Reality TV is the new meta

Last night my girlfriend introduced me to a show on Hulu called Vanderpump Rules.

The show is about a bunch of aspiring models and actresses who are all working at a high-end restaurant in LA that can’t stop hooking up with each other.

I pretended not to like it for the first 20 minutes and quickly gave up after that.

(I’m fully invested now.)

But as I was watching I couldn’t help but wonder:

“How f*cking popular did this restaurant get after this show aired?”

So I did some homework.

• 3 years after the show launched in 2013, the restaurant SUR peaked in annual revenue at somewhere between $1.5-2M/yr (significantly higher than other high-end restaurants in the area)

• The restaurant quite literally had fans flying in from out of state and tables were booked out for weeks at a time, and walk-ins were impossible

• The owner Lisa Vanderpump launched multiple spin-off restaurants from the show, some of which became nationally ranked (Pump was featured in “100 Hottest Restaurants” in 2016)

The show was not only EXTREMELY profitable on the frontend for Lisa (she pocketed $50k per episode) but also in terms of backend restaurant sales.

You can call reality TV “trashy” all you want, but:

A) Everyone involved in the production of that showed laughed to the bank

B) You’re already watching it every day without realizing it

YouTube IS the new reality TV.

The genius behind these new “business vlogs” or “day in the life” style videos is they still prey on the same psychological tendencies.

Just like middle-age suburban moms love watching Beverly Hills shopping sprees, 18-25 year old guys wants to live vicariously through their favorite gurus driving supercars.

Same addiction, just a different medium.

These younger guys aren’t watching with the intention of being “sold” to…

They want to be entertained.

They want to immerse themselves in a future world where they’ve achieved all of their dreams and aspirations.

They want a sneak peak of what would happen if they finally “locked in this year.”

This was the genius of my business partner Cam’s $0-10k agency series on YouTube.

We showcased the day-to-day freedom that running a robust content agency afforded us (spontaneous wakesurfing, working at coffee shops, etc) while ALSO putting ourselves in the shoes of the viewer by simulating starting over again.

People KNEW they were learning from a credible source because of our agency track record, but got to learn how we built it through something that felt “fun.”

To simplify it:

Authority + entertainment = sales.

This is the formula that brought us hundreds in thousands of sales for our coaching program and the framework that helps all of our clients print off their YouTube channels.

So yeah. Study reality TV (aka YouTube.)

Because it’s probably made you buy something before.

-Presley

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