Adam Mussa: Understanding and Growing your Digital Audience (Full Transcript)

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Ronen Ainbinder 0:32

Joining us from Sydney, Australia today is the founder and mastermind behind one of the most innovative marketing technologies in sports.

He's the founder of Campaignware — a free platform that helps brands and rights holders by creating highly engaging, digital interactive content that helps them grow their fanbase, gather insights, and activate their sponsors. Quizzes, trivia, polling, surveys, user-generated content, and more. Everything at a low cost with no code required.

Our guest has worked with many brands and sponsors such as the NRL, NBL, Rugby League World Cup, A-League, Western Bulldogs, and many more.

This episode will be packed with takeaways in digital marketing, social media, and more!

Ladies and gents – Adam Mussa

Adam Mussa 1:25

Hi Ronen! How are you?

Ronen Ainbinder 1:26

The Internet is a wild place. I mean, we are discussing here we're in the Zoom call. You are in Australia. I'm in Mexico City, man; this is crazy.

Adam Mussa 1:35

It's amazing, isn't it? It's amazing when you just kind of realize how, yeah, just how close we are, but also how far we are. It's amazing, isn't it?

Ronen Ainbinder 1:45

Yeah, man, it is. And I'm happy that we're able to have the Internet now because we will be able to learn from you, from your experiences, and from everything you've been building so far. But before that, I want to start our conversation off with that fun icebreaker. And I want to ask you, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?

Adam Mussa 2:04

Oh, that's a hard question. Look, if you put a gun to my head, I'd probably say mint choc chip. But yesterday, I did buy a like if we went to our local kind of gelato place, and I bought a half tub of chocolate and mango, which was just amazing. So I don't know, I might have a different choice today.

Ronen Ainbinder 2:27

And it sounds like you're a big fan of ice cream, at least.

Adam Mussa 2:31

I say. So I have a pretty bad sweet tooth. Yeah. Which is considered in sport, because you're not supposed to have sweets. But yeah.

Ronen Ainbinder 2:39

Yeah. Adam, let's talk about your journey in developing Campaignware. How about you just maybe take us back a few years when you just were only thinking about this? And maybe tell the story from that point to the moment you landed your first client?

Adam Mussa 3:00

yeah, absolutely. So for sure, it's a pretty interesting story. So my background is mostly that of working in sort of digital agencies. I had some pretty long stints as a product manager as well. So building technology has always been pretty, pretty second nature for me. But it was sort of during my time when I was at an agency, and specifically, we're working with a few sporting clients. And we kind of realized that there was starting to become this kind of emerging need for different types of interactive content and sort of gamified kind of campaigns. But the challenge that we always found was that it was expensive to build because we'd have to build it from scratch every time for every client. Even though we had a codebase that we would essentially replicate in some ways, the actual design, we'd have to do it every single time. So it's very expensive and very time-consuming for the clients. So we didn't have a great success rate, even though the products were good. And they were always well received, and we hit the KPIs we were supposed to. So I pitched my boss at the time. Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we turn this into a self-service tool? And we essentially charged a fee and let the client do it? And he said to me, no, I don't think there's a market for that. So I thought, okay, that's fine. And so we kind of carried on, I sort of moved on from there. And then, a few years later, just through sheer coincidence, like I wasn't even trying to do this. One of our clients, one of the clients, kind of came back to me said, Hey, you remember those voting tools that you kind of created first? Do you think you could do one of those again? And I was working full time at the time. So I found a developer, and we just said, Hey, we can do this in time, I'm going to sell it. But I know we can kind of do it. So we're going to do it. And he said, Okay, fine. All right. Let's do it. So we kind of got our first client, which was the sporting news website. So sporting news.com.au, a worldwide sport I separate, was just the Australian version of that. So they were kind of our first client from that side where it was. It wasn't even called. So Campaignware was our second name; our first name was bench vote, which we only rebranded about two months ago. That was even before that. It was just a piece of code flying in GitHub. It just didn't do anything else. Besides that, Our second client was the Rugby League World Cup. And that was kind of more because we already had some connections there in rugby league, and we didn't even charge them for it. Because we applied for use a lot, we applied for a government grant to get the funding to do it because we know that they wouldn't be able to pay for it. So we just said, all we need is your signature, just kind of, can you please do it. And we knew that we were going to have a great product for them and all that kind of stuff. And they said, Yep, happy to do it. If it's a pilot or going to help, and it was a phenomenal success, it was all the way through the entire tournament, 30 games or something like that, that they ran through. And the engagement numbers were amazing. Our first actual paying client as a bench for what is now a campaign was only a few months later, again, just a random call that I received one day from an AFL team said, Hey, I saw the stuff that you did for the Rugby World Cup, could you do this for us as well. And then from there, our product was born, we've turned it into a fully self-service platform. And then from there, we were able to essentially build and build and build and build on it to what it is today, which is 50 plus templates from starting from only one. Yeah, so it was quite a journey. And it was a lot of serendipity and a lot of luck; I'd say I can't take that much credit for it.

