INBOUND Bold Talks: Brian Fanzo "Limitations Inspire Creativity!"

All right, so I want you guys to do me a favor. Close your eyes and picture your most successful event, your most successful campaign. Now, I'm going to give you about 10 minutes to do that. Now, I talk fast, but I don't give you any more time. I cram a lot of content in here. And really what I'm focusing on today is something I've never talked about before, only because it wasn't something that I realized was so powerful until people started asking me how to make things work with new technology, with new things that are going on. And so I call it. Limitations inspire creativity. And so there's new technology out there today. There's lots of new things happening around the world. And as every new tech comes, every new device comes, every new social network, or, of course, like Amy said, some of them disappear so fast, we can't even update our slides each time a new platform comes us, as marketers say, oh, God, not another one, or, don't give me another app. I had marketers telling me they unfollowed me on Twitter because they were so tired of me talking about new technology and new things coming out that they couldn't even figure out what was going on today. They didn't want to know about the new things that are happening. But when we're looking at these new technologies and we're trying to figure out how to scale, we. We can't focus only on the blocking and tackling. We can't think only about, I need to learn how to use Snapchat now. I need to learn how to do all of these individual platforms. Because when we're defining success, and I ask that question when we start, when you guys are picturing your success, when you're picturing your successful campaigns, I ask you this. Did you think about the problem you were solving, the experience you were creating, or the vanity metrics that your boss was happy to see? Unfortunately for us, and unfortunately for when we're building our campaigns, so much of what we do today is we talk about building community. The power of community. Community has changed my life. We talk about the importance of experiences. We talk about the importance of solving problems. But we all know when we're trying to sell it upstream and we're trying to get budget, we hear things like impressions. How many retweets did it get? How many favorites does it have? And ultimately, those vanity metrics end up determining and dictating what we think is successful. We talked about Applebee's. I believe still to this day, a year later, is the most successful live video campaign that any one brand has done. We took over the applebee's.com website. We brought in 20 influencers to go to different Applebee's around the United States for 12 hours. We are on applebees.com and we are using a hashtag called Taste the Change. That hashtag got 1 billion impressions on Twitter doing that event using live video. Now, that's exciting. One billion is super exciting. But the thing that was exciting for me is how much more each check went up for each one of the people that watched a video stream, tweeted about it, and then attended and went and bought something at Applebee's that day. The idea for me was not the vanity metrics. It wasn't the hashtag impressions, because last time I checked, the CMO can't turn those impressions into the bank. And retweets and favorites are free. So when we're looking at managing and looking at success, I ask you throughout this next couple minutes to redefine what success looks like. It's not what you can measure. It's ultimately what you want to deliver. And I believe as we start looking at what we can measure, as we start thinking about how can we define what success is? Success should be about the experience. Success should be about empowering your community. Success should be about solving a problem. And how do we do that? Well, I like to think of it as we take away the barrier and we stop starting from the metrics. Because it's not your fault, it's not our fault, it's not my fault that we've been using things like likes. I mean, how many people, when you were going through college, you were thinking about being a marketer? You said, I really hope in my career I get to make people like me or my page. Right? Like that. It's even creepy. Just, you know, even when someone says, I'm an influencer, being an influencer, I don't want to influence somebody. That kind of gives me the creeps. But what we like to talk about is we like to help empower our sales team. We like to help solve a problem. We like to make a difference for the people that are buying our product that are doing the things that we're doing. But how do we measure that? How do we look at new technology? How many people here on Snapchat look at that? We can tell we're with marketers. I say that at the tech event in Barcelona two days ago, and I got about 25 people, and they were all the marketing team of that Tech event. But one of the biggest complaints and the biggest struggles that people have today is how do I measure success on Snapchat? That's the wrong way to approach this. The limitation of data and discovery and all of these things that we as marketers complain about are the reason that the millennials and the Gen Zs love these platforms. The simplicity, the limited data. So I ask you this. Rather than looking at Snapchat and saying, oh, I don't get the data that I want to report on, think about it and says, what can I leverage Snapchat to do to bring it to somewhere where I can actually measure success? I do things like screenshot campaigns where the idea where it says, hey, we can measure success. We can measure what we're trying to do. Click through to our website time on page. If we get someone to Twitter. Well, on Snapchat, I never drop a call to action other than saying to win a book or to sign up for this new webinar and get a free access to this event, take a screenshot of this Snap, tweet it out, and tag us on Twitter. Well, now I get to know the Persona of my audience. I get all the data that comes with it on Twitter. I now get to continue the conversation beyond just Snapchat. I ultimately now am able to take success and understand what it means for my business, understand