How to Navigate Social Media with Nick Tran, President & CMO of First Round, ex-TikTok & FARFETCH | Ep. 403

0:00Today's episode is brought to you by customer.io. You have customer data, but turning it into personalized marketing at scale? That's the hard part. Customer.io connects the dots. Feed it your data, start sending messages that actually feel personal. Learn more at customer.io slash TMM. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. What's up? Welcome back to the Market Millennials Podcast.

0:50I'm here with Nick Tran. Nick has a cool history and I'm going to let him talk a little bit about it, but he didn't want to put on his Seagull and Stable hat that he has at home. And we're also repping the same mic. So we're kind of like twinning today on the podcast for those people who are not seeing the video of this. So I'm excited to get talking, but Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Daniel. I'm excited to be here. And yes, I was contemplating running down and grabbing my Segal and Stable hat, but I feel like I've repped it quite a bit recently. So since you're already wearing it, I'll just leave it to you to rep.

1:24I want to like set up this conversation because you have a very cool career path. I just want you to go a little bit into the career path so people get a sense because you've been really ahead in culture, ahead on social media, ahead in trends and a lot of your roles reflect that. So could you go a little bit of like your background and then we'll go into the conversation. Yeah, I'll start with the whole reason I ended up going down the path I did. So my dream job is to go back to teach. If I can go back and teach marketing at an MBA program, that's gonna be sort of the pinnacle of my career. And with that in mind, I've always thought about each destination as being a case study, which is why I try to go to different industries, with every pit stop that I make along the career journey.

2:12And what started out in food and bed with Taco Bell kind of then went to apparel with Stance and then consumer electronics with Samsung and then media entertainment with Hulu and then Disney and then social platforms slash entertainment platforms with TikTok. And then I had a brief stint at Farfetch, which is a e-commerce and luxury platform overall. So really had the opportunity to run the gamut in terms of industries with the main through line being that every place I went to ended up being in some crazy crisis and needing to like dig in and work with a team to get through that is what really shaped my marketing career to date.

2:48Yeah. I mean, all these brands are, were like head of the curve, culturally relevant, like stance. I remember 10 years ago, everybody had stance stocks, stance stocks were everywhere. And then they went to stance boxers and everybody had against boxers and it was just like, it was like everywhere. And still it's culturally relevant with like Gen Z, which is cool to see. Um, but I want to, I want to talk about how you have seen like media progress over the years. Like what has shifted in the last few years in like the media, social media landscape? I mean, we'll break that down into two components because the media landscape I think has evolved and that sort of ushered in this new wave of social media, which you call out and even that's starting to evolve.

3:32So starting with the media landscape, it's been amazing to see how the barriers of entry for new brands to break through used to be the media buy, right? So I remember a time when it was very difficult for startups, like when I was at Stance, to find a way to really cut through when you had all the incumbent apparel brands outspend us, you know, 100 to 1 or 10 to 1 on all the different media channels. So like TV, radio, print, out of home, you name it. Like they had it covered. And when you're a small brand, you had to find ways to challenge those brands in a way that you could actually afford.

4:10That became the biggest constraint. So at Stance, you know, we were able to find those little niches in social and also through partnerships and influencers and ultimately carve a path for us to scale that business to not only, as you mentioned, do well in socks, but then break into boxer, boxer briefs, and then eventually shirts. What we've seen now is as social media has evolved to provide this new mechanism or algorithm for content distribution, you no longer need to buy your way into people's feeds. It's actually better to find ways to improve your content and then eventually get into the feeds organically.

4:53So what used to be a barrier is no longer an issue and it's become a little bit more of an even playing field for brands who are just starting to just dominate on the content scene, really drive the engagement and then boost their awareness, which is why we're seeing so many brands that weren't around three to five years ago now having billion dollar valuations. So that's definitely one thing that's changing that I think is fascinating for the smaller brands that are starting to come up, like the Siegelmans of the world. How can they break through? It's going to be through content and not through just straight media buying.

5:24on that note too is like where media buying is just getting harder because everybody knows targeting now there's going to be ai that could automatically do that and the one thing that you can win on is straight creative and creative is the way to win in creative is be good at organic first and know how it works in an organic feed before it works in a paid feed because it works in organic it's going to probably work in pay yeah but then to take that about even further people who are okay and organic are now learning the tips and the tricks and using AI to hack their way to optimize their content like the actual creative so as that bar raises all content that's being delivered will start to feel a little bit more of the same because people are using very similar and templated hooks people are using very similar formats you know they're using the same influencers.