Ronen Ainbinder 6:23

No, I'm fascinated by the fact that it snowballed into one thing, took you to the next thing, into the next class, and again, look at happenings and serendipity, as you mentioned. I'm fascinated by it. And I'm curious, like how exactly did you come up with the business model? Or how exactly did you pivot on how to charge for this specific service that you did you at the beginning thought that this was something that you could charge for, or you weren't so sure, and that's why you tried maybe doing it for free, or like, just walk us through a little bit of how the business model came into, into fruition and like gave it structure and everything?

Adam Mussa 7:11

no problem. So we already knew that people would pay for it because we'd already experienced that, well, I'd already experienced it. Because essentially, it was my job to commercialize in the agency. So I already knew that there was a market for it, but I didn't know how big the market would be; we didn't have any competitors at the time, we didn't have any existing data or anything like that. So it was just kind of a bit of a finger in the air. And just sort of testing and learning, putting up a price and seeing what people will pay for. At the start, I know that we kept a price artificially down because we wanted to achieve traction. So making the most amount of money was not the goal immediately. Even now, I say that prices are still very reasonable. Because we're trying to build market share more than we're trying to ultimately try to extract every penny out of our clients, not how we do things. So we knew that there was already going to be a market for it; the thing that we didn't know was just how big the market was right. And the sport has been sort of interesting; it's been a bit of a double-edged sword for us where there are rights holders out there that are willing to invest in digital marketing, especially kind of digital content and campaign creation things like that. The big learning for us was that it's very sponsor-led that internally, I guess, resourcing wise, especially over here in Australia, resourcing is not that great in terms of the kind of, for rice holders and for clubs. So it's one a sponsor pushes for your data acquisition and for building there, essentially their email list or building the number of their database off the back of their sponsorship, that's when our product becomes basically invaluable, and it becomes a must-have. So it's kind of interesting. And we can't say that we're not still learning because we're definitely still learning every day. But yeah, there's been some things along the line; we just knew that we'd be able to commercialize it on day one, though, so that was quite lucky.

Ronen Ainbinder 9:07

And basically, sponsors or brands pay to bear specific activation or specific like a game that you create for them, or by the user using it or how exactly.

Adam Mussa 9:20

great question. So we generally work directly with the rights holder. So we generally kind of talk directly to the partnerships team because we know that that's where we're going to have the most luck. Because chances are the guys who are bringing money into the business as opposed to the guys who are taking money out of it, but not taking money out of business, but spending money that they're more likely to want to essentially be able to provide more value to either from a retention point of view to keep that sponsor is from new commercialization and bringing new sponsors on board. So they're probably more willing and open to trying new things. Whereas the marketing team where you normally think something like this would work quite well. Usually, those are the guys that have the most amount of work to do. So giving them something new to do can sometimes be Whoa, no thanks, we've already got too much to deal with. So sometimes that internal pressure can be helpful to be able to kind of do that. So, generally, that's the question; how we normally work is that we will normally talk to a partnership sort of either someone higher up or somebody who's kind of Midway and just explain to them what we do take him through our case studies and examples. And luckily, we have a lot with some very, very big brands all the way from Ford to AA insurance. It's Subway, McDonald's, sort of big brands, we show them what we've done, and we show them how simple it is to use and how easy. And then sometimes you can just see the dollar signs in their eyes saying, Wow, I can use this for this brand, I can use this for this brand, I can use this for this brand. And then it kind of sells itself, right. That's not always the case. But that's always known when we had the most luck when they just know that their sponsors are already asking for some of this stuff. And here's an easy way that they can do it, where it's cheap enough, they don't even have to necessarily ask their boss to do it, you can just stick it on a credit card, and off they go. So the one thing that we've kind of learned here is that and especially for I think, for a tech company, a small one like us, it's easier to essentially make it as easy as possible for them to say yes because you have to remember that these guys that are very time poor, they've got a lot of things on their plate. The time is only becoming less available. So the easier you can make it for him, the better it's going to be for you ultimately and if that means you're doing the work for him, which we did when we first started, but now we've made our product good enough that they can do it themselves. And they can just literally duplicate the work that they've done before. So it even saved some more time than having to speak to us. Just things like that can be useful.

Ronen Ainbinder 11:49

Let's dive a little deep into how those sports properties, brands, or sponsors can better understand their audience or fan base. What are some of the elements that you can think about? Or if you're saying you're explaining it to me? How exactly am I, as halftime snacks, podcasts? How can I understand my audience better? And is my fan base? Is it better for my listeners?

