How Moment Lenses built a new market for itself with YouTube branded content

Moment took a page out of GoPro's playbook to build one of the best YouTube brand channels we've seen

Nov 02, 2021

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The iPhone 4S launched in 2011, completely revolutionizing mobile photography. And very quickly after point-and-shoot cameras pretty much became obsolete, being replaced by mobile cameras.

Moment Lenses saw this as an opportunity — while the vast majority of people were happy with their mobile cameras, there was a subsection of people who wanted to take more unique photographs, but were unwilling to invest the money and space to get a larger camera.

This is where external mobile camera lenses came in — lenses that attached to people’s phones to “supercharge” them, providing unique perspectives such as wide-angle, fish-eye, and telephoto without the extra heft that a DSLR and lens combo would entail.

When there were already tons of these clip-on lenses on Amazon – why would someone spend $100+ on one from Moment?

→ Community + Brand.

Moment built a really strong community and brand on YouTube, with 500K subscribers as of today (November 2021), and their most popular video getting 2.5M views.

They collaborated with hundreds of top YouTube creators such as Peter McKinnon, MKBHD, Sara Dietschy, Sam Sheffer, PotatoJet, and many many more – leading to some SOLID user-generated content and affiliate/influencer partnerships that I’m sure would have driven tons of sales (even though we don’t have the exact numbers) looking at how much non-affiliated UGC was generated for Moment on YouTube, and how some of their new lenses sold out in under two hours 👀.

For a young D2C brand founded on Kickstarter, this is huge. How did they do this? Let’s get into it.

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Building a brand on YouTube 🔨

Looking at Moment’s oldest videos, it’s clear that they are all about what you can do, what can you achieve, the lifestyle you can have, the content you can create with the lens. It’s all about the viewer.

Moment took a page from GoPro’s playbook, showing an aspirational lifestyle that one can have (read: one can show on social media) if one bought their products — you can vlog, showing all the amazing times you have with friends, you can make movies like Tangerine, you can take photos of the amazing adventures you have. With Moment Lenses.

This was around the same time that interest in iPhone photography and videography was increasing – the film “Tangerine” was released in 2015 with a 7.1 rating on IMDb, shot entirely on three iPhone 5Ss.

That’s why they showcased films by popular and up-and-coming creators such as Gareth Pon on their YouTube channel, along with other iPhone movies that gave viewers an idea of what they could achieve with the devices they already owned.

This was also great for SEO because people were searching for inspiration for ways that they could use their phones to create better content, and Moment targeted those people. They even created content that wasn’t about their lenses but was about phone photography in general.

Their most popular video, with 2.5M views, is a camera shootout between the iPhone 7 Plus and the iPhone 8 Plus. This is a great example of inbound content because a subsection of the people interested in these phone cameras would also be interested in lenses to make these cameras even more powerful.

Essentially, as far as YouTube is concerned, Moment Lenses’ channel is like that of GoPro’s, but in the sphere of mobile photography. People watch their content, irrespective of whether they are customers or not, or even if they are not in the market for a phone camera lens (at least right now!).

This brand on YouTube is what allowed them to take their content strategy forward with branded content on YouTube — with such a strong presence in the photographer and videographer community, it was easy for them to get multiple partnerships, on-channel and off-channel with top creators in the space, taking them even further.

Taking charge with branded content 🚀

In 2017, top tech YouTuber MKBHD made a video called ‘Dope Tech: “Shot on Smartphones!”’ in which he said “…this one [among mobile phone lenses] that I’ve grown to like the most is this one from Moment Lenses. And I’ve gravitated the most to this one because of their focus on quality.”

If you’re familiar with tech YouTube, you’ll know that if MKBHD recommends something, that’s BOUND to drive a TON of sales. Moment followed up by making a video with MKBHD on their own channel as well, further solidifying their partnership.

Similarly, creators such as Peter McKinnon, a top photography channel, made videos on Moment as well. One of them was on mobile photography as a topic, and in that video he mentioned that Moment reached out to him and sent him a few of their lenses as gifts – no strings attached, no sponsorship. He liked the products so much that he mentioned them on his channel, and with his huge community, he was bound to drive a ton of sales as well.

The same thing happened with Sara Dietschy, Moment sent her a bunch of lenses and she made a video recommending them.

All of this happened no-strings-attached — just as a result of product seeding/gifting to the right people and then just banking on the quality of their product to take the relationship forward.

This especially works because the thing with creators is that when they like something, they want to share it with the world and their audience.

When you see the same brand being recommended again and again by all the different creators that you like and trust, you’re bound to think “Moment Lenses” when you think “which phone lens should I buy”.

Riding the wave of this positive feedback loop

The cool thing with YouTube is that a lot of the content on YouTube is evergreen — this means that once it’s up there, it’s up there. People can search for it and find it even if it was posted years ago if it’s still relevant. This is unlike Instagram, where the “shelf-life” of content is much shorter.

As a result of this, YouTube is what supercharged Moment Lenses’ brand — whenever anyone searches for “mobile photography”, they find videos by Moment or by other creators recommending Moment, even today.

With all the affiliate links in all the video descriptions of all of these videos, you can just imagine the number of sales they must be making.

All of this happened as a result of three things → a great product, a great brand, and a great product seeding strategy.

Wrap up

I hope this article shows you the importance of product seeding and branded content in the context of YouTube — but these principles still apply on Instagram, TikTok, and good old blogs as well.

At Ubu, we don’t (yet) have the features to do it on YouTube, but if you’re interested in applying this strategy for your D2C brand on Instagram, I highly recommend you reach out to us!

Learn more about Ubu

See you guys again here next week 🚀

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