Tom Wilde has taken the corner office at audio and video search firm PodZinger, moving company founder Alex Laats upstairs and positioning the business for B2B2C success.
Control issues aren’t just something that city dwellers in the Big Apple or the Bay Area talk to their Dr. Melfi’s about in bi-weekly therapy sessions. Big media content companies have control issues that would put a couple of graduating classes full of therapists into the Forbes 500 list of wealthiest people.
The unlikely source of help for those companies might come out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but not from Harvard or MIT. Multimedia search firm PodZinger has a therapeutic plan for Big Media, with new CEO Tom Wilde wearing the disarming smile while toting a substantial dose of control issue cure.
He chatted with Murdok for a few minutes about taking PodZinger forward and building on what Laats has created. PodZinger’s technology can index audio and video content effectively and make it searchable. A content owner can then make that indexed content available in short snippets, in response to searches for it.
It’s just what Big Media needs, Wilde told us. PodZinger isn’t trying to find the philosopher’s stone by divining the alchemy of a business to consumer strategy. For every YouTube or MySpace that evolves, many more do not.
Being the solution for business to business to consumer has much more appeal. Big Media has the content, while the Internet audience has the demand. Why should a Viacom or a Time Warner settle for an all or nothing approach to putting content online, when they can make snippets of desirable content available through the familiar process of search?
Searchable content can be categorized, Wilde reasoned, and if it can be categorized it can be organized into channels. The Big Media company that does this suddenly has a medium that can be monetized too.
Wilde said this would lead to higher values per ad impression, as people will be able to find the content they want. PodZinger’s technology would also empower Big Media with the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain ads, based on content or just competitor status.
Consumers would feel in control, as they have come to expect from their online search and media consumption experience. Big Media would also enjoy knowing that they can make content available without dumping all of it completely online.
Wilde said PodZinger has been talking to several companies, and explaining how such a strategy with PodZinger’s technology as a centerpiece could benefit them. The time seems right for the content power brokers to give people this kind of access; we will see if they agree.