Adam Mussa 12:17

Yeah, for sure. Any digital property or even any brand you can think of? If you've got a social media profile, or if you've got an email, if you've got a social media profile, chances are that you know very, very little about any of those people, right? If you're promoting your stuff through social media, then chances are you have no idea which that name, email address. They're just very anonymous stats that Facebook will give you unless you use advertising to essentially pay for that data, right. So ultimately, what we do, and the easiest way that we can kind of explain it, is that we convert that audience that lives on your social media accounts, that you have no idea who they are, we turn them into essentially hard data. So name, phone number, email address, and then even kind of additional sort of fields and additional data fields that you may ask if, for example, like with some of the Ford campaigns that we ran with one of our NFL clients, they wanted to know, what type of car do they drive they wanted to know are they in the market for a car, or they did buy their cars new and secondhand. So you're using the process of gamification and digital content almost as like the Trojan horse to kind of get under the skin of the fan is most fans, and you'll notice yourself I know that I certainly am; we're pretty allergic to filling out forms, we're pretty allergic to giving data away because we know why we're doing it right. We're all pretty smart now. So doing it this way, you're creating an authentic community to kind of connect with that fan, right, you're getting them to vote on them and at the match, or you're getting them to predict the starting 11 For the next Chelsea game or something along those lines, there's a connection there that's happening. So by doing that, you kind of get under their skin a little bit, and they're very happy to give you that data, which is why our conversion rates are so high and why our product performs so well. Because it kind of becomes second nature, they don't even know why they're giving you that data, they know that they are, and it's very GDPR compliant, all that kind of stuff. Still, it feels like it's part of the process, if that makes sense. So yeah, there are a couple of different reasons why our product works so well. There's a lot of marketing science behind it, but that's kind of one of the main reasons why it does

Ronen Ainbinder 14:17

Put in perspective that you worked before in a digital marketing agency and had a couple of ideas or thoughts about how brands should understand their followings and audiences. I wonder if anything changed your mind once you started Campaignware that you thought was true. Still, then you were like, probably is not so true or this is different or, or knowing specific things about the audience like I'm gonna just throw an example but maybe just by knowing the name the not the name. Still, the age Man, that's super important. So I wonder if there's anything specific that you can share with us about things you thought were useful or things you thought were not useful. And then you change your mind once you have developed Campaignware.

Adam Mussa 15:14

Oh, that would probably be too many. You learn stuff every day, right. And I think that that's important. You know that if you're not learning new things every day about your customers and the people you're ultimately trying to service because our products are unique, ultimately, we sell them to business. Then they use it for their fans who you know, not visit something b2b To see if you wanna think of it that way. But we don't make any money from the fans, right? So it's kind of interesting in the way that we're sort of used, the one that does come to mind was, I guess, kind of what I was mentioning beforehand about just who our customers were, that was probably the biggest thing, like in terms of the product, I think that we were fairly correct in our initial sort of hypothesis of if you give the fan a great experience. You don't make it hard for them, in terms of filling out this form, and then you can vote, or then you can play the game or whatever; that stuff never works. And that's why most people fail, right? It's because, like

Ronen Ainbinder 16:13

Transactional, you mean?

Adam Mussa 16:15

I'm sure you probably entered competitions before as well, where you've got to register your details. Then you can play the game, we do it the complete opposite way, the other way, and then give your details. And by doing it that way, your conversion rates are higher. It's kind of counterintuitive.

Ronen Ainbinder 16:31

So you feel like you already received it, so you don't matter. That's exactly right. And then, but I also feel like it hooks you, but it also likes, kind of like already leaves you no choice, right? Because you like you already received value in a way. So then you have to like you feel like you have to.

Adam Mussa 16:51

Feel more compelled to. That's exactly right. There's a little bit of a psychological element to it. Right? And that's, that's what we kind of trade-off. And if you want to think of it that way, which is that yes, because you've given value, I think that we're more intrinsically inclined to deliver value as well for that person. So that's how we built our product. So we'll, that was kind of a very much a guiding hypothesis for when I built the product. And it rings true. It's been 100% consistent since the day that we started. Yeah, there have been features and things like that that we've built along the way that we thought would be useful but didn't end up being quite as useful.

For example, some lead tracking technologies and things like that, which will be more useful. But with GDPR, and kind of the cookieless future, it will become harder to do that sort of stuff. So we're figuring out what comes next. The big thing for us in the business was just understanding who our customer was. That piece that I told you earlier about not being a sponsorship, the sponsorship team, I'd never expected that to be the case. When we started talking to people, they said, hey, especially when we started talking to digital marketing managers. First, they said, Hey, not going to be for me, but why don't you talk to the sponsored guy here. And my initial thought was, this was going to be a waste of time. But it turned out that he just said, wow, we've got this brand, this brand, this brand, and this brand, they want to use it, how much. And that was it. So honestly, that was the biggest change. So knowing exactly who your customer is inside the organization was a life changer for me. We literally wouldn't be here if we hadn't figured that out so quickly. It was a real game-changer for us.

