, but for now, baby mama. When she dumped me, I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do, so my life long dream of moving to New York City, I just put on the fast tracks, and I moved to New York City about six months later.

I moved to New York City with no education, no job, no prospects. I didn’t have any friends. I knew one person who lived in all five boroughs, one person, and I had a place to stay. A sublet for three months, and I had a two year old, but I had saved up $800 bucks, so I had that going for me. And I moved there on an Amtrak train with my iMac and a duffle bag, and the goal was to figure out how to become a filmmaker, and that was it. That was the vision. That was the goal.

How to Become a Filmmaker

You know, ultimately, I found a job being an assistant for an artist. I got paid 10 bucks an hour under the table. Sweet. And what I would do is after my shift was over, I worked in this like, disgusting warehouse. We didn’t have a bathroom. But after my shift was over, I would make videos about his artwork, about his sculptures, ’cause I didn’t have anything else to make videos about. And one day, he busted me. He busted me and my brother, who both worked for him. He busted us making videos ’cause it’s not what we were supposed to be doing. And he was like, “Show them to me,” and we played them back, and he stood over our shoulder, and he watched the videos, and he looked at us, and he was like, “Okay. Look, moving ahead. I don’t want you doing anything but making videos for me.” And we were like, “Oh. Cool, bro. Done.” A beautiful accident.

And that’s what I did. I made videos, and I made videos, and I made videos, and instead of getting 10 bucks an hour, I eventually got 12 bucks an hour, and one thing after another. It was just pure hustle. The first paid gig I ever really had for making videos was one of that artists’ collectors, the guy who … a rich guy who bought his paintings said, “Hey, I need to make a video for my boyfriend for his 50th birthday. Could I use those brothers that make your videos?” And he was like, “Sure.” And it was the first time I had ever, ever in my life been paid to make a video. He hired us to make a video. It was a birthday video. Very exciting. At that birthday, we played the video on the big screen and like, some people came up to us like, “Hey, I really liked that video.” Then, all of the sudden we started to chase down these paths. People were interested.

I’m just gonna cut myself off here on a quick tangent. This is my biography, but if you see the parallels between this story and how marketing, today, works, I just encourage you to hear this bio through that lens, ’cause that’s the lens with which I’m telling it, but it led me from one place to another as the audience grew from just being this artist to just being this art collector, to just being these people at the 50th birthday party.

All the while, I would spend every free minute of my life making these little videos, and I remember, I think it was 2003, I got as a present, the original iPod. Kids, iPod is this thing that before you had smartphones that would play music for you, but it was that iPod, if you guys remember, that had a manual, a physical dial. Remember? It would actually tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Remember that fucking thing? It was 400 bucks. It was like, the most expensive gift I had ever been given. And after I had that for a year and a half, the battery died, and I was really bummed out, so I tried to replace it. I couldn’t figure it out.

I called Apple, and they said, “Look, our policy is to recommend you buy a new battery. We don’t replace it.” And I was so pissed off, I called them back, but I tape recorded the phone call. I put ’em on speaker, and I was like, “Let me just understand this. You don’t replace batteries?” And they were like, “No, sir. We recommend you buy a new iPod.” And I was like, “Okay. Thanks.” And then, I took that audio, and I played that audio under a video of myself going around New York City, and you remember those advertisements of like, the girl dancing in silhouette with the colorful backdrop with the headphones? Remember those things? They were all over every city in America. I went up to every one of those billboards, and much like cigarette advertisements have a warning on the bottom saying, “This will give you cancer,” I put the warning on the bottom of every single iPod poster that said, “iPod’s unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months,” and I made a little video of that, and I posted it online, and it went gangbusters. And this was two and a half years before YouTube was even launched. It was on a splash page. It was on a very simple website that I had a friend build. It went huge.

The Washington Post wrote an article about it, and the term viral video was coined about this movie. It did millions and millions of views. We were on Fox News and BBC and Al Jazeera and NBC and CNN. It was the David versus Goliath story. Steve Jobs got all pissed at me, personally, which is one of the biggest honors of my entire life. And you know, ultimately, it brought all of this attention to my brother and I, and what we were doing and making videos. And again, that is marketing. That was me marketing a perspective or an idea. Again, it happened to come from frustration because up until about my mid-30s, I was pretty angry. I’ve kinda gotten over that, now.

