This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.
With Twitter, Facebook, class='blippr-nobr'>Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google and class='blippr-nobr'>Foursquareclass="blippr-nobr">Foursquare dominating the tech news cycle, it’s easy to forget about Flixsterclass="blippr-nobr">Flixster and its movie discovery service — and that’s a huge mistake. With more than 22 million downloads of its mobile apps, Flixster is a major player in mobile and one to watch as the mobile web continues to take over the world.
Flixster has been around for more than four years now. It’s growing by leaps and bounds with each new mobile application release, and this year’s acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes (and not selling itself to MySpace — more on that later) proves the company is an independent force to be reckoned with.
Much of Flixster’s success can be attributed to its fantastic mobile applications, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook integration and the organic effect of friends telling friends about the application. Over the course of the next few months, however, you’ll start to see Flixster in a whole new light — on the big screen.
Beginning this fall, Flixster will be working with in-theater ad network NCM Media Networks on a major consumer marketing push to promote Flixster and class='blippr-nobr'>Rotten Tomatoesclass="blippr-nobr">Rotten Tomatoes to movie going audiences on big screens in 17,000 theaters across the U.S.
That’s some major mainstream exposure. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Co-founder and CEO Joe Greenstein, who also hinted that Flixster will make its way on to class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet-connected television sets in the near future.
What follows is a deeper look at the company’s growth strategies and a little background on how they got to where they are today.
The Road to Profitability
One thing Flixster has managed to do over the course of the past four years is to evolve its product to match consumer demand. Flixster started as a destination site, made the leap to build on top of other social platforms like Facebook and MySpace when that was an emerging trend and then quickly transitioned to mobile. The company’s nimble reinvention strategy has worked — Flixster is now a profitable and expects to break even in 2010.
To date, Flixster has raised a little less than $9 million from angel, Series A and Series B rounds of investments. Greenstein says the startup is not looking for additional funding at this time.
But, are they looking to be acquired? That’s seems to be a negative for right now. In fact, rumors that MySpaceclass="blippr-nobr">MySpace would buy Flixster were blown out of proportion, a mixup that Greenstein attributes to the assumption that Flixster’s frequent talks with News Corp. were MySpace-related when they in fact were about the Rotten Tomatoes deal.
The Future is Mobile
Mobile has been huge for Flixster. Greenstein details that the iPhoneclass="blippr-nobr">iPhone has been the company’s most successful platform, though in recent months he has seen Androidclass="blippr-nobr">Android bubble up in terms of importance. Today, Flixster downloads on Android are on par with iPhone downloads.
The company also projects massive Flixster adoption on tablet devices. Flixster’s completely reworked iPad app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times since release. “We designed it from scratch around the idea that the iPad is a browsing and discovery device,” Greenstein says.
That approach is paying off handsomely. iPad app users are proving to be Flixster’s power users and are using it much more heavily than other mobile apps. Greenstein hopes to further cater to this content consumption crowd with a new 2.0 version of the app coming soon.
At some point, though, one has to wonder: is Flixster’s growth on mobile devices sustainable? To that question, Greenstein responds by pointing to research showing that overall smartphone penetration is still quite low — Italy has the highest penetration of smartphones at just 28%. This means that Flixster is poised to capitalize on the huge number of users expected to switch from feature phones to smartphones as they become cheaper and more accessible.
Plus, mobile growth is where the money is. “Direct brand advertising is up 300% in the last year, and there’s ton of interest from advertisers in mobile products,” Greenstein says.
Flixster’s Small and Big Picture
Mobile innovation will help Flixster continue to grow, but the company also has designs to graduate and become the brand that most consumers use to discover and make decisions about the movies they see. Flixster’s NCM Media Networks arrangement will go a long way to drive home brand awareness, but the company will also make a push for your living room attention as well.
Just recently, Flixster launched a channel on Roku set top boxes. That channel is essentially just a simple application that lets users watch movie trailers on their TVs, but it is already the number one downloaded channel on Roku.
Greenstein wouldn’t disclose any specifics, but he did talk about connected TVs from the perspective of a savvy entrepreneur salivating over the next big platform. With that in mind, we can only make the educated guess that the Flixster experience will be carried over to Internet-connected television sets and even more set top boxes. Soon enough, Flixster will be everywhere.
Images courtesy of alasis, Far0_RC1, class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
For more Social Media coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Social Mediaclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Social Media channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer, an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter.
