RDC’s Bird’s Eye View series explores what the future of events truly is by bringing unexpected perspectives to the forefront.
In her latest Bird’s Eye View, Robyn chats with Brendan Kane, digital marketing expert and author of two books, Hook Point and One Million Followers. They discuss — among other things — how to best leverage marketing budgets, whether to prioritize building a brand or a community, and the importance of authenticity when brand building.
Watch the full conversation above, or read below:
Robyn Duda: Thank you so much, Brendan, for joining us today. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit of your story on how you got to One Million Followers and Hook Point, and a little bit about your journey.
Brendan Kane: I think it starts all the way back in college. I initially wanted to be a film producer and showed up at film school and quickly realized they teach you very little about business in film school. I figured maybe I should learn about business if I want to get into the business side of the entertainment industry. And at the time, and it still holds true today, the most cost-efficient way to start a business was online. This was back in 2003-2004. I just created a few internet companies to learn and experiment, not really to get rich or make passive income or any of that — really, purely to experiment and understand what it takes to get something up and running. And then when I moved to LA in 2005 to pursue a career, I started like everybody else: at the bottom, making coffees, copies and deliveries. I quickly found out that when anybody asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to be a film producer, I could see everybody's eyes glaze over. It's not as bad as saying that you want to be an actor — and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that — but you're one of a million people that are just trying to stand out. And if you say the same thing as everybody else, you just can't. So I had to identify what my hook point was to stand out at that highest level.
In order to do that, one of the key ingredients that I always do is step back and analyze the situation and listen. And I could just see that every time we finished a film, it would cost us anywhere from $10-75 million to produce this film, and then we would spend anywhere from $10-50 million marketing it. So there's a great sense of anxiety that would come over the studio office that hey, we just completed this single piece of content and we need to get hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this to generate a profit or just to try and break even. So seeing that sense of anxiety, I said, listen, I started these internet companies when I was going to college, I have a pretty good understanding of where the traffic is, and how to harness that traffic for a fraction of the cost that we were paying for TV, print and radio, in addition to free traffic sources as well. One such was I did the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube, back in like 2007, before there was such a thing as influencer, and I got all those deals for pretty much free. So that's kind of where I got started. And then from the film industry, I started building technology platforms on top of social media and licensing them back to big media companies like an MTV or Vice or Viacom, and learned a lot about social media as it pertains to technology and marketing. And then it just kept evolving from there.
RD: You hit on something that strikes a chord with me from an event standpoint, about how big your marketing budgets are in film. It's all content, essentially, right? Events produce content, movies produce content. And in the event world, marketing budgets are so small, so impact is so important. Everything matters so much marketing budgets are minuscule. If you had to pick one place to really hone in from a marketing budget, when you have such a small pool of money, where do you see the biggest impact?
BK: It's a great question. It depends on the audience. But just in a general sense, the biggest impact is anything that you can track. It's funny because a film producer called me the other day, they have a film coming out in like three weeks and it's a pretty decent sized film and they want my help with it. But one of the things I told them — and it's so true about film marketing — is the marketing budgets are overinflated, because there is a lack of attribution. It's transitioning with things going online through the streaming services, but when we think about traditional theatrical, there's a huge disconnect between an ad and a box office ticket, because that's an offline transaction. You can't do attribution to say, Okay, this dollar spent here yielded this result.
Now, with digital marketing, that is the power of it. This is one of the big things that I talk about my with my clients — I oftentimes don’t like setting set marketing budgets because I think it can really put handcuffs on you. To me, it's like, how can we create that model where we're paying $1, we know how much we're getting back in return, we know we're getting $2 or $3, or maybe we're getting -$1. And even in that situation, at least we know something is not working, so that we can get into a mindset not of, ‘Okay, for this we're going to spend $10,000 or $20,000,’ but, ‘Hey, once we know this is working, we're going to spend as much as possible until the event sells out.’ Or maybe it's a virtual event or whatever that is.
Those traditional budget mindsets hold people back from success because they just look at, hey, this is the amount of money I have, so I'm just going to figure out how to spend it. Instead of saying, Hey, we're going to start with a minimal budget in these different areas, let's prove it out, and then we can see which direction do we want to excel in. And that's where these platforms like a Facebook advertising platform, YouTube, Google, any of these online social platforms or advertising platforms, there is no minimum spend. You can literally go and spend $10, and they're not going to say that's too little, versus the traditional mediums like a magazine or radio or print, there's minimums that you have to spend for them to even pick up the phone.
RD: You've brought up some really good points. I think everyone gets so set on we have to have this omni channel approach and here's how much we're giving to each. It's trial and error.
BK: Omni channel works and it's valuable, but it's once something's working. To me, it’s starting with the simplest forms. If you need to sell tickets, let's figure out how to sell tickets first, and then you can use omni channel and all that stuff to amplify it. One of the core philosophies is how do you just sell one ticket or get one deal? That's going to teach you tremendous amount, because if you can't even sell the one, then how are you going to create an omni channel strategy? Maybe it's not one, maybe it's 100 or 1000, but you've got to find that way – what does it actually take to get somebody to buy in to the event that you're doing? And then you can look at what does scale look like beyond there.
