Dailybreak CEO on Driving Users to Action
Tuesday Aug 21, 2012 by Susan Johnston - Contributor, VentureFizz
Online challenge and engagement marketing website CampusLIVE has come a long way since 2008, when Boris Revsin and Jared Stenquist founded the site in their UMass dorm room. Now with about 30 employees, the company rebranded as Dailybreak and raised $5 million in funding from GSV Capital, Highland Capital Partners, and Charles River Ventures earlier this year.
Online media and eCommerce veteran John Federman came onboard as CEO in the spring. Federman stresses that although Dailybreak has expanded beyond its original audience of college students, it hasn’t lost the targeting and specificity that contributed to its early success. “We wanted to expand our audience beyond college but that didn’t mean we wanted to become generic,” he says. “We now have challenges directed towards moms and young professionals and high school students. We speak in the language of those content creators.”
The site features challenges such as trivia, games, and contests where users (called “breakers”) post user-generated content to earn coins which they can redeem for auction or raffle items. Breakers play an average of about 20 challenges per month, according to Federman, with an average of 3 minutes or more spent per engagement.
“How valuable is a Facebook like?” he says. “In many cases, not terribly valuable. We look to engage consumers in ways that are more driven by action.” Those actions can include creating videos, answering trivia questions, or sharing a challenge with friends.
Dailybreak created a recent contest in conjunction with the launch of the Chevy Sonic and asked breakers (in this case, college-educated young professionals) to post videos describing their first experience driving a stick shift. “Chevy wanted users who engage with them to give them information,” explains Federman. “All the while doing so, they wanted it to be entertaining.” Response to the contest exceeded expectations, and Dailybreak delivered hundreds of videos to Chevrolet.
Other clients include McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Microsoft. While Dailybreak is free for consumers, “brands pay on a pay per performance basis,” says Federman. “They’re effectively paying for this social action. We like a lot of people are excited to be part of the innovation of brands recognizing the value in increasing the level of dialogue and action.”
Dailybreak’s mobile app will launch in September, which Federman predicts “will create an even stickier and more viral environment for us.” Most of the $5 million investment will go towards sales and marketing, he adds. Going forward, the goal is to find “deeper and more impactful relationships with our user base,” says Federman.
Susan Johnston is a journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow Susan on Twitter (@UrbanMuseWriter) by clicking here.
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