6:20They're using the same elements and the ingredients to make compelling content, which makes me believe that in a, you know, near future, we're going to get to the point where you're going to want to leave those feeds and find new ways to engage with your favorite brands or your favorite creators or your favorite, you know, social media folks or whatever it might be. Let's actually dig a little bit deep into that. I know you have a phrase, the end of everything feed, but also what do you see if this starts to hit a peak of like saturation of content that everybody knows how to win on those platforms?

6:55You could just type in Mr. B's hooks and AI will give you 50 ,000 like Mr. B's hooks that you can use for your own. So what does that look like in five to 10 years? What should marketers today be thinking about what their content to not only stay relevant in feeds right now, but also plan for like feeds in the future or like beyond the feed. Yeah. I mean, I can share that with an analogy to start with, and then we can go back to the actual point that you made. But have you ever played around on Canva or do you use Canva at all? All the time, but yeah, I'm a meme guy. So I love just putting it in a meme.

7:36Okay, so imagine the world pre-Canva where the real barrier was the visual aesthetic or the design. So if someone came in with an incredibly well-designed deck, you could almost get by with having the content or the substance itself be okay or passable. but if it was just like visually incredible, you know, like how many agencies one accounts just based on like the design of the deck. That's sort of how it used to be. Now with Canva, I would say everyone almost has an even playing field. So it's going back to the substance, right? And not just like the visual aesthetic and the design of it all.

8:19It's a very similar parallel to where I see content because as people are able to use tools to create, to your point, like memes or actually generate videos at scale that leverage all the right hooks and all the right links and all the right filters and all the right songs or whatever it is, you're going to see all of that, you know, kind of being like you're seeing a bunch of well-designed, you know, presentation decks right now to the point where people will actually have to dig into the content and identify like what they actually want to watch and not just watch what the algos are pushing to them because it met all the criteria that's able to hack into their, you know, the way into their feed.

8:59Yeah. I mean, that's a really good analogy. I also think about every, like a lot of aspects of marketing, how you can get away with a stuffed blog post for like SEO to win on that. And now you actually have to write like a really good piece of content. That's right. Even be seen. A lot of marketers are very good at hacking the way, even with paid social for a long time, you can hack your way just by better targeting, like better lists. And your creative could have been average and you could win because you knew exactly where to put your creative in front of the right person to win. Now, you can't do that anymore.

9:38Yeah. But that to me is a huge opportunity for creative because, you know, as people optimize and continue to sort of like raise the floor, I think there's an opportunity for people to really create work that has substance, where the content is incredibly, you know, innovative or unique, and it tells a perspective or point of view that gets people excited again. So I'm almost happy or excited to see what happens next. I'm not looking at this as like a negative or like the industry is doomed. I'm more so thinking that this might, you know, unleash a new era of creativity and allow people to really get back into the substance rather than just like the aesthetic of it all.

10:17I know you were at TikTok like pretty early stage of where it was scaling in the US. And one thing that was like really noticeable like in the COVID time is people really connected with the creators on the platform. But now we're in a phase where you could watch 30 videos and not remember one creator that was behind the video. So what is driving this like the connection like the loss of connection to creators and loss of the connection to the actual people behind like some videos? Yeah, I don't have like a necessarily like an exact answer. I'd say like I have my perspective, but not too different from what we were talking about earlier.

11:04When TikTok was first scaling, each creator or TikTok, you know, influencer that started to really find success had that niche or that specific passion area that they were obsessed with and they would just showcase that on the platform. That was driven by this idea that it doesn't matter what you made, if the audience was there, which typically there was, the algorithm would be able to take your content and put it in front of the right audiences and then see that success scale, right? As far as the views and everything. Right now, I think we're getting to a point where there's a little bit less unique, you know, content being pushed out and it's less original and it's more taking inspiration from another creator.

11:52And instead of even just doing like a remix, that's more in your voice, people are just literally taking that exact idea and then just putting it back out of the feeds. So you might see the same exact viral video done a hundred different ways from a hundred different people. And I think when you have that start to happen, it dilutes the impact that that individual, you know, creator used to have. And it's making you not really care to remember who that last creator you saw was because you just seeing them as one of a sea of many who are doing the exact same trend. Like for example, you know, how many different suspect challenge videos did you see?

