Online Video Marketing

Vince Thompson: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony I'm Vince Thompson. The age of the Internet makes it possible for any business to reach mass market audiences with multi-media, a privilege traditionally reserved for the giant corporations that could afford it. Benjamin Wang, CEO of Flicks is giving the big boys a run for their money today by empowering businesses of all sizes to reach that mass market on-line with on-line video. Would you like to tell us little bit about Flicks, how does this all work? Benjamin Wang: Sure, so Flicks has been around since 2005 and our mission has basically been to take any business and give them the tools they need to put video assets on-line. Flicks is based on 3 fundamental value propositions, one, make it really easy, two, make it really cheap, and three, do it in a way that allows the brands to reflect their unique personality on-line through customization and branding. So, Flicks provides a full suite of tools that allows for the ingestion, trans-coding, streaming, management, and tracking and analytics of video content. Vince Thompson: So, you've been incredibly successful, somebody starts an Internet company and they're the CEO, they have 90 they sell it. Now some of us can say, "I got kind of lucky," right? You've done it twice, which is a different league of entrepreneur; help us understand how do you come up with these ideas? Benjamin Wang: So, in every business that I've created it's been very market driven in terms of looking at where is their existing market demand that's going unmet. So if you're not on the list of the top three things that someone wakes up in the morning worrying about and if that person doesn't have a budget to spend associated with those points of pain, the likelihood that you're going to have a successful company is really diminished. I mean, the historical idea has been that if you create a better mouse trap then you'll create a successful business. In order for it to work within that business market it needs to be easy plug and play and it needs to be cost effective, and historically there hasn't been a solution that met those criteria. What we did was we gave any brand the ability to emulate that lifestyle experience with on-line publications. We believe that over the next 2 to 3 years every website in the world adopts video for competitive purposes. Vince Thompson: That's great advice, so how do you find these unmet market needs? Benjamin Wang: Well, part of it has to do with what are you exposed to as an individual either as a business or as a consumer, and where you do find on your own experience where there are holes in the market place. So, it's very difficult, I think, to be passionate about a business unless you as an individual really feel that there's a need for the product or service that you're creating. Many people create businesses where they think someone else will be the customer for this but they never be the customer themselves, in my mind that's a bad business to be an owner of. Vince Thompson: How did you learn to do this? Benjamin Wang: I'd like to say that I've done a lot of things wrong so I know a lot of what not to do. Many companies can't separate what's on the critical path from what's unimportant to the company's success. Typically with the company you have three types of risk, you have market risk, which is does anyone care, you have technology risk, which is will it work, and then you have execution risk, which really come down to people. What I've found is that the best path to success is to get people who are really knowledgeable as specialists in the area of expertise that matter and people that have a track record of success themselves. So if you can take the execution risk off the table and if you can be market driven in terms of the market opportunity and if you can use technology components where you're not having to reinvent the wheel in order to deploy a solution, you're really maximizing your chances for success in a start-up. On any given day you have 90 things that are on fire within a start-up but only two or three of them really matter, so the ability to focus on the two or three things that really matter is critically important. Vince Thompson: What's the most fun part about running a company today? Benjamin Wang: Well, I think it's really seeing your customer's success stories, I mean; we have over 17,000 publishers on the Flicks platform today and over 300 large enterprise customers and if we look at the multitude of way in which those clients are using video, the success they're having, we really get the opportunity to participate vicariously in their success, which is really gratifying as a start-up. In part because video is the most passive form of consumption and so we've turned into a nation of people we like to press the remote control and then absorb what we're getting from a consumption perspective. The Web has become such a prevalent source of how we consume content today and video is now within the reach of all businesses and so it's really becoming a mainstay from a content perspective. Vince Thompson: Fantastic, well it's an exciting business, Benjamin Wang thank you so much— Benjamin Wang: Thanks very much. Vince Thompson: great having you on Dog— Benjamin Wang: Pleasure to be here. Vince Thompson: pleasure. As always if you have questions, comments, or write-ins for guests please email info@dogandony.com. I'm Vince Thompson, thanks for watching today.