Dog Breath, Poop, Bitcoin, and YouTube: My 2013 in Review

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One year ago my wife and I both had strong feelings that 2013 was going to be a year of transition. Our feelings were right. Beyond moving and having baby number two, here is my 2013 professional life rolled up into one post:

JANUARY:

Utah Business Week

The PR team at Orabrush somehow convinced Utah Business Magazine to put my mug on the cover. This cover is very valuable to me… and my grandparents show their copies to everyone.

FEBRUARY – ORAPUP LAUNCHES

We sold over $1 million dollars of Orapups using a hairbrush with an OXO handle and a bunch of Orabrush bristles glued to it (look closely at the video below):

Orapup gave us two record breaking quarters in the first quarter of this year!

APRIL TO PRESENT – #BITCOIN

My oldest brother Theron approached me about a great idea. He was recruiting a team for a documentary film about bitcoin. That same day Austin Craig said he would be interested. Lucky for us Beccy, his bride-to-be, was also down. I wrote and directed the Kickstarter video. We raised the funds on Kickstarter. Beccy and Austin were the world”s first couple to live on bitcoin for 101 days and they literally traveled around the globe. The film “Life On Bitcoin” will be completed in 2014.  It is going to be fantastic.

AUGUST – THE HARMON BROTHERS LEAVE ORABRUSH

It seemed like just yesterday Neal and I were in Bob Wagstaff’s house forming Orabrush Inc. That first year I was “CEO” (really Neal and I were running the company together). Neal had been the backbone of Orabrush but I had always had the opportunity to be the face. 3.5 years later it was time to move on to another opportunity. We were going from tongue gunk to poop.

SEPTEMBER – WE REBRAND POO~POURRI

DECEMBER – ANNOUNCING VIDANGEL

VidAngel is founded by 4 Harmon brothers: Neal, Daniel, Jordan, and myself (there are 6 Harmon brothers in case you were wondering). After spending 3 years working on YouTube we were CRAVING a way to control our experience better.  I get so tired of cleavage thumbnails and rampant profanity and vulgarity on YouTube. Not just that, but YouTube now allows nudity and sex in some circumstances. In 2012 we started working on VidAngel at nights.

There is ClearPlay, their DVD player filters out sex, profanity, and violence on DVDs. I am a customer. But they have been around for 15 years and they are like a dinosaur with technology. After all these years they were acting like a monopoly and they need some good healthy competition. Also we needed a solution for streaming, so that is the problem we set out to solve with VidAngel.

After over a year of stealth mode we should be launching in early 2014. Our goal is to not only give people control over their movie streaming experience, but also over ALL of YouTube. Imagine being able to let your kids get on YouTube without ever needing to worry about them stumbling across an F-word? 

INTERESTED IN HIRING HARMON BROTHERS?

I just went into my blog comments and I had over 250 comments asking me for help on their businesses. We don’t do a lot of service agreements or consulting, but we take them on when we have extra time. After plowing through the comments we decided to create HarmonBrothers.com. Just go to HarmonBrothers.com/contact to let us know you are interested in work!

VidAngel.com – Imagine YouTube WITHOUT F-Words Or Cleavage Thumbnails…

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Imagine if you could browse YouTube without ever hearing the F-Bomb, or seeing another stupid cleavage thumbnail? VidAngel is on a mission to make that possible.

VidAngel is an idea that my brothers and I had about a year ago when we were still at Orabrush. Why had no one had built a browser app plugin that would filter out sex, nudity, swears, and graphic violence on streaming video? We decided it was a problem we wanted to solve.  A year later, and a lot of long nights, long talks with legal teams, and saving up cash, we just went public with VidAngel. VidAngel mutes profanity and skips sex, nudity and violence right while you are watching your online video.

 

Clean up all of Hollywood

(thousands of filters coming):

Our first goal is to clean up every TV show and Movie available on Google Play.

Eventually we want to do the same for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vudu and others, but VidAngel is starting with Google Play because it has a good selection (including new releases) and we understand how to use Google for marketing better than anyone (see 18 million views on our Orabrush ad, 7 million views on Orapup, and 19 million views on our PooPourri ad).