12:28Right? Like I've seen like hundreds and now are they all fun? Sure. But can I specifically recall which creator either started that trend or which creator, you know, had the best version of that suspect challenge? Like, no, I have no idea because it was just like another version that I maybe saw for that brief moment in time. And then immediately went on and saw another, which then made me forget about, you know, the previous one. So I think as you see creators just start to mimic and produce content that drives engagement, but doesn't really have as much originality, you're going to start to like lose interest in the creator themselves, which is also why I think we're going to hit that peak social moment and people are going to want to find the real creators that they're, you know, obsessed with or interested in versus what the feed is just pushing in front of them because it's like a similar templar style that they've seen before.

13:17But on the flip side too, I think this has helped brands and artists because they're pushing out the same audio or like they're sharing like the same product. So at the flip side that if someone's doing like a viral like recipe trend, all those things are going to go the brand is actually in the front for the front of that not the creators because like nobody's going to remember that like you said that first person but they're going to go out to trader joe's or um target and go buy all those things same with these songs where like every week there's like a new song that's going viral like benson boom pop popping up just because of tiktok is because creators are repeating each song and doing trends and it's just making these creators, I mean, people outside the feed be more famous than inside the feed.

14:10Yeah, but that's where I actually find it really interesting because when I was at TikTok, one of the things that we wanted to try to do was drive a TikTok creator to true A-list celebrity status. That was sort of the goal because we wanted to be able to take the limits of where we saw YouTube influencers and really try to like, you know, leapfrog that and allow our creators to break through in culture and actually drive culture. What you use as the example of Benson Boone, I think is interesting because there's a difference between stars that are amplified through social and maybe like pick up their audience more quickly.

14:49But my argument would have been that like Benson Boone was still going to be Benson Boone and he was still going to be a star irregardless of the platform. The platform might have just helped an audience find him a little bit more efficiently or quickly. That's very different than a social media star that maybe wasn't going to be a Benson Boone who attracted a significant following because they were able to get on the platform earlier or hack into the way to drive engagement and create that content. my hunch is that as those people or folks in general are becoming less differentiated because so many others can just copy that exact same concept or idea and there's nothing that's going to be like substantively different between them you're going to start to see the separation between a normal influencer and the quote-unquote like Benson Boons of the world who are so incredibly talented that it almost doesn't matter what environment you put them in they're going to stand out.

15:45So we'll see a little bit more of that. Now imagine a world where, you know, a platform decides to create a version of TikTok, let's say, that not only highlighted new and emerging artists, but also allowed you to transact and buy tickets to their show or their, you know, album and their merch and be able to experience, you know, something, you know, within that platform. Like I think the idea of community commerce and content all in one place that's within a specific category, I think will be a lot more compelling in the near future than like a, you know, all encompassing fee that just feeds you a bunch of stuff that you may not be as interested in.

16:30Yeah. I mean, Spotify kind of tried it a little bit, but nobody really knows that you could see like events near you and go look at their events or buy their merch on there. and you just listen to the song but it's kind of funny that they have that i want to also go so i'm just thinking from like a marketer's point of view now so like if the feeds are getting very diluted everybody's doing trends um what is like the next stage what should marketers be thinking about like if they should they be on social should they think about beyond social like what are the what would you recommend to like a marketer running a marketing a small company that's trying to compete, they're getting.

17:13So what would you recommend to them? Yeah, I still think we're, you know, at least a couple years out from this environment that I was sort of alluding to. You know, today, you still want to be where all the people are. And the dominant platforms, you know, with it, with IG and with TikTok, are still going to be places that marketers should and will continue to play in. I think they're going to want to figure out how to optimize their content. I get this idea of like, okay, there's a trend. So we're going to jump on a trend so that we can get some engagement. If you are a brand that can't take the trend and remix it to add your brand's perspective on that and make it make sense for the audience to say like, this is the value that the brand is bringing to this trend, or this is why the brand is providing this perspective, then it's sort of like almost a vanity play where you might get a million views, but it might not actually amount to anything.

