How ISEBOX is making content distribution simple

Being a public relations professional is a very creative job that comes with some pretty annoying hurdles in the area of content distribution.

More often than not, getting written content along with video, photos and other formats to journalists can become tedious, even with platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox available.

ISEBOX was conceived by founder Marc de Leuw and CTO Salvatore Salpietro based on their experience in video production for clients in the communications and PR world.

They realized that there was no easy way to push video content, combined with photos, documents and audio content out to journalists in formats they could view and download on their time.

So, after two years of development, ISEBOX was launched in 2012. “We were fortunate to bring P&G and Adidas on as clients that summer for the London Olympics and have been growing since,” said de Leuw.

De Leuw believes that measuring who has downloaded the content, and where the videos are being played helps figure out what works best. “Ultimately, we want to make it easy for communications professionals to push their photos and videos out to the press,” he said. “And by making it easy for the press to download, you increase adoption by 70 percent.”

While there are several platforms that specialize in specific content types (just video, like Vimeo, or just photos, like Flickr), there weren’t any that addressed the need to publish various types that would be available for download.

“I’d have to guess that managing all these different content types is painful on the backend,” de Leuw said. “Additionally, I don’t think that anyone identified that there was such a pain point in the PR and event sectors to share different types of content with large audiences. At ISEBOX, we make a big promise to deliver all those content types to our users which requires us to manage several types of technology and ensure they work congruously.”

ISEBOX works with several companies in the Philadelphia area including Visit Philly, which uses the platform to both manage their B-roll as well as for media relations. ISEBOX also works with a prominent startup, Coldlight, based out of Wayne, Pa., which just recently received an investment from Intel and had their CEO named Entrepreneur of the Year in Philadelphia.

“For a variety of reasons, press releases have become seemingly irrelevant over the past several years,” said Rob Patterson, VP of Marketing at ColdLight. “When we were introduced to ISEBOX, our team was completely blown away with what we thought was the re-invention of how to deliver news in what is now a visual, interactive world. With ISEBOX, our news is not just news — it’s an interactive, compelling story.”

ISEBOX uses a SaaS model, so they typically offer access to the platform for a monthly investment when clients want to use their media relations and content distribution. For 12 releases, the investment would be in the $400 a month range. However, for events, their clients may invest on a project basis. A typical larger event, for say, the global BMA event, would be $9,500.

“One of the best accidents we’ve had is in the event sector,” said Joe Witte, ISEBOX’s VP of business development and marketing. “I suggested to some old friends of mine at BOLO, a digital conference in Scottsdale, that they use ISEBOX to share the event content with attendees. The attendees loved it because they didn’t have to jot notes and snap photos of each slide. The BOLO team loved it because we generated more than 5K video plays for them for a conference that had only 250 attendees — so the awareness was great, in addition to making it really easy to distribute huge video and PowerPoint’s out to attendees suddenly became easy.”