RDC’s Bird’s Eye View series explores what the future of events truly is by bringing unexpected perspectives to the forefront.
Robyn caught up with Erick Brownstein, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Shareability, which takes a Hollywood approach to brand storytelling and is responsible for a ton of viral branded content. They discuss virality and what it means for events, planners, and producers moving forward, including why virality is so important when you're thinking about planning for your offline experience design, so that you can maximize your online media engagement
Watch or read the full interview below:
Robyn Duda: Erick, thank you so much for being part of Bird's Eye View. We've been talking for a couple of months, and you have some really great insights that I'd love to tap into. First off, tell us about you, how you got into what you're doing, and a little bit about Shareability.
Erick Brownstein: Thanks for having me. So, a little bit about me — a long and windy road to end up focusing on social media platforms and video. This is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to tell stories these days in terms of reaching people and connecting with people. The road to getting to this point — the highlights are journeying around the world in different places for a long time, catching the bug that being of service is probably the greatest aspiration that we can all have. Being of service can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It took me into a journey of the nonprofit world, environmental work and human rights work. Then, working with companies around what was the web and how could they figure out their place in that, and how did that tie to social impact. It was sort of this convergence of two different worlds. That led to the exploration of what they were calling web 2.0 back in the day, which was before they called it social media. It was web 2.0. So you had web 1.0, which was the read web, it was just information. Web 2.0 became what they called the read/write web. It was more interactive.
Then, that led to starting an agency called the New Agency, which was connecting brands and bigger agencies with marketing tech and other cool ways to connect with people, and then sprinkling some strategy fairy dust in the middle. In 2010, I was the Executive Director of the first Social Media Week in Los Angeles. I planted myself in the center of that emerging world, had about 85 events over a week in LA, thousands of people diving in to learn what the heck was going on. In early 2015, I joined up with a couple guys and started Shareability. It was one year after we reverse engineered winning an Oscar by using social media and video, so we drove 10 times more engagements on YouTube than all the other nominees combined, and my partner won an Oscar for best documentary short.
In 2015 we really started Shareability as a way to help brands figure out how to not make crappy commercials as a way to get their message out there. We focused on making viral videos with brands on YouTube, and we worked with all these different YouTubers. We cracked the code on how to do that, so we had dozens of videos that made it to the front page of YouTube and got millions, and tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of views, and the most shared ad in the world, and the most successful celebrity video in the world, and the most this and the most that. Then the company evolved from there. So that was the origin story to get to this place.
RD: Which is awesome. You and I chatted about what you do in experience and how that really fits into the traditional event world. Virality and creating shareable moments is something that I think is in a dream world. Everyone talks about pre, during, and post-event, but really it's much more than that, in my opinion. It's not just creating buzz before, having this event, and then recapping the video from the event afterward. It's truly creating something that is unique and different. I'd love to talk a little bit about your view of experience and experiential, and how that fits into creating something that is shareable afterward, that would last far beyond just sending the clips to the audiences that were there, or emailing the list that bought a ticket to the Museum of Ice Cream. I’d love your thoughts on where that's going and how Shareability is moving in that direction and where you think the future really lies there.
EB: A lot to unpack. You think of experiential as an event in time. You have this moment, like you said, you have before, during and after. So the people that are there get to have that experience. One way we always think about content in general, is how is that content or the stories that come out of something, going to reach as many people as possible? An event is just a source of content in my view. You have a place where there's people, so what can you capture there that could be so interesting that it not only goes to the people that were there, but it goes to the people that were there who then feel inspired to share it with other people? Or the people that are hosting the event or the brands that are sponsoring the event feel so inspired by that content that they really want to put some serious paid media and juice behind it, because they know, like a snowball at the top of the hill, the more people see it, the bigger it's going to get.
The idea of creating stuff that people care about, that's the lens that we look through in general. How do you provide people value is the underlying philosophy. If you think that a recap video from a conference is really valuable to people and that they're going to share that, great. I've never seen one that has done that. That’s not saying that that's not valuable and important, but it's certainly not going to be the thing that extends the reach, for one — and reach is one aspect — and then it's certainly not going to be the thing that drives engagement with the people that were there or the people that didn't have a chance to be there. So looking through that lens of reach and awareness and breaking through all the clutter, and breaking through all the noise because the internet is so noisy, Why are people going to pay any attention to something that you're putting out there? It has to be really good or valuable in some way. And then secondly, how are you going to engage them? How are you going to make them care enough about this thing that maybe they'll like it or comment on it, or ideally share it? That engagement piece is really at the heart of what we call this brand 3.0 framework.