RD: That's gold right there. It's breaking it down in its simplest form and then coming up with a plan from there. It’s a really good point. You talk a lot about authenticity and brand building in some of the books. How important do you think having an authentic voice is, and does it matter if it's a product versus a person?
BK: I think that authenticity plays a role, but I think that there's sometimes an over emphasis on it, where you first start with authenticity, and then you build the campaign from there. To me, it's like, how do we first grab attention? How do we hold that attention long enough to get somebody to say I believe in this product or service or whatever it may be? It's not like you start with how do I get somebody to believe in this product or service, because if you focus all your energy and effort that way, and you can't get somebody to stop the scroll, or just even open an email or open a LinkedIn message or whatever your form of advertising is, then it doesn't matter.
For me, authenticity does play a role in that you want to make sure that you're contextualizing your message in a way that feels authentic to you, so it comes off real. It's less about the other people out there. It's more about you as a brand, or you as an individual, or you as an event or whatever. Is it really authentic to what your core expertise is or what you're delivering? Otherwise people can see through that. So it's more about your ability to articulate that, but I don't really like leading with that, because I think that oftentimes people focus so heavily on authenticity or branding first, and then figure out well, how do we put this into content that's actually going to serve our underlying business or grab the attention that we need?
RD: That's really interesting. We talk about brand and going out to market, especially when you're building brands online and trying to build communities around them. It’s the chicken and the egg — what comes first, the brand or the community? Does it matter? I'm bringing this up because one of the things that I’m watching out for as a disrupter is the creator community. And you're seeing people like Gary V and Lewis Howes and all these people who are putting on their own events now, and they have these active, very captive communities of people who they're now able to create experiences for. What's your thoughts on that?
BK: I say building community first. Even the examples that you put out, Gary V and Lewis Howes, people aren’t opting into them for their brand, people are opting in for their content and what they're saying, and then the brand helps them stick around. But it's the content that grabs the attention and says, Hey, I want to opt in to follow this person, whether it's on social media, email or anything like that. And then the underlying brand foundation can keep them there.
But even Gary V, for example, his brand has evolved. His brand started off with like hustle, hustle, hustle and work super hard, but I think he had a realization that that's probably not the best message, and he's grown and evolved that message over time, and even recently, he's grown and evolved that message into NFTs and things like that. So does brand play a role? Yes, but I had a friend and advisor that was one of the head people at Live Nation, and he said it perfectly. How can you build a brand, when you haven't even built a business? People are trying to create their brand, but they haven't sold a single product or gotten anybody to follow their account or share their content. You have to figure that out and that will dictate where the brand goes.
RD: That’s really interesting. Now I’m thinking about it reflecting on me. That was a struggle that I had for years as I was building the business. Everyone kept saying, what's the brand? And I was like, I don't even know exactly where we want to focus. I know we love experience and what we're doing, but I need to figure out what the problem is I'm trying to solve for the community I'm trying to solve it for before I define exactly who I am and what we stand for.
BK: That’s 100% spot on. The only thing that matters is are you solving a problem for somebody? That's why people opt in. You’re going to buy a product because it solves a problem. And that problem can be many different things — it can just be simply making you feel good, versus a real tangible solution — but I don't experience it, and the data doesn't support it, that consumers are walking around saying I want to find cool brands to engage with. No — they see your product, and they're like, I want this product. And then through that, they build brand loyalty.
Look at the evolution of Apple, the most valuable company in the world. It wasn't that they started with brand. They started with the Macintosh, and they kept building these other platforms. Now, there is an underlying brand ethos, but anybody can say they think differently. It's the way that they've delivered the actual tangible product that people use every day that keeps them there. And the brand is part of it, but they're opting in for the product.
RD: So, experience. From your side, what do you think the future holds in three to five years? Where do you see that world going?
BK: There's a lot of talk about the future of VR and the metaverse and things like that. And it's interesting for somebody like me, and my perspective, I'm deeply rooted in social and digital, but I'm not a gamer at heart. So I look at a lot of these applications, and it's not really interesting to me. Also, I think we have to take into consideration COVID and how long this is going to last. I think that there is a massive desire now and in the future for offline experiences to happen. Online, there's tremendous growth potential and it's going to evolve and it’ll always be there. But I think I think that the human being at its core craves human connection, and there's only so much connection that you can get through a screen. So I think that offline experiences are going to be massively valuable.
At the same time, how do you harness the power of online to drive that offline? That's where I think a lot of power happens, and why I chose to publish books, because books, if you're buying a physical copy, or even if you're just listening to audio walking around or on a train or something, I consider that offline. How do you marry the two together for massive impact? I don't think it's focus on one or the other. It's how do you leverage both of them off of each other?