18:17I think if brands can figure out how to add value to the trend or remix it so that it makes sense coming from them in that manner and the audience is actually like wanting to see it, then it becomes a much more interesting opportunity for them. But, you know, with that said, you know, where should marketers play? I feel like there's going to be this huge push towards experiential and more like in real life opportunities to interact and engage with audiences. I think there's going to be, you know, hopefully some innovation because like, as you know, people start to use AI tools and become more efficient, they should be spending their time thinking of like how to be, you know, a level up from where the competitive set is.

19:00So like, I think there's gonna be a lot of innovation, but a lot of stuff that'll take you outside of screens and back into the real world in order to engage in a more like meaningful way. Like the number of brands that I've seen do these pop-up activations that just crush and also provide social content, I think is like an easy evolution of what we see as social now. Yeah, because I mean, as people are more and more in touch with their phones, they're gonna be more and more craving in real world connection and real world stuff. I also see a lot of brands going into more developing niche, like closed algorithm communities where they can take people off algorithms into their own community that has a feed to their own type of feed, but also has an in real life component where you can meet up like run clubs and stuff like that, where it's like you're taking them off.

19:55You have a social component, but then they have that in real life group chat that everybody loves is interest-based. They come together. I think we'll see a lot of that because activities that don't require social, but that can build up a community through social, will eventually be more robust off platforms and outside of the screens. I think it'll be really nuanced to see how much those tactics get replicated. Because once you see a few brands gain success, it's pretty fair to say that a lot of bigger brands then jump in, but then it becomes not as cool. And so then the more nimble, smaller brands then iterate and they find the next thing.

20:42And then you find the larger brands then start to chase the new thing. So it's an endless cycle. I think if brands can just lean into what their core community, you know, finds of value, they'll likely find a path to success. i also think what's working real well too and i would like to get your perspective on this is like the creators and brands who use social like serialized way where you have like the stod guy who has like yeah his bit and like because you you want to go back to the bit instead of going back to the trend like you want to go back to like a show and i see good brands doing that type of thing.

21:26So what are your thoughts on like people like now producing like small TV show, like content instead of that? Yeah. I love that. I think that's where brands are providing a unique, you know, way into content and whether it's a guy who is such an incredible, uh, creator because, you know, he, he's taken one, I guess, character and then developed a whole second character because of the success of the first character and then created a brand out of the first character. But he also has an opportunity to expand that portfolio to hit a different audience with the second character. So, you know, you're going to see a lot of folks that are able to build up audiences because their content is just so entertaining and engaging and fun.

22:13And I, you know, to your point, I don't see that being a type of, you know, content or the type of creator that's just jumping on a trend. They're literally creating something original and something unique and something that's only delivered by them, which is where I see brands should be taking lessons from and developing their version of that. Because it all started with soap brands creating 20-minute soap operas or whatever the timeframe was back in the day. And we're now getting back into the era where I think brands can dive in and create their own branded content in a way that's actually entertaining and engaging or inspiring and surface that on platforms that don't require a fee to be distributed on.

22:55So the fact that like the cost to distribute stuff on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram is free and you can do it at scale because the content is being fed through the algos to the people that want to see it. I don't see why brands, you know, would rather spend money to interrupt you while you're watching something that you want to watch versus spending that money and investing it into making their own thing that actually you would want to watch because that's sort of the best relationship and engagement that you could have with a brand. So my hope is that more marketers take cues from the creators that are really developing unique and original content.

23:32And instead of just chasing the trends or doing that TikTok challenge or whatever it might be, just really thinking like, how can we bring unique and original content to life in a short form format that allows people to not only feel more inspired by the brand, but also understand the value that the brand brings to them. Here's a question for you, because I know you said at the beginning of the podcast that you have been on, you've been every brand that you were with were kind of in a hole and you kind of like you had to dug them out of a hole or some sort of problem they were facing. So if you went to a new brand right now, you were like the CMO, like what are some like, and they were in a hole, What are your one, two, three steps that you would start with to think about getting them out of that hole?

24:22Because you've been five different industries, so you've done it for the playbook. Yeah. Actually, I love that question. I don't think anyone's asked me that before. I'm thinking about that all the time, and I'm taking out a new challenge that is going to force me to do exactly what you just said. and for me it starts with really understanding what the brand proposition is like what the value is that this brand can bring to its it's you know core audience it doesn't be like massive like that core audience and i used to have a mentor slash teacher it was someone that used to run insights at taco bell who then became a professor at uc irvine and the way that he broke down the insights was very clean to me.

