YouTube Stars Try Next Stage

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Taking Shot: Jack and Jack perform for the crowd at Fullscreen’s Intour production at Pasadena’s convention center.

Before British boy band One Direction took the stage on a recent blisteringly hot Saturday night in Pasadena, another group of stars commanded the attention of some 3,000 screaming teenage girls in the city’s convention center.

The hysteria came during an all-day festival called Intour, the first foray into live entertainment for Fullscreen, a three-year-old Culver City multichannel network founded by former Google Inc. executive George Strompolos that now bills itself as a “global youth media company.”

Intour brought together more than a dozen popular young YouTube stars in an effort to transform their online video shtick into a live music, dance and comedy showcase, all with a heavy dose of audience interactivity, both in person and on social media.

As soon as any of the performers stepped foot on stage, the decibel level of the 55,000-square-foot exhibit hall reached ear-piercing levels, evoking memories of crazed fans on MTV’s “Total Request Live” or an earlier generation’s Beatlemania.

So what type of talent, exactly, is driving the fame of these YouTube video creators, some of whom earn more than $1 million annually from ad revenue and brand deals?

“They’re not famous for a specific thing,” said Ryan Detert, chief executive of West Hollywood’s Influential Network, which connects brands with these young Internet-made celebrities, dubbed social media influencers, including some of Fullscreen’s talent. “They’re famous for a connection.”

And those connections are getting stronger. An August survey released by entertainment trade publication Variety found that YouTube stars are now more popular than mainstream Hollywood actors among American teens.

It is that strong connection that Fullscreen plans to capitalize on as it seeks to create additional revenue streams beyond YouTube. Tapping into the $5 billion North American concert industry is one of those goals.

“We look at Intour as an intellectual property,” said Larry Shapiro, a former agent at Creative Artists Agency in Century City who now serves as Fullscreen’s head of talent. “It’s built to scale. This is an asset we can take on the road.”

Test flight

Though these tours are still building momentum, Fullscreen isn’t carving entirely new ground. In 2011, Mountain View’s DigiTour Media, backed by investors including Ryan Seacrest and New York media powerhouse Advance Publications, created a similar tour.

For its part, Fullscreen is betting that its roster of more than 50,000 video creators will create nearly endless possibilities for a wide variety of themed shows – and revenue streams.

The Pasadena show earlier this month was the first step in that process; the company would not say if the effort turned a profit.

“If you build a jetliner,” Shapiro said, “you want to take it on a test flight first.”

General admission tickets cost $42, while an $80 ticket also bought admission to VIP meet-and-greets with the stars. A $150 ticket gained entry to Intour’s after-party, for which it struck a sponsorship deal with Taco Bell. Fullscreen officials said after the event that Intour nearly hit its 3,000-person capacity. While he declined to offer a breakdown of how many tickets were sold in each price tier, Shapiro did note that the more expensive ticket allocations sold out. Fullscreen did not disclose how much it spent to produce the show.

Detert, whose company also hosts events for influencers, estimated it cost Fullscreen in the low- to midsix figures to stage the production. He’s confident that more tickets could be sold for future events across the United States.

“This is something that can be scaled across multiple venues,” he said. “They can probably ramp it up to tens of thousands of kids.”

Personal connection

One of those thousands is 13-year-old Vanessa Brownlee of Pacific Grove in Monterey County. The night before the show, she and friend Julia Mueller, also 13, made the six-hour drive to Pasadena with their parents, who were in attendance, too. The group also had tickets to see One Direction that night.

Brownlee and Mueller are smack in the sweet spot of Fullscreen’s target demographic and, perhaps realizing the limitations as well as the benefits of that core group, the company gave free admission to parents accompanying their kids to Intour. Many of the adults lounged on beanbags in the convention center hallway; some were glued to smartphones just like their kids inside, who were busy posting Instagram photos of stars playing musical chairs and battling it out in lip-syncing contests. Other adults chose to hide from the madness in the parents-only lounge while sipping $12 cocktails.

Brownlee and Mueller’s favorite star is 18-year-old Jenn McAllister, who goes by the online moniker JennXPenn and has more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.

“I love her pranks that she does with her friends,” said Brownlee, who highlighted McAllister’s fun and energetic persona as her most likable quality.

Brownlee said watching McAllister and the other stars on stage only enhanced the bond she feels with them.

“They seem more real,” she said. “They seem younger and more connected to you.”

Elena and Topher Mueller, the parents of Brownlee’s friend, said they decided to watch some of McAllister’s videos before coming to the show to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s still hard to pinpoint, Elena Mueller said, but she reckons it’s all about being relatable.

“There’s something about their age and their ability to talk straight to them through the video,” she said. “They’re living their lives in front of them.”

Shop window

Fullscreen offset some of the cost to produce the show through six corporate sponsors, including Taco Bell, a division of Yum! Brands. The fast-food chain even produced original videos featuring Fullscreen influencers for its YouTube channel. Universal Studios Inc., meanwhile, used the event to debut footage from its upcoming PG-13 horror movie “Ouija.”

The event also provided an opportunity for Fullscreen executives to show off the company’s talent to advertisers in the hopes of securing additional brand deals for its stars, such as 22-year-old Ricky Dillon, a vlogger-turned-pop star from Hoover, Ala. Dillon already has brand deals with companies including Audible Inc., Hulu and online eyewear retailer Warby Parker, among others.

“It definitely is a good way to show companies that I am more versatile,” he said. “I can do more than just talk in front of a camera.”

The YouTube star has been making videos since 2010, when he parodied a Britney Spears song. Today, more than 1.7 million people subscribe to Dillon’s personal channel in which he typically plays lighthearted games like “Guess that tweet.” In more serious videos, Dillon talks to his fans about real-life issues including bullying and suicide prevention.

Now that Dillon has leveraged his YouTube fame toward more traditional entertainment pursuits, it’s up to Fullscreen’s sales team to connect him and other stars with marketers looking to reach with young audiences.

Chad Bettor, head of account management at Santa Monica ad agency 180la, said his company has had great success in signing up YouTube and Vine celebrities for campaigns involving clients like Pepsi Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co. He explained in an email that YouTube celebrities are useful to marketers because of the engagement level of their plugged-in fan base – something you don’t necessarily get with more mainstream film and television stars.

“Our clients understand the value these personalities bring with them to a project,” Bettor said. “It’s more than signing them as you might a traditional celebrity. Their following becomes a hypertargeted media buy that we know will be open to a message from the brand.”

Jonah Minton, Fullscreen’s senior vice president of ad sales, said he and his staff hosted numerous marketers at the event who were interested in working with the company’s talent.

“There’s nothing like putting our clients in front of screaming, passionate engaged fans,” Minton said. “Every time we’ve taken our advertisers to these types of events, they’re just floored.”