David Carson On The Spot
By ELEFTHERIA PARPIS
Monday, June 12 2006
Monday, June 12 2006
Published on AllBusiness.com
David Carson, co-founder of digital entertainment network Heavy.com, says the best decision he's ever made is "not being an advertising company." Carson, who with partner Simon Assaad first caught the industry's attention with IBM e-business interactive ads at Ogilvy & Mather New York, is now most excited about creating and distributing content via the Internet. His animated series Behind the Music That Sucks debuted on Heavy.com and has since aired on TV networks around the world. A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Carson, 36, discusses digital content. Q: What was your inspiration for Heavy.com?
A: Heavy literally came out of everything that our clients at the time said we shouldn't be doing. We said rather than try to push these things up a hill at some of the ad agencies and some of our marketing clients, maybe we should just put our money where our mouth is and just make it for ourselves. It was really just for us to show people what we were talking about. We were always a sort of "show me, don't tell me" kind of company, so we figured, "We'll make it, they'll take a look at it and then they'll certainly want to buy it."
How did the success of Behind the Music That Sucks influence your business?
That's been a process for us because we are trying to prove if you make something interesting and try to distribute it on this platform for online, you can actually do something interesting, you could actually get a lot of people to watch it, pay attention, interact with it and so forth. Who better to do it then just a few guys who have a very small company to show a larger company that, "Hey, you could be doing these types of things as well." That actually ended up turning into a business for us because from there, Heavy.com actually started to get an audience, and an audience that advertisers wanted to get to.
You helped launch Fuse. How did that experience help you with Heavy.com?
We were essentially building the cable network, and I remember looking at the Nielsen ratings for MTV, MTV 2 and Fuse, and one of our research guys said we actually have a larger audience on Heavy.com. That's when I realized I'm a complete idiot. Why am I building up this network for somebody else when I've got this other network that I own? So I quit the next day.
What is the percentage of original programming versus user-generated?
It's really about 50/50, and it'll be interesting to see where that mix goes. My Heavy is opening up a little more user gen for us.
You say MyHeavy is a safer place for user-generated content. Why?
Because
A: Heavy literally came out of everything that our clients at the time said we shouldn't be doing. We said rather than try to push these things up a hill at some of the ad agencies and some of our marketing clients, maybe we should just put our money where our mouth is and just make it for ourselves. It was really just for us to show people what we were talking about. We were always a sort of "show me, don't tell me" kind of company, so we figured, "We'll make it, they'll take a look at it and then they'll certainly want to buy it."
How did the success of Behind the Music That Sucks influence your business?
That's been a process for us because we are trying to prove if you make something interesting and try to distribute it on this platform for online, you can actually do something interesting, you could actually get a lot of people to watch it, pay attention, interact with it and so forth. Who better to do it then just a few guys who have a very small company to show a larger company that, "Hey, you could be doing these types of things as well." That actually ended up turning into a business for us because from there, Heavy.com actually started to get an audience, and an audience that advertisers wanted to get to.
You helped launch Fuse. How did that experience help you with Heavy.com?
We were essentially building the cable network, and I remember looking at the Nielsen ratings for MTV, MTV 2 and Fuse, and one of our research guys said we actually have a larger audience on Heavy.com. That's when I realized I'm a complete idiot. Why am I building up this network for somebody else when I've got this other network that I own? So I quit the next day.
What is the percentage of original programming versus user-generated?
It's really about 50/50, and it'll be interesting to see where that mix goes. My Heavy is opening up a little more user gen for us.
You say MyHeavy is a safer place for user-generated content. Why?
Because