Has it only been SIX days since I watched my first Casey Neistat daily vlog? It feels like I’ve been with him – I mean, watching, his videos on YouTube for months now…
Maybe that’s why he’s so popular. It’s easy to binge-watch Casey’s videos on YouTube because he’s a skilled story-teller who happens to be a film-maker who happens to be a down-to-earth kind of guy. A family man, in fact, with a wife named Candace and two kids named Owen and Francine. A man with a #Cinderella story (watch this vlog of his to learn more) who’s inspiring countless numbers of folks like me who are working on making their next dream come true (“Focus on the future,” as Casey would say).
Casey Neistat is also the co-founder of a new self-immersive (is that the right word for it?) video app: Beme. “Beme is a social media app that wants to engineer authenticity,” says The Verge.
Though Beme seems really intriguing to me, that’s not why I started watching Casey. This is why: Casey produces his own daily vlogs and they’re fascinating to watch. He’s the writer, camera-operator, Drone pilot, “actor,” and editor of all 425 or so daily vlogs. I predict his style and the filming formula he uses will be influencing how future film-makers and story-tellers on other media (TV, radio, Internet, blogs, vlogs, etc.) will share their stories.
I’m pretty good at these types of predictions. In fact, way back in the early 1980’s, when I was in college, before I dropped out, I was a journalism major. But I really just wanted to be a writer who documented other people’s life stories. I wrote fiction and non-fiction. One of my fictional stories was about a young woman who wanted to share every interesting moment of her life on a daily basis with the world with cameras strategically placed all around her, capturing different moments in a variety of shots. If that had really happened, even just once, in the 1980’s, that would have been thought of as either Avant-garde or very egotistical of my character in my short story. (Wait, what? Did I predict YouTube vloggers?)
So, why did I stop, literally, in the middle of my day, to write this short blog post now to tell you about Casey Neistat (pronounced: “nice-tat”)? Because, if you’re a marketer, you simply must watch at least one of Casey’s videos/vlogs. He’s the future of marketing. It’s almost as if he traveled here from the future and has been busy doing all this stuff in the past several years. If you’re a Casey fan, you know that he’d love to hear that time traveler reference.
His daily vlogs are hypnotic. He’s such a skilled story-teller and edits his vlogs in an almost constant one-second-per-shot style. You just can’t look away —–and you wouldn’t want to, even if you could.
Casey is changing the way we market. I’m not sure if we should even call it “marketing” anymore…because the talented storytellers, the YouTubers, Vloggers, short film-makers, journalists and “everyday” people, who capture their stories (no matter what subject matter), in an interesting and hypnotic way, are blazing trails right now. And Casey is the hottest trail blazer.
You can find Casey all over social media and sharing unique content on each platform. Follow Casey Neistat on YouTube now. You won’t regret it. His 2,972,485 subscribers have been enriched by his work. I’m one of them. Excuse me while I go catch up on about 350 or so of Casey Neistat’s daily vlogs… Below is a short, short list of my faves, so far.
Hotel Room Secret (I love the drone shots of New York City and the fact that Casey built and told a story about this simple thing: his hotel room.)
My Kid and Me (2,197,993 views, as of today, May 16, 2016 at 1:45 p.m.)
Draw My Life – Casey Neistat (Notice the name of the company he’s promoting: it only appears for two seconds on-screen; and he mentions it once, in the beginning. That’s it! But it got seen and heard by more than 2,214,325 people and counting. Plus, he has this permanant link below the video: This film was made with the support of The Nantucket Project https://www.nantucketproject.com/)
Scariest Day of My Life (Very interesting story from someone who witnessed that day and time of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York city – a block from his apartment were the Twin Towers).
1,500,000 Views Per Vlog (This is fascinating because it’s a crossover video with another popular YouTuber: Roman Atwood).
Total Nonsense and Chaos (When he attends a YouTube gathering of popular YouTubers)
How I discovered Casey Neistat: Twitter, of course. I happened to catch a Tweet by Techcrunch. I watched their video interview and was intrigued, so I went over to Casey’s YouTube channel and haven’t slept much since. No, just kidding – sort of. I did wake up the other night at 2 a.m. (not sleeping very well while hubby’s away in Houston, flying his drone for a client) and couldn’t get back to sleep. So, I ate a bowl of Special K cereal and watched one of Casey’s videos. Then I promptly fell asleep. What can I say? He kinda makes you feel good about the world. He’s soothing that way.