The brand 3.0 framework is pretty simple, but it's really useful for thinking about how do we engage with people and activate people, and it starts with content and stories. So content is the first pillar. Community is the second, and then commerce is the third. So content, community commerce. This idea of using content that you can create from an event to inspire some sense of community, where people feel connected, and then that leads to some type of a transaction — whether it's a sale or the download of something, or some other action that you're asking people to take. So we can dive deeper into that community aspect, because it's not just the warm and fuzzy community center that we think about, but it's really a sense of connection amongst a group of people that are participating, either in the shorter term or over the longer term.
RD: I'd love to dive more into that. It’s a word that has been thrown around in events for a long time — “we’re creating community.” Everyone went on this community bandwagon years and years ago, but I don't think that's what they've truly been doing. They're using that word very haphazardly. Because you have a pool of people and you have their names that all have a common interest doesn't mean that they have a sense of belonging with you and your brand. What's the magic to creating community?
EB: It's super interesting because I think there's a massive evolution happening right now in the opportunity to create community. If web 1.0 was the read web, and web 2.0 was the read/write web, Web3, as we've been calling, is read, write, and own. Web3 now has provided people with a whole different opportunity to create community, actual platforms where people feel incentivized to participate because they actually can own and earn. This is a really interesting evolution to think about how can a brand or how can conference organizers start thinking about the tools that are available now to do that, and to build direct relationships with people, where a lot of other platforms are now being disintermediated because of that.
This is a great example that I just heard about, this what State Farm just did. You think about State Farm Insurance, like the most boring company in the world, they just did a big Web3 play, where they put virtual footballs all over the country. It was like a PokemonGo kind of experience. And these footballs, if you go around, you'd have to get close enough to them to capture them, they had all different things they gave to you. One might be a valuable NFT. One might be something that was just a fun piece of content. It was like a treasure hunt. But what was fascinating about it was that every time someone did that, they now established — because that person put that NFT in their wallet — they established the direct relationship with them. Something now that they can continue to build on by giving them more stuff. You imagine the budget they might have spent to go do a campaign somewhere, $500,000, maybe they give away something that's worth 10 bucks to each person. Could be a Starbucks card for all we know.
So that direct relationship, now they're starting to think, okay, what else can we do for this group of people? Can we give them access? Can we cut a deal with DIRECTV so we can get them a deal on Sunday football packs? All these things they can start to do to give them value, give them value, give them value, and now that community starts to build around State Farm, which is kind of absurd if you think about it. But that's where things can be going. And so, if you are a conference that is around a topic that is of interest to people, either personally and or professionally, you go, okay, here's where there can be a conversation that happens over time. And by the way, there's these new tools that we can start to use that build this direct relationship, which is on top of email, on top of SMS, on top of social platforms. It gets really interesting. The old community might be, I’m a guy walking down the street that says, ‘I'm a Ford guy.’ You’re walking the other way, and someone has ‘I'm a Chevy guy,’ and you're not in the same community of truck lovers. Or I'm Ram Nation, or whatever it may be. That was just identity, and you could serve them with stories and content and other things. But now you can start to imagine what does it really mean to foster community by bringing value in other ways beyond entertainment (which by the way is important)?
RD: Let's talk about some of the stuff, if you can, that you've been doing. There’s some examples of these offline moments and, in my mind, people spend millions and millions of dollars, whether it's an activation, something from a brand or if it's from a conference, they spend millions of dollars on these finite moments in time and they never do anything with it that's really productive. Are there any examples that you can cite for the audience that are a little more tangible? I think this seems like a very esoteric topic to a lot of folks, but it's not because it's being starting to be done more and more.
EB: I think a couple examples. One is just an event that we had with Forever21. It was the Summer Throwback party for Forever 21. We rented a big mansion and basically used what normally would have been a pretty traditional retail type activation, where you just have a party, and you have some influencers there and so on. We just took it up a notch, and the up a notch was that there were seven different stations throughout the house. And each one was really fun and unique and different, and really well branded. So all the influencers that were coming there, although they were capturing content themselves, or using let's say, the selfie station or whatever it was, and it was all heavily branded — Forever 21 was freaking everywhere — they were doing it because it was fun and valuable to them. It was a really cool experience. So the next thing you know, we invited 200 influencers and 600 showed up and we had our line down the street, we have guards keeping people out and so on. Just imagining that each of these stations provided people an opportunity to capture content, share it with their friends, tag their friends, and so the thing just went explosive because of that. Super simple.
