Ex-TikTok CMO (Spotlight): Your 90-Day Campaign Cycle Is Killing You

0:00If you think about the original playbook, it's you have this objective and sometimes they say increase brand recognition, drive brand awareness, do whatever these things are. And then the way they go about doing it traditionally is you take your team, you come up with your objective, you then develop like a strategy against that. You then brief your creative agency with your business objectives. They come back with your creative campaign. You then go produce that creative campaign. You go buy media against it and then you deploy that. and then you hope that it ends up working out after this two to three month cycle has gone through that process.

0:34Nick Tran:Yeah, which still sounds normal for today. Yeah, but it's not going to work anymore. Okay, okay. Yeah, because the world moves so quickly and people don't consume content in the way that this model was built for. They're consuming most of it in the world of social in short form. That if you engineer everything in this manner, by the time it gets to market, the stuff that you were relying on to be relevant no longer matters to people. So what we had to do at TikTok was realize that the strength of the brand was in proving the point that culture starts on the platform. And I can't prove that culture starts on the platform if I'm going through that whole process and then showing you something two months later.

1:15And then you thinking, well, that happened so long ago. You clearly aren't on top of what's happening in culture. I should go find out what's happening on other platforms. so the way that we reversed engineered everything is like okay if people see certain signals as being indicators that something has gone viral or is culturally relevant let's just take those as the actual objectives so one of the things i found out was that people thought that if you became famous on the platform that would mean that the platform had done what it's supposed to do and that culture starts there so i would have that as a little box okay how do i make someone famous next little check was like okay if you were to take a viral you know video what would that look like and how does success manifest itself for that person well they'd end up on like a late night talk show talking to like Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel or whoever it is and that means that okay that viral video is so significant that they ended up on a talk show and then seeing it in culture whether it's parodies on SNL or parodies through other creators or celebrities these are all like indicators that something was truly viral.

2:23So what I told the team at the time was if those are our new inputs and those aren't just outcomes of being successful, let's just reverse engineer everything to win those and see if we could condense the campaign timeline from two or three months down to 72 hours with the main goal of getting someone to show up on late night, have someone have a video that is parodied by a bunch of celebrities and then ultimately making that person famous. And then if you actually think about that, if you have the resources, you can actually engineer that all together without needing it to actually be done on its own.

2:58So you can actually make your own morality. So we did that a few times. We called it Project Cheetah. And we ultimately came up with a bunch of campaigns that took 72 hours to bring to life, checked all those boxes and made a lot of people very well known throughout the US leveraging different mechanisms as placing them in the TV, late night TV talk shows, or buying advertising that would put them in front of millions of Americans every night, or doing those things that would help them become famous. Or even in one case, executive producing a film that allows one of the biggest TikTok stars of the time to actually be in a film to show that they transcended social media culture and are now in real films.

3:35So like all those things were stuff that we were playing with. And again, like working backwards and flipping the playbook upside down.

3:41Nick Tran:Wow. I mean, one, it's amazing thinking about having a KPI, but then also knowing you can hit that KPI internally. Yeah, of course. But when you come up with those metrics, I mean, how did you figure out like those are the ones that matter? Did you, yeah, tell me about the thinking behind that, like especially coming to agreement on, yes, those are the goals. I don't know if there was ever like full fledged agreement. I think it was just instinctively what we thought mattered. And it turns out it was the case. The other one that people love to see as an indicator is if a creator started to get a lot of brand deals, it meant that they were successful and that they had gone beyond the world of just social.

4:19So we would also help push a lot of our clients and partners to then partner with certain creators and do brand deals. So yeah, those were all things that we did early days to try to engineer the idea that culture starts on the platform. But yeah, it wasn't as complex as you might think. It was just like a few of us discussing, well, what are the things that people look at and what are signals that, you know, the platform is successful? And we also took what YouTube had done up until then and then where they kind of like plateaued and then thought like, what would that evolution have looked like if the YouTube stars of, you know, a decade ago had actually transcended culture and became mainstream?

4:55Like that was sort of where we were also noodling around and brainstorming.

5:00Nick Tran:Yeah. I love the idea of finding the signals. I mean, it seems like this could work for any company. I mean, B2B, B2C, like figuring out like what would actually look like success for our customer? What would make them feel like the hero? How do we reverse engineer it and actually make sure it happens? And I mean, have other companies come to you and asked you to help them? I assume they're gonna be like, hi, come over here and do the same thing. Not as many as you'd think. And ironically, there are some brands that I was just obsessed with where I'd reach out and say, I know what you're dealing with.

5:32I know what you're trying to accomplish. Let me just come in and help. Um, I know the platform in and out and they would just basically ignore me, which I was shocked by. But then there are other folks that were like, we know, you know how to do this. Um, can you either consult or help us build this? And my realization during this like sabbatical that I took was that a lot of agencies will tell clients, they know how to do this. And when I see their methodology, I instinctively know that they're just throwing spaghetti on the wall and they don't actually know. So I made it a point to reach out to some of my friends who are either CEOs or presidents or CMOs of different companies and say, hey, I'm taking a little bit of time off, but I think I could train your team internally to learn how to do what we did in three to four months.

6:23And the whole proposition was, let me help you do that in that time frame and help you become less reliant on your agencies or on paid media, specifically paid social. And sure enough, it ended up working for a lot of these folks. So it was a fun time just teaching and training up folks. I think the same thing can be applied to long form content. So right now you're seeing this shift where a lot of the short form stuff that you're seeing in market is starting to evolve into brands taking a risk and doing longer form content. And they're either putting it out on their social channels or on YouTube, or in some cases, even piloting their own little mini series and shows.