One such example is the Chinese company VANCL, an online retailer that specializes in inexpensive quality clothing and accessories for the 18- to 28-year-old urban young adult consumer group. Like the Old Spice commercial, VANCL's latest marketing campaign began in the real world, then transitioned into cyberspace, eliciting thousands of user-generated copycats. I'll examine exactly how they did it in just a moment, but first we should look at the context in which VANCL operates in as well as their successful business model.
The Rise of E-Commerce in China
There are currently 420 million Internet users in China, with roughly half of this total comprised of the teenager to young-adult segment. While Chinese are often thought of as big savers, China's young consumers are more willing than ever to use credit cards and shop in an increasingly secure online marketplace.
It is estimated that 140 million Chinese netizens will shop online by the end of 2010. This is resulting in a growing number of successful e-commerce companies that are winning market share not by trying to compete directly with e-commerce giants like Alibaba Group, but by developing models targeted at a particular niche (think Etsy). Over the course of this year, six such Chinese e-commerce companies have raised at least $180 million in venture capital investment.
What is VANCL?
VANCL is one of these major e-tailers in China raising money in the burgeoning e-commerce environment. In May 2010 the firm raised $50 million backed by a consortium of VCs including IDG Capital. VANCL was founded in 2007 by a Chinese e-commerce entrepreneur named Chen Nian. Chen's previous company, Joyo, was acquired by Amazon, allowing him to take on a new challenge in China's online retail space.
Since Chen founded VANCL in 2007, it has grown rapidly over the past three years - maximizing the opportunity presented by China's online clothes shopping market, expected to reach RMB 30.87 billion with 81.5% year-on-year growth. A key determinant of VANCL's great success is how it leverages a tremendous amount of online advertising to target urban young Chinese seeking distinctive stylish clothing at affordable prices.
Offline to Online Marketing: VANCL's Successful Campaign
For the past few months, VANCL has stepped out into the real world of major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing and is plastering billboard advertisements along the walls of bustling subway and bus stops.
There are two different advertisements that both follow a similar structure - one features a popular female actress named Wang Luodan and the other portrays a well-known public intellectual named Han Han. On the left of the poster is an image of the spokesperson wearing stylish VANCL clothes looking cool and collected, with a message on the right giving an introspective note about how they view themselves and the world around them.
Netizens responded to the simple but eye-catching advertisements by creating a group on a leading social network called Douban where they could create and share their own versions of the ads - and this is where the story gets controversial. While reports vary, some contend that the full campaign was user generated, while others contend that it was sparked by the agency that VANCL hired to run the campaign. Soon thousands of different versions popped up all over China's most well-known social networks and BBS message boards, virally spreading across the nation.
How you too can go viral in China
As noted at the beginning of this article, there is no manual for creating a successful viral marketing campaign in China or in any other part of the world for that matter. Yet, I do believe that there are three characteristics of VANCL's campaign that increased the likelihood of its "virality":
Choose the right spokesperson. Just as few would argue that the Old Spice campaign would not have been as effective if a popular athlete was chosen instead of Mustafa, the first step that VANCL took in the right direction was choosing Wang Luodan and Han Han. These two prominent figures represent the generation VANCL seeks to sell its products to.
Choose a message your customers can relate to. The statements in the advertisements were a form of self-expression that potential customers could relate to. They highlighted relationships and feelings that they felt themselves but had no outlet through which to share it. This prompted people to express themselves through their own versions of the advertisement.
Choose a framework that is easy to replicate. While famous figures were featured, there was nothing complicated about the advertisement itself. All that was included was a photo and writing. Someone with the most limited Photoshop skills could easily create their own version of the advertisement as a means of self expression.
'The Big Bang Theory' is no stranger to sexy sci-fi starlets, having scored geektastic cameos from Katee Sackhoff and Summer Glau in seasons past (wit.
Pentax announces price and availibilty for 645D camera: Photokina 2010: Pentax has announced its 645D medium format digital camera will start shipping globally from December 2010. The camera will sell at a retail price of $9999.99 for ...
In terms of blog networks, no one ever seems to talk about Google, but they actually have one of the biggest. The search giant has well over 100 blogs devoted to everything from general company news to niche things that only webmasters ...
robert shumake'The Big Bang Theory' is no stranger to sexy sci-fi starlets, having scored geektastic cameos from Katee Sackhoff and Summer Glau in seasons past (wit.
Pentax announces price and availibilty for 645D camera: Photokina 2010: Pentax has announced its 645D medium format digital camera will start shipping globally from December 2010. The camera will sell at a retail price of $9999.99 for ...
In terms of blog networks, no one ever seems to talk about Google, but they actually have one of the biggest. The search giant has well over 100 blogs devoted to everything from general company news to niche things that only webmasters ...
This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.
