At VidCon this year, Apple was reportedly in talks with a few popular YouTube channels, suggesting the possibility of an advertising campaign collaboration between the Cupertino-based company and YouTubers like Louis Cole and Wong Fu Productions. Similar to Apple’s experimentation with advertising the iPhone 5c on Tumblr, a move to partner with well-known YouTubers with subscribers numbering in the millions could help attract a younger-skewing audience for Apple.
Specifically, Louis’ channel “FunForLouis” has just north of 1.5 million subscribers, while Wong Fu Productions has about 2.5 million. Louis made his partnership with Apple known in a video posted in early August, detailing a meeting at Apple HQ in San Francisco, which was instigated earlier in the summer at VidCon, the yearly conference for YouTube creators in Anaheim. Louis remains understandably silent on the specifics of the meeting in the San Francisco vlog, but does confirm he and Apple will be collaborating on something together in the future.
“Well guys, that was an exciting, but very long meeting. We ended up going for some food and drinks and stuff in a bar, but turns out I’m going to be doing some stuff with Apple. They don’t work with many people, but we’re going to be doing some stuff together, which is exciting. I can’t tell you more than that.”
Wong Fu Production’s potential connection with Apple comes from a report out of Ad Week, suggesting that the sketch comedy channel was “paired” with Apple at VidCon in a sort of speed-date set up by the conference. Far less of an official meeting between the two as Louis Cole had, there’s still the potential that Wong Fu could see a similar partnership with the company as Louis’ channel. The style of videos differ drastically between Louis and Wong Fu, with the former presenting a detailed travelogue of his various adventures around the world, and the latter publishing straight-forward comedic skit and parody videos.
Although their styles don’t mesh together, Apple could be creating a new ad campaign, possibly for the upcoming “iPhone 6s” and “iPhone 6s Plus,” that centers on creatives from YouTube using the company’s new products as the main tools for shooting, editing, and publishing content for their channel. Even though FunForLouis and Wong Fu Productions aren’t even close to the most popular channels on the site (the top 100 range in descending order from 38 million to 6 million subscribers), if Apple keeps partnering up with distinctive channels, it could create an interesting, idiosyncratic ad campaign.
