After creating hundreds of virtual events during the pandemic, video hosting platform Brandlive found that the majority of attendees were using their phones to access company events.
Courtesy of Brandlive
When Sam Kolbert-Hyle took over as CEO of Brandlive in January 2020, he wasted no time getting to know the live video hosting company’s customers. In doing so, he discovered something strange.
Rather than using the software as intended, to broadcast live product launches, one of his top clients, Nike, had been using it to host quarterly town hall-style meetings with hundreds of employees. Since launching in 2010, Brandlive’s core offering had become increasingly irrelevant, what with the advent of Facebook and Instagram Live. But this, Kolbert-Hyle thought, could be the key to revitalizing the Portland, Oregon-based business.
“I started digging into the data on our platform. I saw big companies had 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 [employees] invited to the meetings, and I’m seeing that the attendance is running between 30% and 40%,” Kolbert-Hyle says. “I went back to the board and I said, ‘Okay, there are some really interesting things here at this business, and we have great clients, but I’m going to take the business in a completely different direction.’”
His vision: To create a video platform that makes virtual town-hall and all-hands meetings actually enjoyable to attend—or, as Kolbert-Hyle puts it, an elevated Zoom experience.
The new product, aptly called Allhands, launched this week and enables large companies to stream live video to thousands of employees via desktop, mobile and conference room devices. Allhands’ video production team attends, produces and films each meeting, ensuring the final product looks more like a TV show than just another team meeting, Kolbert-Hyle says. Features like interactive quizzes, surveys and upvoting allow employees to interact in real time. And for those who aren’t able to tune in live, Allhands provides replays and highlight reels.
It’s not cheap: The average event costs $20,000, he says. But Kolbert-Hyle is targeting big, global companies, ones who can (and will) pay top dollar for premium events. Many of the billion-dollar businesses he works with have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on videos, he says, only to find they don’t play well on Zoom.
“The current state of the world is that Zoom is good enough. But as soon as we go back into the office, you’re not going to want to put the Zoom meeting on the 20-by-60 foot auditorium screen,” Kolbert-Hyle says. “You don’t want to rewatch a Zoom meeting. That’s really what we’re focused on, making the content feel worth rewatching.”
Kolbert-Hyle had intended on launching Allhands shortly after he took over as CEO, but then Covid-19 hit. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, the whole strategy and thesis might not work because we might have to shut the company down,’” he says. “Our events historically required people to go on site, and they were starting to get canceled.”
With Allhands, Brandlive CEO Sam Kolbert-Hyle says he wants to borrow tactics from the consumer technology world, such as sending push notifications to attendees reminding them to sign on to meetings.
EDUARDO ACORDA PHOTOGRAPHY
He paused the launch, pivoting toward producing large-scale virtual events, most notably fundraising campaigns for President Joe Biden. Brandlive also produced the remote table reads for Superbad and The Princess Bride, both of which attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers, Kolbert-Hyle says.
Initially, he says he expected 2020 revenue to be between $2 million and $3 million. Thanks to Kolbert-Hyle’s new strategy, it closed out the year with $20 million in revenue and expects more than $30 million in 2021.
At The North Face, which has been a Brandlive customer for five years, senior training manager Matt O’Grady envisions not just using Allhands for town-hall meetings, but for employee training sessions. During the pandemic, the apparel company used the platform to host more than 700 virtual training clinics for sales associates at REI and Dick’s Sporting Goods. “You get a totally branded experience [with Brandlive],” O’Grady says. “I think that’s really important for brands like us. We can make it look and feel like The North Face.”
This is aligned with Kolbert-Hyle’s long-term goal for Allhands to be the go-to tool for all corporate gatherings, whether weekly committee meetings or quarterly happy hours.
“We’re really just trying to bring the fun back to these types of meetings,” he says. “[Company-wide meetings] can become more like a destination versus what currently is, literally, just a calendar invite.”