What if 84% of small businesses needed your platform to survive? Joshua Bloom, GM, Head of US Enterprise Sales and Canada at TikTok, has been working in social media expansion in Canada for over 26 years. His journey led him to become the first employee at MySpace, Facebook, and TikTok Canada. Alison Simpson, CEO of the CMA, explores Joshua's journey from Wall Street to social media pioneer, why some platforms thrive while others fail, and how he's leading through unprecedented regulatory uncertainty.

Presenter  0:01  
Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMA CEO, Alison Simpson.

Alison  0:20  
In today's episode, we're exploring the fascinating intersection of digital innovation, economic impact and entrepreneurial resilience with someone who has an absolutely extraordinary track record of being first. So I'm super excited to welcome Joshua Bloom. He has served as the GM of global business solutions for TikTok Canada, and remarkably, has also been the first employee of not one but three major social platforms in Canada, going as far back as MySpace, then Facebook and TikTok. Josh's exceptional leadership was just recognized with a promotion and North American role. So he is now the GM Head of U.S. Enterprise Sales, as well as maintaining Canada at TikTok. Josh's career journey is anything but traditional. From Wall Street to becoming a key architect of social media expansion in Canada over the past 26 years. Since joining on as an instrumental team member in starting TikTok Canada in 2019, he's witnessed the platform grow from a startup operation to an economic powerhouse. Through the combined total of its operations and SMB activities on the platform, TikTok has contributed 2.3 billion to Canada's GDP in 2024 alone. They also support over 613,000 small businesses, 84% of which now consider the platform essential to their survival. This conversation comes at an absolutely critical juncture. With economic uncertainty, we are all managing through dramatic change. With recent regulatory challenges forcing TikTok Canada to pause major cultural investments and face an uncertain future, t hat reality is even more true for Josh and his experience can provide super valuable learning for all of us. So whether you're curious about building social platforms from the ground up, the economic impact of TikTok on Canadian businesses, or how leaders navigate extreme uncertainty, today's conversation promises insights that you won't find anywhere else. So welcome Josh and congratulations on your new role. 

Joshua  2:21  
Thank you so much, Alison, it's great to talk with you again. 

Alison  2:24  
Now, Josh, you have this incredibly unique distinction of being employee number one for three major social platforms in Canada. That's a 26 year front row seat to the evolution of social media here, and I'd love you to take us back to the transition from Wall Street to digital, including what was the pivotal moment that convinced you to pursue a career in marketing? 

Joshua  2:45  
It's funny, I graduated university in 1995, not to age myself, but I graduated a finance degree, and I've always had this vision of working on Wall Street. And so about the end of 1998, after having worked  in finance about three years. My cousin Lee Nadler, called a digital pioneer, he was a number 17 employee at DoubleClick. And DoubleClick was first ad serving technology. And DoubleClick also created the very first ad network. So back in the mid to late 90s, they used to represent all the big websites, including Alta Vista, if you remember that search engine before, before Google, sort of like had its, you know, its reign. So he introduced me to the company, and used to tell me stories about how digital was going to be the big thing in advertising. I was not a fan of computers. Still to this day, I'm not great at them, but he mentioned that they were opening up this media team and that I should come and check it out. He finally convinced me, and it was sort of a match made in heaven. And, you know, ended up spending three fantastic years at DoubleClick to which, one, I really learned internet and the potential of the internet, and two, I was really able to understand what working in a really positive culture looked like. DoubleClick, I think was one of the early great digital cultures, and I think that helped me to sort of create sort of what I wanted to see when I led teams later on down the road.

Alison  4:14  
Well, a huge thank you on behalf of Canadian marketers for your cousin giving you that push, because clearly we have benefited. And I also like the cultural learning. So being an early adopter to digital and social media is great, but the learning you took on the importance of a culture, regardless of what sector or industry you're in, the culture can be such a competitive advantage, and that's clearly something that you've lived and brought to life in your different roles in Canada,

Joshua  4:38  
Absolutely, it was such an empowering and engaging culture. The fantastic leaders that really were people leaders, and it gave everyone an opportunity to to be successful and to be the best versions of themselves. And it was funny because back in that, in that period of time, we were selling digital against all other forms of media. We would literally have packets of 50 to 100 pieces of paper stacked on top of each other with leads that we would call one at a time, and basically try to sell digital media against the other traditional media formats that they were using. It was a really wild time.

Alison  5:18  
Now, you were brave to take a leap early in your careers, but you've also built a number of platforms from scratch in the Canadian market. So walk us through what it's like and the approach that you took for building something from scratch. 

Joshua  5:31  
It's really interesting. So, you know, that started with, you know, my being the first employee in Canada for MySpace. What caught my eye is that, you know, MySpace was a platform that not only was I using, but I was such a fan of music, and I used the platform basically to connect with bands that I adored. And came to a realization very quickly that it really was an amazing platform to discover new music. And when I think about the steps that I took myself in terms of that first platform that I worked with, and then to Facebook, and then to TikTok, it really started with sort of building a vision and then inspiring a narrative that really turned heads. 

Joshua  6:11  
So when you think about MySpace like it was revolutionary, and you know, combined massive scale with unprecedented self expression, allowing brands like tap into like these rich audience data and target consumers through the culture that they were actively creating. It gave your advertisers an opportunity to like tap, you know, right into that, you know, sort of evolving culture that was, that was being created on the internet. You know, then Facebook was sort of captivating advertisers, you know, for uniting like what was real identity with social connectivity and then enabling very precise targeting at scale. You know, Facebook bought Instagram, and you know that totally transformed advertising by merging, like the visual storytelling with aspirational lifestyle. And yeah, that gave brands a seamless way to inspire and influence and connect.

Joshua  6:59  
And now you fast forward to today with TikTok, which has social components to it, but it's really, you know, entertainment-based. It's really just a playground for, like, infinite discovery and driving culture and allowing brands not to just participate, but to actually help to shape culture. And if you do it right, you know, brands have an opportunity to drive, not only the most important business KPIs, but really disrupt the way that we are perceiving marketing today. Second to that, I  would probably just say that, like hiring the right folks early, because, like, they're going to set the tone and who you are as an organization in the market, and you need to make sure that the conversations that they're having within the market are ones that are going to sort of ease that barrier entry for testing, so that when that first dollar is spent, it's done in a way that is meaningful, they're learning something, and they're able to then move up from sort of that experiences. 

Joshua  7:53  
A lot of times, I think you have, you have these sort of call it, shiny objects in markets, and marketers always have testing dollars, but if you don't really get anything out of that test, they flop. And that's why you really only see, like, a handful of platforms that are really are getting, you know, significant dollars and having, like, meaningful partnerships with brands today.

Alison  8:16  
It's great advice, and with the three platforms that you've built in Canada, you've been on the ground floor, but you've also seen some that have gone into phenomenal success and some that failed. So MySpace certainly dominated early but ultimately lost market share. Facebook's become a global giant, and Tiktok has been exploding in recent years. So it's great learning and from a strategic perspective, what were the key differentiators between the platforms succeeding longer term, versus those that didn't.

Joshua  8:43  
I think MySpace had a really hard time defining itself. If you if you put MySpace and Facebook next to each other, we'll see that MySpace is very much like a, was