In any event, it did wonderful things that we could have never imagined. It was this accident we could have never foreseen. And that was sort of the name of the game for my first decade in New York City. It was that kind of hustling. Hustling, hustling, hustling. Chasing down each and every avenue so long as it presented me with an opportunity to make more videos.

Ultimately, I met a guy who wanted to do a bigger project with my brother and I. He’d seen some of our small videos, and he said, “Let me produce a feature film.” And we told him frankly, like, “Look. I don’t think we know how to make a feature film, but I know how to make little videos, so just give us enough money to do that for a whole year, and we’ll do something with it.” And this guy believed in us enough to say okay. And that’s exactly what we did. We met with him every six weeks, and we showed him our progress. We made all these movies. Eventually, he brought in a very famous producer. Her name was Christine Vachon, and she saw it, and she was like, “You know what this is? This is a TV show.” So we started to form and patty all of these little videos together into like, a 25 minute structure until it started to feel like a TV show, and at the end of that year, we went and shopped that around. And a lot of places, a lot of outlets saw it, and they had no idea what they were looking at, and they shook their head, and they led us out of the room.

I remember one outlet said, “You know what? Maybe we can put that on our website.” This was 2008, and that was about as insulting as you could get. Putting it on a website. And then, one TV outlet said, “We love this.” And it was HBO, and they ended up buying the show from us for a couple million dollars, and it was the hugest break we could ever imagine. This was a show that my brother Van and I wrote, produced, edited, we starred in, we shot in on our stupid $200 camcorders. We edited it on those same iMacs using iMovie 1.0. It was a purely homemade product that we had made, and because of that, HBO stepped in. They bought it, and they put it on the air.

It was just us doing what we loved doing

Again, it was just us doing what we knew we loved doing. Sharing ideas that we understood well, and that’s how far it took us. The show came out. It was … bombed. So it goes. It was very well reviewed, but nobody saw it. They played it at midnight on Friday nights, and how I think of that now is I imagine my YouTube audience. My YouTube channel does almost 2 million views a day, every single day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and I imagine if my YouTube audience could only watch my videos one day a week, Friday nights at midnight, how small that audience would be. And it was that frustration that really disenfranchised me with television and feature films, and I just wanted to do the one thing I knew how to do, which was make these little videos, and YouTube seemed like the best conduit to put them out there. One of the first videos I made was that bike lanes video, and all of the sudden, it shined this spotlight on my YouTube channel.

Now, in those ten years, I had been lucky enough to get opportunities to direct television commercials, and this is the most traditional means of a creative director, movie director, video director working in the advertising space. You get a concept. You turn that concept into your treatment. They accept the treatment. You deliver storyboards. You show up on set. You direct the video to exactly the specifications that you promised in your storyboard. There is not a lot of margins there to express your creativity, and because of that, I didn’t really thrive. So all at the same time, just 2010, after the HBO show, I started to get a lot more advertising interest, and I had this idea. I said, “What if, instead of me stepping into direct these TV commercials, that the brands are approaching me purely because they like the videos that I make. What if I just make these kinds of videos for these brands?”

I remember the executive producer at the production company that represent me. She said in very condescending but eloquent with her New Zealand accent. She said, “Oh, darling. It doesn’t work like that.” And I stopped working with them right then and there. I sort of ended the relationship, and I decided to go off on my own, and I started to put out there that this is what I wanted to do. And the first company that said, “Okay. Let’s try something. Let’s do something together,” was Nike. Nike’s a sneaker company. They’re out of Oregon. They make great stuff. And they came to me. Nike said, “Hey. Look, we love your videos. We’re about to launch this new product, and would you make some videos around the launch of this product?” I said, “Sure.” And now, given, my YouTube channel was tiny, then. They weren’t reaching out to me because of my reach, which is how influence or marketing works, today. They only wanted to work with me because of the creative.

That process between them coming to me and me making the videos was a tumultuous one, ’cause I had no idea how budgeting works or any of the formalities within that process worked, but I gave them a couple of concepts. They said, “Okay, fine.” I said, “I needed this budget.” They kind of said, “Okay, fine.” And then I went off, and I made the first two videos for them, and they were happy with those videos. They used them. They put them online. They promoted them where they could. They were somewhat effective. I’m very proud of those videos, but they weren’t the iPod video. They certainly weren’t the bike lanes video. They didn’t have the world talking about them, and the deal was for three videos, and those were the first two.