Clean up all of YouTube

(hundreds of thousands of filters coming):

If you are a member of the VidAngel community  you will be able to use your VidAngel app to filter any video on YouTube for your kids, adjust filters that others have created, and have access to the entire communities filters for FREE. Think Wikipedia for YouTube filters. Our goal is to have every popular YouTube video filtered so you don’t run into soul destroying landmines while enjoying YouTube.

YouTube has always attracted foul mouthed vloggers. R-rated language is common.  But more recently YouTube has started to allow nudity and sexual content onto the site. Traditionally YouTube has not been known for family friendliness.

There are over 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.  YouTube is now more popular than Facebook with teenagers. YouTube and Netflix account for over half of the Internet’s traffic.  There are loads of great Internet filters out there that make the web a more family friendly place, but we want to provide an option for YouTube.

Google Chromecast can Stream VidAngel to your TV

With the launch of Google Chromecast, our timing couldn’t be more perfect. Right now we are giving away a FREE Google Chromecast when you sign up for VidAngel.

 

 

 

Greatest Measure Designed to Maintain & Strengthen the Family

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No law in history has strengthened RELIGION more than the First Amendment. Perhaps it is time to design protections modeled after the first amendment to protect MARRIAGE.

 

QUESTION: What is the greatest measure ever taken to maintain and strengthen the positive impacts of religion on society?

ANSWER: The first amendment to the United States Constitution.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The irony is that the first amendment is religion’s great protector because it explicitly removes government’s power over religion. No protection in history has had a greater impact to strengthen religion than the first amendment—I am a Mormon, and we barely survived conception even with the first amendment in place, and we would have certainly died without it.

QUESTION: So, what is the greatest government measure we could ever design to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society?

Perhaps we need to design protections modeled after the first amendment explicitly removing the government’s role in defining or making laws regarding the establishment of families (marriage).

_______________________________________________________________

I wrote this while I was thinking about the call from our living prophets in the Family Proclamation. It is just a thought I wrote in my journal tonight, and decided to publish it to my blog.

“WE CALL UPON responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.”

All extreme sports businesses should be on YouTube

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YouTube is probably the single most effective marketing tool for anyone who has a product or service connected to extreme sports. Don’t believe me? Check out the examples below:

Devin Graham, my old roommate and the guy who shot the original Bad Breath Test for Orabrush, released this video two days ago. It is a promo that he did for JetLev (a ridiculously awesome water jet pack). The video will hit a quarter million views tonight and I expect it to end up with well over a million views. I want to see them do a documentary style video on the story of JetLev (like the one Devin did for Orabrush).  At $100K a pop, you might think that the YouTube audience is not the JetLev target demographic, but I believe JetLev is comparable to SegWay and it will be most used as a rental for tourists. YouTube is the perfect crowd.

GoPro gets it. They are releasing a couple of videos a week. Not only are their videos naturally viral in nature, but they are promoting them with ads as well, raking in tens of thousands of subscribers to their YouTube channel. They could get even more subscribers if they just asked for them, but GoPro is still blowing away their competitor Contour who doesn’t get YouTube.

Guns and Gear, a hack guns dealer in Georgia, started a YouTube channel one year ago. A white trash guy, with a foe Russian accent, profanes as he blasts targets with high-powered assault rifles. I am not a fan, but someone loves it because their videos have been viewed 62 million times and they are the fastest growing YouTube channel in the past 30 days. That kind of growth fills me with envy.

This is one of my favorite videos this month. Tempest Freerunning Academy just released this video to promote their new parkour training gym. I have watched the video at least 4 times.

Moral of the story: if you have a business in extreme sports without a YouTube strategy, then it is time to invest.

iPad 2 PUNKED (Parody)

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On March 2nd I was watching the iPad 2 video intro and this video concept came to my mind. I have several ideas everyday but this one stuck. Luckily I had the team to pull it off. It wasn’t as timely as I would have liked because we had to wait for the iPad to come out on Friday at 5pm.  I got the last iPad available at Verizon.

We asked Chris Hansen to do the make-up. Austin Craig played each of the parts. Dave Ackerman and Austin Craig wrote it. It took two days of shooting simply because of the hours needed to change the makeup.