RD: It's a journey. We all want to get to engagement in one way or another, and whatever spoke you come in on, you’ve got to be able to ride the whole wheel with them the way they want to ride it. There has to be multiple points of entry into getting to engage with people and getting to know a brand or product.
BK: You also see a lot of case studies around people wanting to participate in offline experiences so that they can share it in the online world. There was one or two museums in LA that were the most Instagrammable spots, because they have these really interesting and unique installations. Or people going to Art Basel which just happened. You see everybody taking shots of what they're experiencing in that offline environment.
RD: One last thing, because I think it's really interesting, could we talk about Taylor Swift stuff a little bit — not to belabor that, I know that's something you did a long time ago, but I think it's really interesting, the brand versus community concept that we hit upon and how you helped build that. And then any comments you have on where she went with it. I’d love some thoughts if you're willing to talk about that.
BK: I think first off, people don't give her enough credit. Obviously they give her enough credit — she's a global superstar — for her music capabilities. But I don't think people give her enough credit for the fact that she built her fan base and her brand herself. She didn’t have a huge record label behind her, she didn’t have huge marketing budgets. It was her herself, and her true genius was she understood with social media coming on the scene — and this is one thing that people fundamentally get wrong with social media, is most people use the platform as a one to many platform, where she saw it as a one to one platform. Because when we're using social media, we're not sitting in a stadium. We're not even typically watching with anybody else — we're sitting on the couch or on the bus or wherever it is, on our mobile device, or even front of our desktop computer. And she fundamentally understood that it was a one-to-one connection platform, and that's how she effectively communicated through that. In addition to her ability and willingness to engage with fans, signing autographs taking photos, and then again in social responding to comments, whatever — that fosters true brand loyalty, that shows Taylor Swift cares about her fan base. And she even took it to the next level.
When it started to scale and instead of having hundreds of thousands of fans, she had tens of millions of fans, that inability to engage with each person one on one was extremely difficult. So that's where she started showing up at bridal showers and birthday parties and on doorsteps with Christmas gifts. She would film and capture that in a way that was still authentic. She cared about that individual fan that she was doing it for. But the way that that content was created, it was demonstrating to the entire fan base, Hey, I cannot be there with every single one of you but I do care about you. That was the subtext of that content. And that's where that content went viral. And again, for those fans watching that content, it's almost as if Taylor was doing that for them themselves. So that's really I think the true genius of what she's done from a community building aspect and also from a brand aspect. Obviously Taylor has developed herself as a musician and in terms of how she represents herself through fashion and style, but the underlying through line of her brand has maintained consistency. And I think one of the main reasons that she's super successful outside of her ability to create beautiful music is that she has this true passion, and it's authentic, that she does care about her fans.
RD: I always think about how you replicate that in a corporate setting and in a corporate world. I'm big on personalization. And personalization doesn't mean that you're just sending me an email with my name in the subject line. It's understanding, what are you trying to get out of this transaction? And for her, people want to feel like they know Taylor. And she's always seemed to be someone who did that really well. How do you do that in something that's not as exciting as music?
BK: I can give you two examples that come to mind. Zappos Shoes, when that first launched, was this novel concept that like, hey, we care about you as customers, if there's anything wrong with your purchase, feel free to send it back and we'll give you full refund no matter what. Number two is Apple, the Genius Bar and their stores. Now obviously, the Genius Bar, sometimes we get frustrated with the wait lines and things like that. But that's a really beneficial service to our clients and customers that's free, to say listen, if you have an issue with your product, come in, we've got all these experts that can help you with that, especially with technology.
And I just bought new luggage from a company called Away Travel, and they have a policy, I think it's like 100 days that you can try it out. And if you don't like it, no matter what condition it's in, it doesn't matter, just bring it in. It's different than what Taylor did, but you still can do it in that corporate environment that basically says, again, it's like the Away Travel, I may or may not take advantage of it, but that still makes me feel good about the brand that they're willing to do that and to take that stance.
RD: We’re starting to shift, and maybe it's a different generation that cares more about that you care about me and that you have corporate values, but I think it's more important than ever. I don't want to just give my money to people who I don't think have any values, morals or care about me as an individual.
BK: But again, the individual is the perfect word. Because in this age of social media and digital distribution of advertising and content, it's easy to fall into the trap to think we're communicating to many, many people or to a pool of people instead of that individual.
RD: Thank you. Any parting words for the events and experience world for 2022 and beyond?
BK: Again, experiences are massively valuable coming out of this age of COVID, and I think in this age of digital as people are looking for that meaningful connection and people want to share those experiences online, to your point, I don't think that means that you have to have the intent of, how do I design an experience so people share it on social media? I think the pure act of, I want to design the best experience possible for this new age of disconnectedness, because of COVID, but also social media, people are really craving the aspect of getting out there and doing things in the real world. And that has massive value when it applies to taking that content and assets, and applying it to the online world.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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