agency in New York actually identified the top 30 of them. They’re not Boardroom material, but they have more consumer intimacy in the digital world than most influencers. Ryan Higa’s launch of the Lenovo Yoga tablet was a seamless part of his ongoing fan interactions. As a result, his fans accepted, even looked forward to, a programme that was an obvious advertisement with the same sort of anticipation they displayed for his other videos. “There is a failure to understand that in digital video you seek fans, you don’t buy audiences.” And it would sensitize you to the “super fans”: a group that influences disproportionately: the 20 per cent of enthusiasts who drive 80 per cent of the engagement and conversation. Superfans help moderate comment streams and provide community leadership for the digital creator’s audience. It is they who help shape the entertainment flow, and you reach them by becoming a part of it. Rhett and Link, for example, integrated Geico advertising into their video programming, but were it not for the brand name, you’d never know it was any different from their other videos. The brand reached Rhett and Link’s superfans by the simple expedient of letting Rhett and Link be Rhett and Link. Something easier said than done for most brands. Doing these two things would allow you to have a much better chance of building a sustained audience as opposed to mere viewership. After all, audience is just the advertising world’s way of describing community. But there’s also an alternative way of looking at digital video, not so much as a community-based audience but by learning from Hollywood. It requires client courage: the courage to commit, once in a while, to one big production. It means creating stories so compelling that they command attention. But then that attention, unlike the attention of a cinema audience, is scaled by a digitally informed distribution strategy. Intimacy in Depth How intimate can you be? How deep can you go? Over the years the most thankless and frustrating presentations I have made were