With Twitter, Facebook, class='blippr-nobr'>Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google and class='blippr-nobr'>Foursquareclass="blippr-nobr">Foursquare dominating the tech news cycle, it’s easy to forget about Flixsterclass="blippr-nobr">Flixster and its movie discovery service — and that’s a huge mistake. With more than 22 million downloads of its mobile apps, Flixster is a major player in mobile and one to watch as the mobile web continues to take over the world.
Flixster has been around for more than four years now. It’s growing by leaps and bounds with each new mobile application release, and this year’s acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes (and not selling itself to MySpace — more on that later) proves the company is an independent force to be reckoned with.
Much of Flixster’s success can be attributed to its fantastic mobile applications, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook integration and the organic effect of friends telling friends about the application. Over the course of the next few months, however, you’ll start to see Flixster in a whole new light — on the big screen.
Beginning this fall, Flixster will be working with in-theater ad network NCM Media Networks on a major consumer marketing push to promote Flixster and class='blippr-nobr'>Rotten Tomatoesclass="blippr-nobr">Rotten Tomatoes to movie going audiences on big screens in 17,000 theaters across the U.S.
That’s some major mainstream exposure. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Co-founder and CEO Joe Greenstein, who also hinted that Flixster will make its way on to class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet-connected television sets in the near future.
What follows is a deeper look at the company’s growth strategies and a little background on how they got to where they are today.
The Road to Profitability
One thing Flixster has managed to do over the course of the past four years is to evolve its product to match consumer demand. Flixster started as a destination site, made the leap to build on top of other social platforms like Facebook and MySpace when that was an emerging trend and then quickly transitioned to mobile. The company’s nimble reinvention strategy has worked — Flixster is now a profitable and expects to break even in 2010.
To date, Flixster has raised a little less than $9 million from angel, Series A and Series B rounds of investments. Greenstein says the startup is not looking for additional funding at this time.
But, are they looking to be acquired? That’s seems to be a negative for right now. In fact, rumors that MySpaceclass="blippr-nobr">MySpace would buy Flixster were blown out of proportion, a mixup that Greenstein attributes to the assumption that Flixster’s frequent talks with News Corp. were MySpace-related when they in fact were about the Rotten Tomatoes deal.
The Future is Mobile
Mobile has been huge for Flixster. Greenstein details that the iPhoneclass="blippr-nobr">iPhone has been the company’s most successful platform, though in recent months he has seen Androidclass="blippr-nobr">Android bubble up in terms of importance. Today, Flixster downloads on Android are on par with iPhone downloads.
The company also projects massive Flixster adoption on tablet devices. Flixster’s completely reworked iPad app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times since release. “We designed it from scratch around the idea that the iPad is a browsing and discovery device,” Greenstein says.
That approach is paying off handsomely. iPad app users are proving to be Flixster’s power users and are using it much more heavily than other mobile apps. Greenstein hopes to further cater to this content consumption crowd with a new 2.0 version of the app coming soon.
At some point, though, one has to wonder: is Flixster’s growth on mobile devices sustainable? To that question, Greenstein responds by pointing to research showing that overall smartphone penetration is still quite low — Italy has the highest penetration of smartphones at just 28%. This means that Flixster is poised to capitalize on the huge number of users expected to switch from feature phones to smartphones as they become cheaper and more accessible.
Plus, mobile growth is where the money is. “Direct brand advertising is up 300% in the last year, and there’s ton of interest from advertisers in mobile products,” Greenstein says.
Flixster’s Small and Big Picture
Mobile innovation will help Flixster continue to grow, but the company also has designs to graduate and become the brand that most consumers use to discover and make decisions about the movies they see. Flixster’s NCM Media Networks arrangement will go a long way to drive home brand awareness, but the company will also make a push for your living room attention as well.
Just recently, Flixster launched a channel on Roku set top boxes. That channel is essentially just a simple application that lets users watch movie trailers on their TVs, but it is already the number one downloaded channel on Roku.
Greenstein wouldn’t disclose any specifics, but he did talk about connected TVs from the perspective of a savvy entrepreneur salivating over the next big platform. With that in mind, we can only make the educated guess that the Flixster experience will be carried over to Internet-connected television sets and even more set top boxes. Soon enough, Flixster will be everywhere.
Images courtesy of alasis, Far0_RC1, class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
For more Social Media coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Social Mediaclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Social Media channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer, an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter.
