Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 4)

SM: So, if I were a marketer thinking about how to use your  capability, and let’s say I work for a movie studio, one of the things I would want to do when a new movie is coming out is to release a whole bunch of clips on your site so that there’s lots of sharing that goes on and to aid the social media word of mouth that happens naturally. Conceivably, you as the platform provider could charge me for that. Does that make sense?

DA: Yes. I definitely agree. I think that that is the direction that things are going in. A studio’s going to take that phenomenal content from its movie and distribute it broadly over the social Web. Either the studio will do it or have someone else do it. Now, that said, I think they’re always going to struggle with how they balance putting all of their weight behind a single arrow and distributing it far and wide. That’s just an education process that they’re going to have to go through in order to let users be as powerful as possible by allowing people to break up their content as much as possible. That’s definitely not in their DNA.

SM: But the notion of trailers has been in their DNA for a long time. Trailers are part of movie marketing and, lately, they have been released on YouTube and shared profusely on Facebook and other social media platforms. So, to some degree, that behavior has become natural to them. Don’t you agree with that?

DA: Let me be clear. I think that they need to think about their quiver as having a number of different arrows. No one is saying that they’re not going to do a 30-second spot on TV or a pre-roll before another movie. But they do need to increase their overall marketing breadth by allowing or helping users to break up their content and take it with them in ways that are more powerful. The fact is that if I’m sitting on Facebook and I really like an upcoming movie, it’s unlikely that I’m going to share the trailer because that’s not the essence of what moves me and gets me excited. What will get me excited is a particular image or quote or sound bite or something like that.

SM: You’re saying that they don’t chop content up?

DA: Yes, that’s exactly right.

SM: What is driving your decision to do only audio and not videos?

DA: There’s a business reality of the differences in license types. Videos extremely hard to get in an economical way. That’s not how studios usually work. But that’s a small part. The biggest part is what users are looking for. Every media type deserves a platform. There’s one for images. There are ones for text. There are ones for video. There are ones for knowledge, like Wikipedia. And there are ones for documents, like Scribd. We believe that there needs to be a first-class platform for audio. That audio can be sound bites as short as two or three seconds all the way up to the state of the union at an hour and a half long. That’s fine. As a platform, we want to make audio a first-class citizen.

The fact is, you’re out there looking for a particular quote from “The King’s Speech,” so that you can share it or be moved by it or something like that, and that’s our goal, to provide that particular thing.

SM: OK. Since 70 million users are on your site, you’re seeing validation of your thesis.

DA: Yes.

SM: What else is interesting from where you sit, in terms of what’s driving your decisions?

DA: The next most interesting thing that’s driving our decisions is related to the actual purchase or recognition of the value. I think where at this time where everyone has a mobile phone in his hand. Everyone is connected to the Android Store, the Windows Store, the iTunes Store, such that you’re changing the dynamics of purchasing from very large to very small individuals. As a result, I think you’re going to be able to start capturing value in a positive way in short order. People are actually going to be able to start purchasing things like an image, a sound bite, a virtual good inside a game and things like that in extremely cost-effective ways and start to change the dynamics and economy of creating this stuff.

Studios today … if you look at the economics of making a movie, the theatrical release today barely pays back the production cost of the movie. It’s, in fact, all of those things down the line, you know, tickets sold in theaters are just the starting point. It’s all the things down the line where you’re selling things to video-on-demand, to TV networks, on DVD, in the iTunes Store that make the profits for that particular movie. And the more options that users have to engage with that content down the line, the more profitable those properties are going to be, and potentially, the less that they need to focus on those giant theatrical releases and marketing budgets upfront. They’ll be able to make the money down the line.

What you’re going to be able to find here as people are able to purchase lots more little things through downloadable content or apps or things like that, this derivative content is going to be powerful at capturing interest and awareness and marketing for content creators across the board.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark
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