Most mornings I wake up to an inbox absolutely flooded with emails from PR agencies packed full of videos, photos, and pitches. When I was introduced to Joe Witte, VP of Business Development and Marketing at ISEBOX, I knew that I wasn’t the only person who thought it was an issue.
ISEBOX, pronounced ‘ice box’, is billed as a super charged Dropbox that requires no technical ability to use, allows for super-fast uploads, and lets PR agencies push their content easier than ever before. The cloud-based dashboard offers real-time reports and tracking with ISEBOX’s analytics: it’s simple, secure, scalable, and accessible.
“We’re in an age where enterprises are their own media firms,” says Witte. “If they want to generate that content, namely blogs, videos, and photos, they need the right applications to manage and disseminate it.”
The owners of ISEBOX’s parent company, The 10 Group, are a production company that embodies the idea of an enterprise as a media firm. They shoot their own, live video for firms like Proctor and Gamble before distributing it to various media outlets.
However, they realized that if they had 5 amazing videos, it wasn’t as easy as they thought to get them into the press’ hands. One of the co-founders of ISEBOX was in fact a journalist who had moved to the PR side of things and diagnosed this pain point, among others, and helped officially launch ISEBOX in 2012.
Witte joined the team not long after, and part of what drew him there was the fact that ISEBOX was so well thought out with the foundational ground work already set.
“Great ideas don’t necessarily grow on trees,” says Witte. “And when I was looking for companies to join I saw that ISEBOX had a solid product, it was used by major enterprises, and it was validated.”
Granted, ISEBOX still faces challenges that startup companies run into, but they have the benefit of not worrying if they’re product will be ready 6 months down the line. Instead, Witte and the ISEBOX crew are focusing on how they can scale their platform over all else right now.
Their scaling efforts were greatly helped when ISEBOX was selected by BMA to participate in their 2014 Global Conference this year. BMA is one of the largest b2b marketing conferences globally, and ISEBOX leveraged that opportunity to promote their product: they put all of the speaker presentations on their cloud platform to show they could distribute content in a totally new way.
“What everybody wants to know is what happens if somebody takes our content it and reuses it somewhere? Often times you don’t know where it goes,” says Witte. “Other than scouring every media outlet on the internet, which is expensive and time consuming, you get something more immediate with ISEBOX.”
When people went to the ISEBOX page to download the BMA presentations and photos, which are stored in every compatibility and resolution quality, ISEBOX gets all of their data – name, title, company, and email. Should they grab an embed code and redistribute the content on their own sites, ISEBOX can track how many page views the video gets no matter where it ends up.
According to Witte, there are more media outlets out there than have ever existed before, and they all want content. To know where that content is and to know what impact it’s having is tough though, but ISEBOX is firmly dedicated to bridging that gap.