What Your Cell Phone And The TV In 1952 Have In Common

A cool think I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk that radically shifted my social strategies.

On this episode Russell talks about what cell phones have in common with 1950’s TV. He also quickly gives some stats from the book launch.

Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

• How searching for a pitch that he remembers from 2015 Russell came across some awesome words of wisdom from Gary Vaynerchuk.
• How you cell phone is similar to 1950’s TV.
• And how Russell plans to dominate every available channel the way he has dominated Facebook.

So listen below to find out how you can benefit from looking at cell phones as if they were TV in the 50’s.

---Transcript---

Hey what’s up everybody? This is a sneaky late night, I’m sneaking out of my house to go grab something at the office, Marketing In Your Car. So this is cool, I don’t think I’ve talked about this with you guys before. If I have, humor me and pretend like you haven’t because I think it’s important.

The other day, it was funny I was, an event I was at in 2015 and this guy did a pitch that was awesome from stage. So I tried to find that presentation so I could see, because I wanted to model part of the presentation for something I was doing. So yes, I’m always funnel hacking and I had these weird things in my memory where I can remember things from, I see a good pitch and it was in 2015, and I remember it. In fact, I remember a pitch from 2004, 2005 from John Childers that’s amazing too, that I went and found so I could listen to and hear him do his pitch again.

Anyway, what I was doing, is basically I was trying to find this pitch. It was an event I was at in 2015. I remember the speaker, I remember the day, everything. I was trying to find it and I was searching everywhere. I had actually purchased the recordings of that event, but the link where the recordings I’d purchased had now expired. I contacted the company, they wouldn’t give it back to me or they didn’t have it anymore or whatever. So then I was trying to buy them on EBay, I couldn’t buy them on EBay. I tried everywhere. I spent way too long trying to search for this presentation, because it was literally like a 2 minute pitch that I wanted to find. It was probably like 8 hours, the time I wasted on this thing.

But I knew that if I found that one little piece, I would know how to pitch this thing I’m trying to sell. I didn’t find it, but I did find some notes that somebody was there and there was a single sentence that gave me kind of, that reminded of what the hook was. So I am kind of re-building that pitch based on my memory and one sentence that I found after 8 hours of digging. In fact, I ended up finding the entire event, I had to pay some dude insane amounts of money to go and black market find it for me. I don’t feel guilty because I bought it before, but normally I wouldn’t do that.

So he gets it to me, sends me the whole thing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” All the videos of everyone in the presentation is there except for the one I am looking for. I’m like, “Dude, where is this?” and he’s like, “How do you know it’s missing.” And I’m like, “I have the notes from somebody who was at the event. The same event that I was at. These are the notes, it says the name of the presentation. This is where between this one and this. You gave me the two other ones, but not the one I needed.” Anyway, I never got the video. So there’s the sad ending of that story. But there’s a happy ending.

But while I was doing that, one of the videos I found during the thing was actually on YouTube, it was the keynote speaker at the event, it was Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk is obviously the keynote to almost every event ever, I think. I love the dude, but he’s probably not going to keynote ours, because he just keynotes too many places, so it’s not that special I think. But he’s awesome, I think he’s awesome. Anyway, I was listening to, sorry I’m at the office now. I was listening to, on YouTube while I was searching for it, I found his recording from that same event and I had missed his presentation because I was out in the hall doing whatever I was doing.

So I was like, I’m going to watch this while I’m searching. So while I’m searching I was watching this presentation. What is cool, sorry my alarm’s going off here. Good, I gotta disarm the alarm, now we’re good to go. So I’m in there and I’m watching this presentation while I’m searching for this other video and I’m listening to it and Gary said something that was like, boom. And maybe that was the journey I got sent on to try and find this one ten minute video clip that I didn’t find. But in the journey is where I found this piece and it was this gold nugget that is so good.

