David Zanker is the Founder of Franchise Digital, a marketing technology platform transforming how fitness and franchise brands manage digital campaigns at scale. With deep experience across franchising, marketing, and technology, David bridges the gap between creative strategy and operational execution for multi-location businesses.
Over the past decade, David has managed more than 300 pre-sale campaigns across seven countries, overseen over $5 million in ad spend for the fitness industry, and generated over 20,000 franchise enquiries and more than 500,000 member leads. Having been an award-winning multi-site franchisee himself, he understands both the realities of local marketing and the complexities franchisors face when trying to scale it.
David’s career spans leadership roles in education technology and marketing, including as CEO of Australia’s largest student management system provider. He later founded Functional Digital, the agency that rocketed BFT from 20 locations to more than 330 globally. To achieve that scale, David built a proprietary ad localisation platform and technology stack that has since evolved into Franchise Digital, used by franchisors and agencies to power networks like Upstate, Anytime Fitness, @Pilates, inLIFE Wellness, J.I.M, Stepz, and Xponential Fitness.
At Beyond Activ Asia-Pacific in Melbourne, Australia, David will share exclusive data and insights from managing millions in ad spend and thousands of campaigns, revealing the science behind high-performing local marketing. His session explores:
How brands are using the Franchise Digital platform to deploy hyperlocal creative at scale, returning marketing strategy in-house while enabling seamless transparency and collaboration between franchisors, franchisees, and agencies. The result: freedom within a framework, happier franchisees, 40% better performing campaigns, and brand protection at scale.
Why location-specific content delivers 74% higher click-through rates than generic templates.
How ad fatigue reduces performance, with 34.5% higher engagement on first views compared to repeats.