When it came time to make the third, you know, I’m like 100 conference calls into this process, and I’m feeling pretty depleted, and I came up with this idea that was mostly nonsense, but it seemed like a good idea. To me. Only. And Nike, unfortunately, regrettably, gave me the entire budget ahead of time. Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever do that. And I called my editor, who is my good friend Max, and I said, “Max, I have this idea. Here’s what I want to do. They gave us the budget, so instead of making the commercial that we promised them, why don’t we do this thing? And here’s my idea. I’ve always wanted to just go to an airport and buy a ticket on the next flight out no matter where it’s going, and then just go to that place, and then when I’m sick of that place, go back to that airport, and do it again. And let’s just keep doing that, Max, until we run out of money.” And he was like, “Yeah, that sounds cool. What about the Nike commercial?” And I was like, “Oh, we’ll figure it out.”

And that’s exactly what we did. We burned through the entire budget in ten days. We only flew coach. I think if we flew business class, we would’ve probably made it to D.C. or something, but we blew through the whole budget in ten days, and we shot a bunch of stuff, but we weren’t sure what we shot, and we came back, and we had about 45 hours worth of video footage, and we were supposed to deliver like, a three minute video, and it was a lot like showing up in the Sahara looking for a diamond. We were sifting and sifting, trying to find, trying to find. We had no idea what we were doing. And I remember, we missed our first deadline at the launch of the product that Nike was launching. They were supposed to premiere our little video. We didn’t have it done. We missed that. Then, they had this big activation at South By Southwest. We missed that. And then I remember the Nike executive. Amazing guy. His name is Alex Lopez. I called him A-Lo.

A-Lo showed up at my office to check on our progress. Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you realize his office is 3,000 miles away from my office, and I just remember A-Lo kind of standing over our shoulders with his arms crossed looking at the monitor as we’re like, showing him footage like this, and he just had that look that my dad had for my entire childhood. He wasn’t mad at us. He’s just really disappointed in us. And ultimately, he just kinda gave us whatever space we needed, and he was like, “Okay, we’ll just chalk this one up to we tried something, and it didn’t work out.”

Ultimately, we made a video, and we found that video that we were trying to make, and the video was exciting, and it was fun, and it was exactly what we set out to do, and I remember sharing it with Alex, and he said two things to me. First, he said, “I don’t know what this is, but I like it.” And then the second thing he said to me is, “There’s no Nike in this entire video.” I apologized for the second thing, but I wanted to focus on the first thing where he said he liked it, and we put it online, and it went absolutely gangbusters, and I think it was four years or something before it was dethroned as the most watched video Nike had ever released. It was huge. We were on the news to talk about this video. It really, really dominated the internet, and then on television. It was everywhere, and when I think back to the success of that video, I think it was only via that process. Again, accidental process of us falling into this and sharing a story that we really wanted to share, that we were able to find our voice that yielded such a successful video.

Do you guys want to see it?

‘Cause I mean, I really built it up, right? If it sucks, just don’t say anything. Just like, nod your head or whatever. All right, and in the back, play this one really loud, if you can, because this one has good … this one has really good audio. Okay. Okay. Okay, ready? It’s four minutes long.

So, after launching that video, I no longer had to explain what I meant when I said, “Let me take your ambitions as a brand and my ambitions as a creative and figure out how to marry them in a way that yields something organic and reaches an audience. Instead, brands were now pursuing me to do that. And to this day, a lot of the companies that I work with still cite that video, so I credit that video tremendously in accelerating what has been the business of my career as a filmmaker.

The New Normal in Marketing

I started this whole talk off by bringing up this idea that the media landscape has changed in such a tremendous way. Without being platitudinal and saying things that you’ve all heard a million times, there have been shifts and pivots in the last decade that were unimaginable, and the way that I summarize them is that now, the viewer, whether that’s someone thumbing through Twitter on their cell phone, or that’s somebody sitting down in front of their TV with the remote in their hand, the viewer has absolute agency. The individual has absolute agency over what they consume.

I’m 37. When I was a kid, I had Nickelodeon or MTV. That is not agency. That is one of two choices. That’s binary. I had one of two choices as to where I could consume media. Therefore, you could put any stupid TV commercial in front of me, and it would have an impact. That is not the world we live in, anymore. My son, who is now 20 years old … he’s a total rockstar, by the way. He’s an the University of San Francisco, and he’s made Dean’s List the last four semesters in a row. Great kid.