So when you’re thinking of an experiential event of another kind, whether it's a conference, etc. what are the things that you could do there that are so fun or interesting or cool that everyone there is going to want to capture that and share it. It could be something that is very topic related or work related or B2B related, but it's just so cool that they've got to post it to LinkedIn or share it with friends or whatever. Giving ways to people extend to extend the experience is something that just takes some creativity and a little bit of investment. What I've mentioned to you is that we haven't done a lot of experiential events in general. What we've done a ton of is capturing people in real life in unexpected ways. This is also something that I think can extend to a conference or an experiential type of event, where people think they're going to do something, but then they're given something completely different or something totally unexpected. And the gold of social media is authentic reactions, emotional reactions. How you can do that at an event, once again, it becomes a creative exercise. What can you do there that maybe is the tentpole moment of the event? You can only get one shot at it, it’s something that different people get to experience, but it's really captured as what we would call a hero video. Which is something that can be quote unquote, viral and super engaging.
RD: A surprise and delight moment, an unexpected, oh shit, capturing the genuine human element of reaction.
EB: Yeah. So I'll give you one example. One of my favorite videos we did was called hashtag winning. Basically we set it up on the promenade in Santa Monica, and we have this wheel with different numbers on it from 50 down to 5. We had people a block away screening people coming down the promenade saying, “Hey, do you want to do something really cool? You get to spin this wheel.” And then we have them sign something saying we’re going to film it. They have no idea what's going to happen, but that's our way of making sure that the people that we capture we’ll be able to use in the video. It's a bit of a prescreen also. So anyway, people come down, there's a host, he's got a microphone, he’s really fun. He says, you're going to win something. So they spin the wheel, and it lands on the 50. And in the essence of it was, Okay, you can take that 50 bucks, or you can give it away to a stranger. Remarkably, or maybe not, of the eight people we did it with, only one person was like, Oh, I'll take the 50. So what happened was, these people took the money and say, Oh, I'll give it to him. And we say, “You know what? Because you're so awesome, we're going to take that 50 and multiply it by 10. So you actually get to go give a stranger $500.” And so all of a sudden, they just look around, and they go give someone $500. And the person's reaction, as you can imagine, is like “What the F is going on?” And then we go to the person afterwards and ask what was that like? “I mean, it was so beautiful. This person there, they really needed that money.” And we said, “Well that was so awesome. For that, you get $500 too.” And it was just this beautiful, heartfelt, amazing thing. So you think, to your point, what does that surprise and delight moment look like in the context of an event? Where you can run something that's relevant to whatever the topic is, but has that same emotional impact? Now, when that video goes out to the world, let's say the brand, the experience, the event, gets a lot of credit for bringing all the feels and the feel good.
RD: It doesn't have to be so literal and direct all the time. I think that gets lost sometimes, like “I don't understand how my brand can do this,” but like you said with State Farm, there are ways around this to creating a connection with a brand that aren't necessarily, do you need insurance, do you need X, Y, and Z?
EB: And so much of this world and why brands matter to people is just emotional. I think it’s a Maya Angelou quote, something like, “Tell me something, and maybe I'll remember you, make me feel something, and I'll always remember.” So brands have this opportunity to bring good feeling to people, for one, and then as we were talking about before, with this Web3, they can actually bring real value. They can just give people gifts. That's a really nice way to get people to pay attention. There was a campaign that Amazon did years ago with Reddit, and they basically gave $1 Amazon gift cards to 100,000 people, and I'm probably getting the actual campaign wrong, but pretty much everybody took the gift card. And then at the end they said Okay, now what we're going to do is let's give those gift cards away, and let's vote on the organization that gets all of the gift cards. So it was going to be like a $100,000 giveaway to some cause.
But this idea of giving people something very tangible is an evolution. And at conferences now, and this is something talking about that bridge between the real world and the virtual world, is you give people a barcode that they can scan as a gift when they walk in to that experience, everybody's going to scan that barcode. Because you're giving them something that goes into their wallet, now you have this direct relationship with them. And by the way, it's also an invitation, let's say, to this metaverse or virtual world, where they can have access to other things and access to content that maybe is behind the locked door.
RD: You and I have talked a little bit in the past about the metaverse and how that plays into stuff. Any thoughts? When it comes to your part of the world, are we walking or running?