So Gary was talking and what he said that was profound, he said, “Our phones, the thing that’s in your hand right now probably, is the equivalent of the TV in the 1950’s.” And then I was like, what’s he talking about? And he went on to kind of explain it and he said, “In 1950’s if you turned on the TV, what was there? three channels. ABC, CBS, and NBC and that was it. So people turned on the TV and had to watch one of three channels.” In fact, that’s what Tony Robbins said to me. When I first met him he’s said, “You know when I got started there were three channels and I just advertized on those three channels and I was everywhere and we made insane amounts of money. And when media split, that’s when it became hard.” But he had a 20 year run. Every channel you turned on Tony was there, and everyone knew who he was all the time.

And then, I’ve done a whole podcast before on how media splits and turns into more channels and cable and soon it gets really, really hard because it’s all fragmented. What’s interesting is that, he said, “Our phones are like TV in the 1950’s because that was the thing in 1950’s, three channels. Right now on your phone, there’s 3 or 4 channels that actually matter. There’s 2 or 4 channels that everybody goes to get all their entertainment and their information and those kind of things.”

If you think about it, think about the typical app, there’s the app store or whatever you want to call it, it’s insane, there’s millions of apps. So you think it’s this huge flooded thing, but the reality is, think about your phone right now and your habits. How many apps do you go to every single day consistently? And probably like 5 or 6 times a day. I was thinking about that and thinking about myself and there’s definitely a pattern. When I’m bored I open up the social tab and I go to Facebook, Instagram, messenger, Snapchat, anyway there’s 4 or 5 things I go to. When I’m done, I close it down and get back to my work.

When I get bored and get stuck or whatever, I come back and open up those 3 or 4 channels to see if anything interesting is happening on any of them and then I come back and I leave. And that’s what TV was, right. When he started saying that, he’s like, “If you understand that, everyone’s got these phones and there’s only 3, 4 or 5 stations everybody’s listening to.” So what are those channels. Facebook is a channel, Instagram is a channel, Snap chat is a Channel, YouTube is a channel. What are the channels that are there? There’s not that many, there really isn’t. There’s only a handful of them. And when he said that I was like, “Oh my gosh.”

And I’m really good on one channel. We’re good on Zuckerberg. We dominate Facebook, but we haven’t been good at the other ones. So we started, if you’ve been watching, I’ve been really working hard at Instagram lately, it’s been growing and actually doing really well for us. If you’re not following my Instagram, please follow my Instagram. I think you just go to Instagram.com/russellbrunson, I think. But I’m not sure.

So we’re starting to do stuff on Instagram and on YouTube we’re actually on Monday launching our big YouTube channel. On each channel we have a different strategy. For me, the ones we’re trying to dominate are Facebook, Instagram, I kind of gave up on Snapchat, if I’m completely honest. Instagram is just easier and better, I think. So we’re doing Instagram hard, Twitter, we ignored Twitter for our entire lives and then it turned out we’re getting insane amounts of traffic from Twitter. People are talking about us and we didn’t even know. So now we’re like, crap we should do something in Twitter. I’m going to go learn how to tweet. So I’m starting to get into that again. And then YouTube.

So there’s the four or five channels. We’re not trying to be the biggest dude on YouTube, but I’m trying to get, so my audience when they pull out their phone and are searching the four or five channels, they’re going to see me on everyone of those channels. I started looking at that and I was like, holy crap. I always thought the internet was so big. We’re trying to advertize everywhere. But if you flip it like that, all the sudden it shrinks it down. This is your mobile experience. This is your phone, there are four channels your people are on. How do you get in front of your people on those four channels? That’s it, and it’s really not that hard.

So that’s been, that’s my strategy and you’ll see that happening more and more over the next few weeks as we’re rolling out each channel more aggressively. And then we’re having a strategy and putting people in place to make it consistent and cool. And I’m not talking about, a lot of people go and make a video and then rip the audio and put it on 30 different places. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about understanding the intricacies of each channel and making u