Ronen Ainbinder 18:33

I want to double click on the fact that you mentioned that kind of like wreck regulatory systems around like ads and stuff are changing GDP PER we've seen Apple change their politics and then Snapchat and all these like advertising companies that companies like Facebook that sell ads drop, like significantly in the public markets. I wonder what you expect of the future of digital marketing and social media and knowing and understanding your audience. Is there a specific like I like, like a future that you see in helping you build and develop camping? Is there something that you can share with others? Maybe ideas or things you see happening already?

Adam Mussa 19:28

Yeah, definitely. I think now it's fairly obvious that sort of the cookie apocalypse, it's here. And it's not even something we're talking about. It's something that's happening,

Ronen Ainbinder 19:40

And we're not talking about the cookies that you eat!

Adam Mussa 19:45

Ha! Definitely not. Because that would be sad. I think cookies are for marketing purposes. I think we're getting the general public to let that one slide, right. I don't care. But yeah, kind of sort of tracking people by cookies and technologies like that. Now that that's finished, I think they'll ask, as marketers, we're very good at coming up with new ways to do the same thing that we did even a few years ago. So there's going to be something new that I don't know. But I'm pretty sure something will come over and replace it. The thing that we've always done, and I think the truest thing that I can probably say about this, is that we've always told our customers, if you want data, ask for it. Right, there is no truer data that you'll be able to get than just asking for data and letting that person give you their data, right? Because it's going to be the truest form of it. So ultimately, what we've always kind of built is our product. Our sort of guiding principle around it is that if you give that person a great experience, they're going to give you that data. And again that that example that I gave you with Ford, before they captured all this information on people what type of car they drove, what, when they were in the market to buy a new car, how often they buy it, and whether they buy cars, new and secondhand, they did that off the back of a man of the match vote, like it's just unbelievable data that they were getting for their dealers, it was off something so simple as that. And people were giving them that data, and the conversion rate was so high, 60% Plus, we're talking, that's because you build a relationship with people, and they'll give it to you. So to me, I feel that the tech technology is good, and that's fine. But there's a simple way to do it. It's just asking him, give him a reason to give you that data; if you have a reason to give a brand new data, you'll give it to them, right? I'm sure you filled in lots of forms and things like that in the past when you knew you were going to get something for it. Same here, right? So we should stop trying to be too smart and stop trying to add smart people. And I think we should just start to lean in and say, I will give you something of value. I know you'll give it to me too. And that's kind of the way that I see it. It's a bit of a soapbox, but in terms of a bit preachy, but that's how I think that it is.

Ronen Ainbinder 21:57

I like it a lot because I feel like it combines transparency, which is a key element of the future of that. And also combines creative, finding creative routes of asking for those types of data points that will help us understand their audience. So it sounds fun. It sounds interesting. It sounds like Campaignware has a bright future ahead of it. And Adam, it's, it's, it's great to hear you talk about it. And with such passion and with such interest around it, I'm sure that it's going to be a pure success. Man. I have one last question for you, maybe more people in one night. And I want to know, What is something you wish you do in the next two years.

Adam Mussa 22:43

Until last year, our biggest goal was to try and get into the Premier League and try and work with a Premier League team. And we did that this year. So now, for me, my favorite sport is Formula One. And it has been since I was a child. So that's my big goal. I want to go on a break; I want to get into a Formula One team. And hopefully, it's McLaren because McLaren is my team, so I can get there, then I'll say okay, I've ticked off all my bucket list. Now it's just about making money. Now I'm just gonna make money because I've kind of achieved everything that I want to achieve in terms of having the star power but yeah, for me that that that'd be great. Cracking into the US market, I think, is kind of key. We have worked with some US rights holders and that kind of thing. But being able to do a bit more of that. And then even working directly with brands, we're taking a slightly different approach to that because we have looked pretty closely at working directly with brands. So I am kind of able to find, in turn, more unique ways to be able to necessarily engage with people, people's audience, and ultimately make right holders' lives easier. Because it's a hard job to have, and people don't realize it. But working as a rights holder is not easy. So we want to make that as easy as it can be.

Ronen Ainbinder 23:58

You speak with all your purpose in your words. And I love that I recognize, and I respect that. Adam, I can't thank you enough for coming to the halftime snacks and enjoying this conversation. However, all the way from Sydney, Australia, to Mexico City, man, it's insane what the InternetInternet can do. I'm happy we're able to do this man, thank you so much for coming.