Adam Sand's tanning salon promotion hid wrapped boxes around a mall with a September 11 launch date, triggering terrorism concerns and his arrest by Canadian authorities. He also shares why personal Facebook pages get more organic reach than business pages, and how he uses employee videos and paid ads to generate leads.
Tim just asked me about. We were just talking about Facebook and how good we had it back in the day when Facebook pages were so organic. And so he said. And I told him that there was a time that I went in jail because of Facebook. And he's like, like, Facebook jail? I said, no, like, actual, like, Canadian American Security Intelligence Services jail. And so what happened was I used to own tanning salons with Gold's Gym. So when Gold's Gym came to Canada, I had tanning businesses. And it was one summer where in Canada, like, the sun comes out for about 40 days a year, and then it goes back to the winter. You. When the sun comes around, the tanning business dies. And I was, like, really struggling to make rent. And I remember I. And I used. I've always been fascinated with advertising. I would watch back before you had to pay for ad Week. I would read all the stuff that came out on ad week. And they were talking about the movie Cloverfield, the Matrix. You know how, you know, Cloverfield would flash the little spots of the alien or in the Matrix, it'd be like the dudes would, like, jump and stop them in air. And like, the Matrix has you. And then there was this other one locally, we had a mall that opened, and they just put in August 8th, just a big box with an 8 on it. And everybody's like, what's this August 8th? What's this August date? And it was the launch of this new mall, and they called it. So they called this type of marketing a curiosity campaign. And I was like, how could I do a curiosity campaign to, like, make it so I could make rent? And so it was in August when the sun was like, when I was the end of the summer, I'd been just beaten up financially, waiting. Not a lot of stuff. I thought, what's the number one thing that people hate doing with the tanning business? They need to. They hate bringing in the bottle of tanning lotion. And I was in a mall. So I thought, okay, how could I. I'm going to start giving away free T lotion with the memberships. Instead of charging 30 bucks a month, I'm going to charge 90 bucks a month, but I'm going to give away lotion. So I got this idea that go down. And I had no money to advertise, so I had to do something that would catch on. So I went into the recycling area of the mall, the big mall, and it took all the boxes from the shoe stores and clothing stores and wrapped up a hundred boxes with this Brown wrapping paper, gold wrapper. And it said on there, it said, September 11, a special gift to Tanners. Because that was when I was going to launch it. Canada, okay. Canada, okay. Now I go. And so what I did was I talked to all my friends that were managers at stores, and this is before the iPhone3GS, you know what I mean? Like, you didn't have pictures of Facebook from your phone. Like, you had to take pictures, plug it into your camera, your computer, upload the photos and put it on Facebook. And so when I did this, I talked to all my friends who had stores in the mall or managers and said, hey, I want to do this scavenger hunt. If I put this in front of your store, people are going to go looking for it, they're going to take pictures, and your business is going to be on Facebook. It's going to. I want this thing. So then I announced to everybody in the store that, hey, we have this brand new membership coming. It's really cool offer. It's a big gift. We're gonna have a $3,000 prize for whoever can find the most boxes in the mall and upload the pictures to Facebook. Whoever tags us in the most photos is gonna win. And it blew up. We got, like, international attention over this. But what a lot of their family members and friends in the States were doing with like, hello, September 11th, he's gonna blow up your mall. You got the largest mall in Canada. He's gonna blow up your mall. And so then the Canadian social, Canadians, basically the CIA of Canada, got called and I was arrested and brought to jail and had a cavity, was brought up on potentially being a terrorist. And a robot had to go open one of the boxes where I told him, like, it's. There's nothing in there. It's plastic tanning bottles, garbage. Like, it's literally just garbage inside these boxes. And so they had the robot open a box, and then I had to move all the boxes into the hallway outside my store, and the whole thing got kibosh in about two weeks. So in about two weeks, we went from a little tanning salon, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to being on the FBI's most wanted list.
Okay, can I get one other piece of content with you right now?
Yes. Okay.
How are you dealing with, you know, pages get no love from Facebook organically. And your personal page is kind of where stuff has to live. How do you deal with that? And do you basically mostly just basic post on your personal page or how do you. How do you deal with that with sergeants?
Well, so, yeah, so as a consultant, I post things on my personal page because it's where I have friends and my friends see my stuff because they like my stuff. Business pages don't get as much with our sergeant's roofing page. With our company, we post stuff towards. We have to basically focus on being really animated on video, really charismatic on video, planning our videos, doing a lot of them. And then we have to run paid ads to it because the pages don't get the organic reach that they used to because Facebook doesn't need to do that anymore. They don't need more people using it. They don't need to buy you off with viral potential. They just. You have to pay your tax now to be on Facebook, and that's just the way it is.
Helps get your sales people and other people on your team. How do you get them involved with Facebook or social media?
We know we do. Some of them. Some of them want to get that. Some of them want to get that celebrity status when they walk the home. So if our guys are willing to do videos, I teach and coach them how to do videos, and then they will actually. We will actually boost the post. Like, we will take their videos, upload them, run them through our business page, run them as ads. And it works really well because then our guys will go into the home and they'll be like, oh, wow, you're that guy we saw on Facebook. And he's like, yeah, it's me. I'm Matt. Right. And then we give them their own landing page too. So instead of Sergeant Roofing.com contact us. It's Sargenceroofing.com Matt. Chris. Right. And that way they get their own legion.
Awesome. Thanks.
