On today's show, I welcome Timothy Armoo, the 24-year-old CEO and co-founder of Fanbytes, a mobile video advertising platform helping brands like Warner, Apple Music and Sony reach teams through Snapchat and TikTok influencers.
Fanbytes' campaigns have seen then featured in Forbes, Huffington Post and The Times, to name but a few, with Forbes describing them as 'rewriting the rules of social for generation z'.
Fanbytes is Tim's third company, having started his first company at just 14 and selling his second company at just 17.
So, a big challenge for any marketing team for a brand is reaching and engaging with their target audience. More challenging still, is trying to figure out who is that audience is.
Fanbytes, with its exceptional understanding of generation z, tells brands who they should be marketing to and how they should be doing it.
Snapchat is the platform of choice, along with
TikTok, through which search Fanbytes distributes its client's videos ensuring maximum engagement through targeting the right people at the right time.
So, the idea for Fanbytes came to Tim in his cousin's bedroom. He noticed he was always buying lots of new hats and trainers and wondered what motivated him to buy them. His cousin said that YouTube personalities were his inspiration and that's where the idea for Fanbytes came from. They're a company that helps brands to collaborate with influencers, such as those on
YouTube.
Tim wanted to build a new advertising offering for the 21st century that will help brands to collaborate with online stars and personalities
A big part of what they do is data, so they built an algorithm that will enable them to measure the influence of the influencers, to see who was perfect for each brand's campaign. More importantly still, they used it to match influencers with brands.
With data being at the heart of everything they do, the strength of the data set up within their USP, and with other similar players in the market, they needed to differentiate themselves. So, they've done that with their real-time data analytics platform which enables them to measure their campaigns in a way that nobody else can.
So, I really enjoyed going up to London meeting Tim at Fanbytes HQ. I found him incredibly knowledgeable, very charismatic and I think you, the #Screwitjustdoit listener, will find this a really interesting and really relevant chat, especially if you are looking to market and to do business with millennials. We talked about many, many things including opportunities in underserved markets. We talked about opportunities which live in university, or outside university education, opportunities outside of people being inherently lazy and businesses being inherently lazy.
I think that you're really going to enjoy this one, let's StartUp!
"So I'm going to say something which might offend some people but I think it's just real talk. At Fanbytes we help brands to distribute their videos on social, so brands come to us because they're trying to reach and engage communities, specifically on Snapchat, Instagram or TickTock and we build these communities and these influencer networks for us to be able to reach an audience in a very specific targeted way. We work with the Kardashians, for example, they come to us to help them promote their show... like it's the Kardashians, that's pretty interesting.
The thing is, most brands are lazy. In fact, most people, in general, are lazy. People are inherently lazy. "Can you take that piece of content and use the exact same thing on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch, Tumblr and TickTock"...like yeah OK, cool. But, if you can essentially change that, that's where you can build something of significant value.
All these numbers are just banded about. I think recently I saw someone describe themselves as a 'nano-influencer' with 0 to 2,000 followers, like, Jesus Christ.
Fundamentally,
Amazon is essentially like an online Argos, like an online catalogue. I think the mediums may increase but the fundamentals of marketing still stay the same.
I am not ashamed to say I started solely with the purpose of making money. I was a 17-year-old living in a council estate and I had just really started to discover the power of the internet. To me, this is my way out of being poor."
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