At least 500 YouTubers are now making their living on YouTube alone

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This brought tears to my eyes. Shaytards story is very inspiring. They paid off about $195k in debt in 4 years.  This family is making several hundred thousand dollars a year on YouTube!

YouTube is just getting started. Even though YouTube hasn’t yet been recognized in the same way, their growth resembles Facebook’s growth. If my calculations are correct then I can safely estimate that at least 500 channels on YouTube have already created full-time jobs. Orabrush’s YouTube channel alone has been the source of over 14 jobs.  I LOVE IT.

Social Marketers should attend VidCon 2011

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We attended VidCon 2010 and we will be going again this year. VidCon inspired a lot of the “Diaries of a Dirty Tongue” series that was recognized as a top social media campaign in 2010 in AdAge’s “Book of Tens”.   Last year, VidCon was completely sold out for attendees, BUT Orabrush was one of the only brands at the conference. This year it is going to be a lot more crowded. I predict that by 2012, it will be packed with every major brand.  If you haven’t put it on your calendar, get it in now.

Here is the first video we did for “Diaries of a Dirty Tongue”. It was about VidCon2010:

Interview with Rick Mathieson (part 1 and 2)

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Last week I had an Interview with Rick Mathieson. Here are the LINKS:

INTERVIEW: ORABRUSH CMO JEFF HARMON ON THE SECRETS OF A SOCIAL MEDIA SENSATION (PT. 1)


INTERVIEW: ORABRUSH CMO JEFF HARMON (PT 2) – A ‘DIRTY TONGUE’ GOES VIRAL

Rick Mathieson is an award-winning writer, author, speaker and frequent media commentator on marketing in the digital age.

Heralded as “a strategic marketing expert” by Harvard Business School”s Working Knowledge, his insights on postmodern marketing have been featured in ADWEEK, Advertising Age, Wired, Forbes and on MSNBC, CNN Radio, CBS Radio and NPR.

His research into next-generation business models has earned praise from USA Today.

6 YouTubers Every Marketer Should Follow

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This week Rick Mathieson (Author of The On-Demand Brand) asked me in an interview what kind of advice I could give to fellow marketers to help them understand YouTube.

MY ADVICE:  BECOME A YOUTUBE JUNKY.

If you are average, you watch 4 hours of TV per day, but only 15 minutes of YouTube. At Orabrush, we watch a LOT of YouTube :) That’s right, we are paid to watch YouTube everyday—infact, my wife and I don’t even have a TV.

To help you begin your YouTube addiction, I’ve put together a short list of YouTubers that are on the bleeding edge. I am subscribed to each of them (and many more) and I believe any marketer worth his salt will have these channels in their sub box on YouTube:

RhettandLink

This music video promoting pillows has had over 3.4 million views since Sept of last year:

In my opinion, Rhett and Link are thought-leaders in integrating brands on YouTube. Their work in pioneering branding on YouTube has got them recognized by Wired, AdAge, Adweek, The Huffington Post, and others—in my opinion, they deserve much more attention for what they have done.

Tobuscus

Tobuscus is a favorite at Orabrush. Here is a promo he did for Zelda (it has almost 1 million views):

Tobuscus has a similar model to RhettandLink. He is building his YouTube channel around ads. Orabrush is shooting a video with Tobuscus this month. Stay tuned for an update.

WheezyWaiter

At Orabrush, we have chosen to work with WheezyWaiter (Craig) three times (here, here, and here). He has also worked with Ford and been in AdAge. Craig’s channel has the most loyal following of any YouTuber I have seen.

MysteryGuitarMan

This video showcasing Guaraná has over 2.7 million views:

MysteryGuitarMan is a mix of video editing and music. Getting your product placed on his channel is more than most small brands can afford.

Freddiew

This video has over 3 million views:

Although Freddiew has done a commercial with MysteryGuitarMan for Garnier Fructis the real reason I am including him is so you can see what kind of video effects are possible without a budget.

Juicystar07 & Allthatglitters21

Beauty gurus are the hottest thing on YouTube. Blair & Elle are near the top. If your product falls in their domain, theirs is a subscription must. We sent both of these YouTubers Orabrushes to review. When Blair did her review, her fans crashed our servers, sending us more online traffic than the stories done by Nightline or the NYTimes combined!