what it means for the people that are out there. And for me, this is changing the approach. So rather than looking at the metrics that we are able to actually measure, because let's face it, the platforms don't care about us. The platforms are there for the users. If they cared about us, they would give us something more than likes and something more than shares, and they would allow us see things like, you know, I get 57,000 profile views a month to my Twitter account. So my Twitter account, isocial Fans, I get 57,000 page views to that profile. I cannot tell you where the hell they come from. And Twitter doesn't care and they're a client, so I have to give a little bit of generous love there. But for me, it's more. It comes down to, okay, I have all of this data. How can I leverage these limitations and be creative? Because the limitations are not going anywhere. And the thing is, with all of these shiny objects, I am the first one to say I proudly suffer from FOMO or the fear of missing out. And most of what my job is for my clients is I test out, try kick the tires, attempt to break, sign up for the beta of every New technology, every new app that's out there. Because for me, I want to understand the audience, I want to understand the value proposition, I want to understand the use case for the users. And then ultimately I want to present that to my clients and so then they can make the educated decision that says, is this best for me? Is this best for me today? The interesting thing about that is we're oftentimes too busy hustling and only trying to grind out Facebook likes and organic reach. And all of a sudden, if you guys saw the viral trend right now, Facebook Live gives us amazing reach. So we're just gonna take viral videos and fake it like they're live and we're gonna post it on Facebook now and get 2.5 million views of a video of a guy climbing some tower into the sky. And I was guilty of sharing it because I thought it was live and I was duped. But ultimately what we were doing and what they're doing is they're actually looking at saying, I want 2.5 million views on that Facebook video. I went back to the advertisers and said, what are you getting out of those 2.5 million views that are different than that video was on YouTube? Too often we're looking at hustling with what we're presented with. And new apps such as Snapchat, such as Facebook Live, such as Periscope, or they're embracing Keep it simple, stupid. We have so much technology, so many things at our disposal that they no longer are wanting to add a thousand features. The reason Snapchat is hard for all of us, they were not born with an iPhone. Now I'm a millennial. I like to say a pager wearing Millennial because I was born in 81, I did own a pager. I know what a payphone was. My first job was burning Napster CDs in my dorm room. But if you ask, I have a six year old daughter, she went up to the Apple TV and is swiping. She thinks the Apple TV is broke because she can't swipe on the tv. And for those digital natives, for those people that were born and understand Snapchat is native, it's left, right, swipe up, swipe down, hold down, you know, press, let me take a 10 second selfie. That is natural because it's simple, it's easy to execute. Did anybody have to go training? Well, I think some of us might have wished we did training on Snapchat or Periscope. You know, I don't know if anybody knows this but the most popular thing to show on your very first periscope, your feet. Because you don't realize the camera on the back is the first one that turns on and you type in your thing. You're excited, you stress yourself out and you click go. And your feet are the first thing. They're live. But ultimately, with the brands and these apps focusing on simplicity, we have to take a step back and say if we're gonna measure success, we have to also take a simple approach to determining what success means. Now, this change is scary, and like I said, it is not your fault. This is not the way we did it five years ago. It's not the way we did it two years ago. My life changed when Meerkat came out at south by Southwest. I had no idea that I was me doing anything in live video. I've never been done video marketing. I had a podcast. I have a podcast. My YouTube channel's atrocious. I need to fix that. But for me, what I was able to do was able to find a technology that spoke to me that allowed me to tell my story with the world. Now, 18 months later, I've done 1700 live streams myself, personally, I've launched 47 Fortune 500 brands onto these live technologies. And for me, this change is exciting. I'm a change evangelist. I love it. It's why I get up in the morning. It's my most exciting thing other than I love connecting great people with great people to do great shit. But ultimately, for me, I don't look at change as a result of a bunch of bad decisions I made, rather the result of all decisions, both good and bad, that allowed me to get to this state and embrace this new focus. So I want you to think about this fact, the election. When President Obama was first elected, there was 100 million people on Facebook. I remember when he was elected. I remember seeing, wow, there's a lot of conversation. For those of us in the last couple days, we wish we could just delete Facebook from our existence for about a week. Because now there's 1.6 billion people on Facebook doing one presidential term, an eight year term. It went from 100 million to 1.8 billion. So when we're looking at change and we're thinking about these things, we have to understand defining success has to be more than the vanity metrics were presented. Because if you want to stand out from the noise, if you want to make a difference, ultimately, if you want to set yourself up for success as we move forward, and for me, it's not about the new technology. It's about building a community. Ultimately, you establish trust and you leverage those limitations. Because this is my challenge for you. Rather than looking at the limitations in front of you. I don't care what new technology is. Maybe it's even in your life. Look at those limitations and ask yourself, how can I leverage them to do what no one else can? Thank you, guys. Brian Fanzo.