My Biggest Lesson: Sean Lynam

Sean is a strategic marketer with 15 years experience in the industry, most of it at GLOW. As a true fan of platforms and innovation, he uses the internet to give audiences what they least expect and help people feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves.

The one piece of wisdom that has always stayed with me is experiment, optimise, engage. 

It was early in my time at GLOW, where I still work now, and five years into my post-college working life. I had just joined as a digital strategist to the then-small agency, working in its new social media department. I was very excited to be there. Thrilling work with smart people. Also their TV clients had much larger budgets than my previous job in the music industry! 

We were developing a campaign for one of the hottest new reality shows to hit the airwaves in 2012. One of the leadership team members pointed out that this show is hot, new, and so beyond what anyone thought would be a hit. The characters in the show were obviously smart and successful, but also… strange. This was also in the explosion era of social media for TV, and there were little rules to abide by. Putting all that together, the leader said, “We need to seize this opportunity to experiment, optimise, and engage.” I wrote it down immediately. 

It was Mike Molnar, managing partner of GLOW who passed this wisdom on. I barely knew him at that point, and this was some perfect fodder for my impressionable, post-music-biz brain. What’s funny now is that I’m the age he was when he told it to me!

There are two major reasons why I still remember this moment:

• Clearly-stated engagement strategies like this were not something I had experienced in my career yet. The music industry was still wondering what this whole streaming Spotify thing was going to do, and it was known for being an industry built on who-do-you-know to get big things to happen.
• The actual ability to experiment with marketing tactics and stunts were something the exploding social media and tv spaces allowed. In music, budgets were small, the artists owned their own social media presence, and album releases were smaller moments in time compared to a tv season. 

It changed me as a person because it gave me the freedom to think, try, and tinker. “Theory will take you only so far,” – J. Robert Oppenheimer. It allowed me and the rest of the team to wonder if there’s always a better way. 

I do go back and forth with it, sometimes thinking, “there’s plenty of data here to tell me what will work - experimentation will only get me off course.” But then later find myself returning to the phrase as a trend fades away.

I’ve never told anyone… until now.