7:00So I think that there's probably a way in today's world where you could take those learnings that I had from being at these various companies and then teaching brands how to do it internally, rather than them relying on an agency to do it in perpetuity, and then getting those learnings and being able to be self-sufficient and put money into doing more fun things than just putting it into a retainer. So I definitely believe that there's a new era where brands can take a little bit of the responsibility and bring the creativity and the short form and the long form creation in

7:33Nick Tran:house, just learn how to do it and then just run it on their own. Yeah. Okay. So if you were to go into, let's say a larger company now, what does that look like working with a team? What things are you having to train them on? What are things that you didn't think you'd have to train them on? Like, how does it, yeah. How does it work? I mean, I'm going through it right now. Like I'm starting, you know a new role as um now president and cmo of first round which is a joint venture with diageo and main street advisors and in this you're certainly battling some of the you know idea of well this is how it's been done in this industry and this is what works and this is what we need to be playing into and it's no surprise that i recruited a couple folks that are you know people who've worked with me at either tiktok or samsung or hulu and who have that appetite for one taking risks, two, moving quickly, and then three, recognizing that my biggest advantage, which I've leveraged here and there throughout my career, but I'm really doing it now, our network and group of friends that we've been able to do some fun things with throughout my career, they're now coming and reaching out and saying, I love the way that you think about things.

8:43Would you want to partner with one of your brands now and create something really special? and that's where it's unlocking a lot of possibilities that I didn't know these brands had before because people are actually proactively reaching out and saying I want to partner with Ciroc or I want to partner with Lobo 1707 and I want to do something that's innovative and fun that hasn't been done before and we know you know how to do that so can we leverage the partnership that we might have to bring some of that to life and that's some of the stuff that we're working on so a lot of it is unlearning the marketing approaches of the past and ensuring that you enable the team to feel confident enough to like move quickly and make some mistakes, but also get a lot of wins along the way.

9:21And then, and then, you know, realistically building up a culture internally where people are having fun and developing work, because when you have fun doing it, the work just feels different than if you're like afraid, anxious, and just trying to make sure you don't fail. So we're working on all that stuff right now.

9:38Nick Tran:So fun. Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned unlearning. What are maybe five things in marketing that marketing leaders should unlearn right now? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's quite a bit. I think traditional campaign timelines are just out the window. If you're still using that playbook, regardless of the industry you're in, I think you're gonna be just a bit behind when it comes to what's happening in culture and what's relevant. You said five, so I'm gonna actually try to do five. Yeah, I get it. Um, second one I'd say is people were chasing the things that they can measure so aggressively that they started to actually build out processes and put things in place that just yielded better numerical numbers, but didn't actually move the needle on the business.

10:28So at a superficial level for social media, people were saying, let's drive up engagement. Let's try to make sure we get all the views and all the likes and all the comments and whatever else there might be, only to find out that you could be amazing on Twitter slash X slash TikTok and see no impact to your sales. Right. So that's like second thing where they're chasing things. Even the ones that are chasing metrics that look like they're ROI positive. I think it could go down a pretty dark hole quickly where I had an example where I won't say the company, but this one company, they were spending money in Mexico on paid search and driving a lot of what they called ROI.

11:12One quick look at what they were doing made me realize that the team had now been optimizing towards spend in Mexico because whenever they quote unquote put a dollar in, they'd get$4 back. So in that paid world, it looked really ROI positive. What they completely neglected was that there was no competition in Mexico. So they were essentially a monopoly in that specific country. And every dollar they put in was a dollar wasted because all those customers were going to go to that one site to buy that one thing anyways, because there was no one else they could buy from. So it's so interesting that a CMO will see those results and the paid search team will see that impact and they're getting bonus stuff of efficiency and ROI.

11:55and they're showing their boss or their manager, like, look how great we're doing. And the boss is like, I can put that in front of the CFO and justify more spend for the marketing department. Let's go in on that. That they are now doing something that's actually diluting their value and not investing in the things that will build their brand and build the value over time because they're chasing these short-term metrics that they think are yielding ROI. So that's definitely one that I think is not great. So that's three. I think places that focus on all these elements that are outside the walls and don't take effort into like building up the culture inside are also doomed to fail.

12:34I've heard so many companies over the last few years, especially post-COVID and this whole return to office situation, take like such a hard stance and forget about the employees and like the stuff that they have to do. I hear these new lines out in the LinkedIn world where it's like, there is no work-life balance. Or you have to love what you do. All this is a little bit overwhelming. And I think this idea of needing to be on all the time and always be working and grinding and hustling, I don't know if that's what's going to drive greatness or the best creative or the best success. So that's probably number four.

13:13Now I've got to think of a fifth one. You're doing great, by the way. close to number five. I think what is another thing that CMOs are chasing that they shouldn't be chasing? Oh, I don't know if this fits with your answer, but I'm going to throw it out there. I think CMOs also are reluctant to take the top spot in businesses and in companies. So they sell themselves and their team short because for marketers, you now see the CMO suite or the office as being the end game. And I don't think people realize COOs, CFOs, and those folks that traditionally take on the CEO job, their jobs haven't changed that much in the last 10 years.

13:56Like a CFO is still doing what most CFOs had done 10 years ago. When I look at like what a CMO does today, the job has evolved so much. We have to account for are so many new factors like how people consume content, what's happening in culture, what matters to people, all these macro trends that are feeding into it and really changing the way that we think about what we do and looking at data and customer insights and performance marketing and the balance of brand and all these elements that I feel like the best leaders for tomorrow will actually be the ones that had to deal with all those inconsistencies and evolve over time and make those changes that I would love to see more marketers step up into the helm of and then lead a company.

14:38And we have some great examples today of a few that are doing it and doing it incredibly well. And I think if we can continue to see that trend, you'll see a lot more heart and empathy and brand brought to life in a way that I think would look bold for 2026, but actually should just be table stakes.