Mumbrella360: Day Two Wrap

By day two of the Mumbrella360 conference, I’d given up on the pencil skirt.

I also ate another doughnut (earl grey was the flavour of choice this time) and got up in front of a room full of bigwigs and yelled at them.

NIDA’s Les Chantery took us through a hands-on 45 minute workshop designed to make us better communicators through improving our use of voice.

Beginning with a breath training exercise, we nailed a vocal warm-up and a nerve calm-down in one hit:

• Stand tall with one hand on your stomach and another on your chest, aiming for your stomach to expand with each breath, rather than your chest or shoulders. 
• Breathe in for a count of two, hold your breath for a count of two, exhale for a count of four and hold for a count of two. Repeat.
• To warm up your vocal chords, hum for the duration of your exhale. Aim for about 10 minutes to completely warm-up and calm-down. 

Another exercise involved the whole room chanting “Goo Gaa / Gee Gaa / Gay Gaa / Guy Gaa / Goo Gaa,” at increasing speed. The rationale behind the exercise is to train articulation, which will help to prevent stumbling.

The reason many sentences peter out or we get tongue-twisted, explained Chantery, is because our brain will finish the thought before our mouth has.

Neuroscience has shown that human beings align themselves with one another; in any communication situation, either you’re setting the tone, or the other person is. (Think of the last time you felt drained after a conversation with an energy-sucking, negative person).

Ascribing an action to your words will lead your delivery; decide whether it is your intention to calm, to excite, to inspire.

Examples include Obama’s delivery, lead by the action ‘to preach’; Clinton’s action was ‘to charm’; Oprah’s is ‘to befriend’. You get the immediate sense of these actions purely through their delivery.

This was the part where I found myself on-stage, yelling “I’m happy to be here!” at the audience, attempting to communicate the action ‘to challenge’ through my voice.

My fellow brave guinea pigs attempted to covey the actions ‘to excite’ ‘to calm’ and ‘to belittle’.

For more takeaways from this workshop, head over to my full breakdown of the workshop: How to be a better communicator; 5 tips from NIDA.

YouTube revealed some interesting statistics drawn from their research into Australian users.

With 15.5 million Aussies using the platform every month (averaging 21 viewing hours per month each) their research focused on the way different groups – Millennials, parents and Gen X – interact with the platform.

They concluded that Aussies use YouTube for three reasons: entertainment, inspiration and education – the latter becoming a steadily increasing part of YouTube’s service.

People keep coming back because they can customise their journey, and they come with an intention, explained head of video and advertising, Google AUNZ, Caroline Oates.

“When you choose what you watch, you pay attention.”

YouTube is secured as the #1 choice for video content in Australia.

Out of 7.5 million Aussies age 18-39, 43% are light TV viewers and 31% are non-TV viewers, compared to 90% who watch YouTube.

As a result, YouTube will roll out a ‘light TV viewers’ option for advertisers to be launched later this year, as well as the ability to target viewers who use particular devices as consumption diversifies, e.g. 150 million hours of YouTube content is watched every day on TV screens.

They will also tighten their guidelines and policies, including thresholds “moving towards monetisation becoming a privilege, not a right,” and release transparency reports, the first of which was published last month and detailed their efforts to remove violent videos from their platform.  

The average australian is consuming an hour more content than they were seven years ago.

This is what they’re watching:

Gen X

The generation who watched technology evolve now use it as their sidekick.

74% of Gen X-ers use YouTube videos to solve an immediate problem, like how to build flat pack furniture or a retaining wall.

“They feel incredibly empowered,” elaborates Oates. “They’re able to do things for themselves that otherwise, they would have paid someone to do.”

A sense of nostalgia also drives their viewing, with YouTube’s immense catalogue acting as a time capsule for music and TV shows from their youth, historic footage, sports games and more.

Millennials

Australia’s youth are savvier than ever about how they form their opinions.

It’s been a big topic of conversation this week at Mumbrella360 (read more about Junkee’s research into millennials), with young people voicing less trust than ever before in big institutions.

Despite this, 58% of millennials agree that YouTube is a place they can hear different viewpoints on current events, seeking out contrasting perspectives and information which mainstream media many not present to them.

As the first generation to have grown up in a completely globalised world, they use YouTube to engage in that global community.  

79% of millennials go to YouTube to connect, find a community and a place of belonging, or learn something new about a culture or community.

Parents

Parents are a massive part of YouTube’s audience, predominantly using it to adapt to the changing perceptions around what it means to be a parent in 2018.

59% of parents turn to YouTube for parenting guidance.

They look for honest reviews on products, and reassurance that they’re not the only ones finding parenthood a challenge.

With tech-savvy children, 49% of parents use YouTube to connect with their kids.

YouTube has been under fire for quite some time over copyright, content policy and responsibility for the material hosted by their platform, are they’re aware of the need to change.

In the words of global CEO Susan Wojcicki: “It’s important to all of us that we grow responsibly and it’s critical that we are on the right side of history.”

In case you missed it, here’s TMN’s wrap of day one.