Jonathan Block Verk on Shazam

Hi this is Frank Radice for Red Touch Media and this is our continuing series on the future of content i'm with Jonathan Block Verk who is the EVP of strategic partnerships and television for shazam pretty amazing job Jonathan tell me a little bit about what you're trying to do with shazam. Yeah thanks Frank it's a really it's a fun job it's a great company and what we're trying to do is help networks understand how to work with the second screen how to engage viewers with their devices that they're already using and really bridge that pretty serious chasm between what they're watching on television and what they're engaging with on their device. So you had an incredible night with the Grammys tell me a little bit about that. As an organization we went well over the one million mark with shazams app at the Grammys well over a million people reached out and said I'm interested I want to know what this song is I want to know what I'm watching I wanna know who's singing who's performing and 60,000 of them said I actually want to buy this and went through and bought singles off of that after that engagement so it was a really really successful night lots of content to engage with lots of opportunities for remarking and remarketing and re-targeting through that with using that data that we've collected. So shazam is often looked at as the company that oh I hear a song and I just want to know what the name of that song is but you're trying to build it into something more than that based on at my understanding and i'd like you to explain a little bit about it is this gigantic database that you have. Yeah so shazams been around for twelve years obviously a a top-10 app for ever, 400 million people have downloaded our app and have it on their device 125 million in the US and you know it's become I mean its basically become a verb, it's really it's pretty wild that I work in a company that is a verb in the lexicon but over the last 12 years we've collected unbelievable amount of data we've got.. It took us I think it was ten years to get our first billion I think it was ten years to get our first billion and now we have a billion shazams every two months every 60 days and we're collecting this information we have a much better understanding of how to engage with people who are showing an interest in a particular piece of content whether it's music for television. So sometimes people would consider that there's data mining based on receiving content would you then say that data itself was content? I mean it depends, I would think it would depend how you use it and what you do with it. It depends on what context and I mean shazam has an unbelievable amount of data which makes it really one of the few platforms that can be used before program for example or for an album launch you can use this data to market and target people who are already showing interest in that or similar content you can use that data during the experience so surfacing relevant contextual information or additional immersive content during the program and then after the show you can use that data to retarget and reintroduce them to upcoming priority shows and music. That's just fascinating stuff Jonathan congratulations this is Frank Radice with Jonathan Block Verk from shazam see you next time