25:14So it was like either a human insight, brand insight, product insight, or an occasional insight. Those are sort of like the four ways that marketers could think about how their brand slash product or service brings value. If we can distill what that offering is from a brand and then identify that way in, what I actually find is that most companies or brands don't know what their actual mission is, what their target audience is, what the insight is that they're leveraging to reach these folks and how their brand can make a difference and bring value to those consumers. They sort of either like hit one of those things and found success and they just double or triple down on that without looking at the overall ecosystem.

25:57So typically what I like to do when I come into a brand is do a quick audit, understand what are the elements within that like brand operating system or that like brand DNA, and then essentially build that, mount that out. So once I have that, I sort of use that as my foundation to then understand, okay, what are the challenges that the brand has been facing? And can my new brand guide help me tackle that problem? If so, then great. You just kind of figure out how to execute. If the answer is no, the problem lies somewhere else, then it's really just about dissecting what that problem is. And to be honest, it's normally fairly easy to identify what the actual brand issue is and then identify ways to overcome it.

26:41Some of the problems that I've faced in the past are very obvious. Like when I was at Samsung, one of my first launches was the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which were the phones that were catching on fire. It's not hard to figure out what the problem was there, right? Phones were catching on fire. So we could just figure out beyond the brand operating system approach that we needed to build out and do, it starts with just rebuilding trust and then building love for the overall brand. But you have to build trust before you could do anything because the phones were catching on fire. So that to me is very easy.

27:13Most problems aren't that easy to dissect, but they're not actually that hard either. So once you uncover what that real reason is that consumers are either on the fence of buying your brand or are buying a competitor, I think it's, you know, then just down to what's the most, you know, daring, innovative, and bold way to get in front of consumers to get them to like rethink and then go towards your brand or service. I love that answer because I think it applies to all aspects of life. Like usually when things are struggling, like I used to play college football, like usually when you're struggling in college football, it's because like something in your fundamentals have broken down and you have to fix go back and even like the best tennis players you see them like something or the best athletes like it's probably just like one like their foot work is just like gone off or like they're not like something's happened in their swing or something's and it's like they just need to fix that one fundamental to change the game and it's like that one little thing but they have to also have like new eyes sometimes to come in and see that because you don't really know that your footwork's off because you've been doing that bad activity for so long that it just gets part of your DNA and you need someone to look and say like, Hey, this is part of my DNA that it's wrong.

28:31Yeah. I mean, I love that analogy. I think so many analogies can be broken down into sort of those like human truths, whether it's, you know, equating a brand to a body like a person or equating the relationships that you have in life with the relationships that this brand wants to have with its, with its, uh, you know, core fans or core customers. Those are all the things that I think make this, you know, job in this industry so fun. Um, but to your point, like when I, when I come into a brand and I find out what the problem is, it could be as glaring as like, Oh, you know, their stroke is off because, you know footwork or whatever it is or like their swing you know whatever the analogy is but then you fix that you go like actually it's still not working what else is there and then you start to uncover some of like the more nuanced issues and that's the same thing as a brand you might think like oh it's because the phones are on fire but then you're like actually it's beyond that it's because the brand was so focused on product marketing that when the product failed the brand failed so what we need to do in addition to building trust is to also bring a little bit more love towards the brand itself so that people give it a pass when times are tough, but they also celebrate it in Amplight when things are going well.

29:43So all the superficial symptoms might actually be hiding some of the underlying chronic issues, which is where I find it really fun and fascinating to try to dig in, figure out what those chronic issues are in addition to those superficial issues, and then just help rebuild brands in that manner. i want to also ask you a little bit because a lot of marketers go in and say like are very like have a tactical approach or like they have like a playbook that they have run meaning like a channel playbook like i know that if we run facebook ads and we run yeah like they know like their playbook it's gonna they think it's gonna work but it's every brand is a different like analogies we're making every brand is a different human a different like athlete there's different problems but i want to go into like for brands that because you i i could tell you're really into like building brand and and a lot of people don't a lot of brands like they they strive to build brand but they do these other actions that don't prove that they're striving to do brand so what what would you tell those people who are like very tactical focused to step out and also do these these actions to build brand love like what does that look like So take the analogy of starting a relationship, right?