One such example is the Chinese company VANCL, an online retailer that specializes in inexpensive quality clothing and accessories for the 18- to 28-year-old urban young adult consumer group. Like the Old Spice commercial, VANCL's latest marketing campaign began in the real world, then transitioned into cyberspace, eliciting thousands of user-generated copycats. I'll examine exactly how they did it in just a moment, but first we should look at the context in which VANCL operates in as well as their successful business model.
The Rise of E-Commerce in China
There are currently 420 million Internet users in China, with roughly half of this total comprised of the teenager to young-adult segment. While Chinese are often thought of as big savers, China's young consumers are more willing than ever to use credit cards and shop in an increasingly secure online marketplace.
It is estimated that 140 million Chinese netizens will shop online by the end of 2010. This is resulting in a growing number of successful e-commerce companies that are winning market share not by trying to compete directly with e-commerce giants like Alibaba Group, but by developing models targeted at a particular niche (think Etsy). Over the course of this year, six such Chinese e-commerce companies have raised at least $180 million in venture capital investment.
What is VANCL?
VANCL is one of these major e-tailers in China raising money in the burgeoning e-commerce environment. In May 2010 the firm raised $50 million backed by a consortium of VCs including IDG Capital. VANCL was founded in 2007 by a Chinese e-commerce entrepreneur named Chen Nian. Chen's previous company, Joyo, was acquired by Amazon, allowing him to take on a new challenge in China's online retail space.
Since Chen founded VANCL in 2007, it has grown rapidly over the past three years - maximizing the opportunity presented by China's online clothes shopping market, expected to reach RMB 30.87 billion with 81.5% year-on-year growth. A key determinant of VANCL's great success is how it leverages a tremendous amount of online advertising to target urban young Chinese seeking distinctive stylish clothing at affordable prices.
Offline to Online Marketing: VANCL's Successful Campaign
For the past few months, VANCL has stepped out into the real world of major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing and is plastering billboard advertisements along the walls of bustling subway and bus stops.
There are two different advertisements that both follow a similar structure - one features a popular female actress named Wang Luodan and the other portrays a well-known public intellectual named Han Han. On the left of the poster is an image of the spokesperson wearing stylish VANCL clothes looking cool and collected, with a message on the right giving an introspective note about how they view themselves and the world around them.
Netizens responded to the simple but eye-catching advertisements by creating a group on a leading social network called Douban where they could create and share their own versions of the ads - and this is where the story gets controversial. While reports vary, some contend that the full campaign was user generated, while others contend that it was sparked by the agency that VANCL hired to run the campaign. Soon thousands of different versions popped up all over China's most well-known social networks and BBS message boards, virally spreading across the nation.
How you too can go viral in China
As noted at the beginning of this article, there is no manual for creating a successful viral marketing campaign in China or in any other part of the world for that matter. Yet, I do believe that there are three characteristics of VANCL's campaign that increased the likelihood of its "virality":
Choose the right spokesperson. Just as few would argue that the Old Spice campaign would not have been as effective if a popular athlete was chosen instead of Mustafa, the first step that VANCL took in the right direction was choosing Wang Luodan and Han Han. These two prominent figures represent the generation VANCL seeks to sell its products to.
Choose a message your customers can relate to. The statements in the advertisements were a form of self-expression that potential customers could relate to. They highlighted relationships and feelings that they felt themselves but had no outlet through which to share it. This prompted people to express themselves through their own versions of the advertisement.
Choose a framework that is easy to replicate. While famous figures were featured, there was nothing complicated about the advertisement itself. All that was included was a photo and writing. Someone with the most limited Photoshop skills could easily create their own version of the advertisement as a means of self expression.
robert shumake'The Big Bang Theory' is no stranger to sexy sci-fi starlets, having scored geektastic cameos from Katee Sackhoff and Summer Glau in seasons past (wit.
Pentax announces price and availibilty for 645D camera: Photokina 2010: Pentax has announced its 645D medium format digital camera will start shipping globally from December 2010. The camera will sell at a retail price of $9999.99 for ...
In terms of blog networks, no one ever seems to talk about Google, but they actually have one of the biggest. The search giant has well over 100 blogs devoted to everything from general company news to niche things that only webmasters ...
robert shumake'The Big Bang Theory' is no stranger to sexy sci-fi starlets, having scored geektastic cameos from Katee Sackhoff and Summer Glau in seasons past (wit.
Pentax announces price and availibilty for 645D camera: Photokina 2010: Pentax has announced its 645D medium format digital camera will start shipping globally from December 2010. The camera will sell at a retail price of $9999.99 for ...
In terms of blog networks, no one ever seems to talk about Google, but they actually have one of the biggest. The search giant has well over 100 blogs devoted to everything from general company news to niche things that only webmasters ...