I remember watching him a couple of years ago. This is before social media is what it is today, but I remember watching him at the computer, and he would click play on a YouTube video, and a five second, unskippable pre-roll would come up. And faster than Beethoven’s fingers on a piano would move, he would shift, T, F, which is new tab, Facebook. He would skim Facebook for four and a half seconds. Shift, window, close it back to the YouTube video, and the video would start playing. Meaning he was so trained to skip those five seconds. There was no way you were gonna penetrate his ability to weed out the bullshit. And therefore, the only way to reach him, and he’s not … in this story, he’s not special. He’s not an anomaly. He is the norm. The only way to reach him is to put something in front of him that he actually wants to see. And that’s why I credit that Nike movie with the success that it was. It wasn’t about forcing a product down people’s throats. It was about sharing an idea or perspective than an audience engaged with.

This is the new normal in the world of media, and I think this is the new normal in the world of marketing. And I think that this is the world that we all now have to contend with in order to find success in this space. Is how do we share something that people actually want to see? How do we engage with people in a way that they actually care? And that has been foundation to my career in the last seven years.

You know, I made that video, and it took me on sort of a whirlwind of different directions. I started a production company that was very successful, making just branded content before branded content was the buzzword that it was, today. I was invited to … well, right here to Cambridge, to MIT, in 2014, and for the first time since leaving high school in the 10th grade, I went back to school, and while I was at MIT, I just sat there and looked around, and I realize the power of technology. That seems such like a stupid, simple idea, but I realized it, and immediately after leaving MIT, I went back to New York City, and I started a tech company. I went out to San Francisco and raised a whole bunch of capitol to start a software development company. I built and sold the software development company without ever writing a single line of code. The company was successful in that it had a lucrative exit, and all of our investors made money. The product never really succeeded. The company succeeded even though the product didn’t, and I credit that to really good marketing. I was able to develop a message that resounded with people, that affected people in such a way, that they wanted to be a part of it even if the product wasn’t really ready for prime time.

Through that experience, I learned a lot, but what I learned mostly is that I’m probably better at the marketing aspect than I am at the software development aspect, and since launching my tech company, selling my tech company, I’ve doubled down on what it is that I know the best, which is this idea of communicating ideas and perspectives with big audiences, and sometimes, it has to do with me being upset because my iPod battery is dead, and sometimes, it has to do with selling what was Nike’s failed Fuel Band or whatever FitBit thing that was. Why did they cancel that? It was a really cool product. I made a video about it. Why couldn’t they just see that through?

So it’s taken me on paths I could’ve never imagined. It’s taken on me roads I couldn’t have foreseen, and at its core, it is one very simple idea, which is delivering people something that they actually care about. So I want to end this talk with one last video, and this video is really important to me because after making that Nike video, there was … there’s been really not a lot made like that in the world of advertising or in the world of YouTube before we made that video, but after making that video, it’s all anybody wanted from me.

It didn’t matter if it was a tampon company or anything else. Toilet paper company. They’d call me. They’d be like, “Hey, make us that video you made for Nike.” And eventually, I got really frustrated at that, and I got a call from 20th Century Fox, and you know, one of the biggest movie studios in the world, and they said, “Hey, make us that Nike video.” And I said, “No.” I called them back a few days later, and I was like, “You know what? Yeah. Just go ahead. Send me the budget. That’s what Nike did. They just gave me the budget. Just send me the budget.” And instead of making them a video that was about, sort of, self indulgence and really some, maybe, misguided passion to travel, I did something that was much closer to my heart, and I made a video that was about, maybe, altruism. About charity, and it had nothing to do with the product that they were looking to sell. And that’s the video I want to end with, and again, before I click play, I just encourage you to watch this video, again, thinking of it through the lens of marketing because there is very little about this video that cries of marketing because that wasn’t the intent with this video. This video had nothing to do with selling a product. It had everything to do with selling an idea.

And that remains the only advertising and marketing product I’ve ever done where I actually lost money. I didn’t take a fee, and we ended up putting a bunch of our own cash into that to make it happen.

Guys, thank you very much. This was fantastic. Enjoy the rest of the conference, but I appreciate you having me here.

You can follow Casey Neistat on Twitter here and YouTube here.