EB: I think we're crawling very fast, moving to walking and into running. The metaverse is so interesting because so many people, like me, are not native to that virtual experience. Versus people that play multiplayer games and they're just comfortable in that world. Someone like me just does not get it. I have zero comfort interacting with people in a virtual world. It feels very clunky. On Zoom. I'm like, I can look you in the eyes, and although it's two dimensional, it feel more real. When I'm running around in this virtual world, I'm like, I don't know what the hell's going on here. This this is not my experience that I'm used to. And so some old farts like me, it's going to take a while to get comfortable in that space. But the technology is expanding and getting better, and you have these amazing platforms where you can go from station to station, and get audio that feels real and so on. So without a doubt, it's going to continue, and I think the more that brands look at it through that lens of, this isn't a replacement, but if you're in this world, you're going to actually get something you don't get in the real world. We're going to give you access, we're going to give you things, that is a real incentive to pull people in, who then start to experience it and start to feel more comfortable in it.
RD: I agree with you. I think we need to figure out what our plan is. We should be thinking long term, I think that it's in a three-to-five-year plan. I think it has to be, because there's a lot of development that has to go behind a lot of these things. It's not an overnight, flip on a switch and I'm there.
EB: It's also, by the way, who's your audience. If your audience is somewhat techie, and skews in that same demo that plays a lot of online games, they're going to be that much more ready to jump in.
RD: Last question — I always ask this for the folks who are trying to strategize, and you’re a strategy guy in this space, I guess a piece of advice moving into 2022 and thinking about 2023 — in your opinion, it doesn't have to be directly related to events, but what's one piece of advice and one thing you're really keeping your eye on, that the event world should really know and think about?
EB: I’d say two pieces of advice. One is the obvious one, just because we keep talking about it, is the Web3 opportunity, and looking through that lens of direct relationships. To me, that's so important. And how you do that, how do you build direct relationships where you're disintermediating a lot of the platforms? You're no longer dependent on Facebook, you're no longer dependent on any other social platform to reach your folks, and you’re building on top of things like email, SMS, and so on. That just feels like a crucial exploration, and I think there's so much noise, it's hard to find the signal. The noise is speculation of art and NFTs, and who could spend $60 million on a Beeple, and this is crazy, and this is insane. Why would I want to run around like Grand Theft Auto in a conference, it makes no sense. There's something that's very important looking through that community lens. And so just starting to spend the time and the energy to understand why it's important. Every publication out there now is starting to explain why does Web3 matter? What is that on ramp for people to start to wrap their heads around it? And not jump in and spend a lot of money and do something that's not really going to pay off. Starting to think about what that roadmap looks like.
RD: The more I'm seeing is authenticity and authentic moments. I think in the event world, with this massive amount of virtual stuff that's going out, it is so overly scripted and perfected that every moment needs to be perfect. It feels very disingenuous and not real to me. Everything is highly, highly produced in a very boring way, and I think that we know from Tik Tok and where that's going, the rise of people wanting actual, authentic people in front of them, telling them about things that relate to them is a huge movement. I mean, it's not even a movement anymore. It's here.
EB: You hit on the authenticity piece, and that was going to be my second piece. Authenticity in storytelling, and creating content, is what makes it work on social. Everyone's bullshit detectors are so perfectly attuned to an advertising message that they can smell it a mile away. And as soon as you smell advertising, you're like, they’re trying to sell me something, all the blinders go up, and all this protection goes because we're getting bombarded thousands of times a day, so we have to do that. So the lens of authentic storytelling, and authentic engaging, and valuable content, is something that, as you mentioned upfront, how does an event organizer or a brand participating in real life event start to imagine, what is the content that is really going to be valuable for people? What is it that they can't get on their own? What is it that through that lens of storytelling, engagement, emotional connection, as well as being informative, where does that opportunity lie? And that that is not something that comes easily to anybody. Being a great storyteller is hard. Who are the partners to be able to guide the organizers or the brands through that experience? And it becomes a “Hey, what are our goals? What are our objectives?” It becomes very much of a brand brief that people are accustomed to. Here's the sandbox that we can play it. It's going to be this physical location over these days. And we need to figure out what is the output from that, from a big tentpole video to programming content across social, to content that can live on their website, to you name it.
RD: That's fantastic advice, Erick. Thank you so much. You're a fountain of knowledge, so I appreciate you coming on and giving us some advice.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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