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Hi i'm Donna Drake with Live It Up but today i'm working with Red Touch Media and with
us on set is the guy that started it all or at least is the CEO now and his name is Wayne
Scholes, welcome to the show how are you? I'm very good thank you. It's like welcoming
you to your own show it's kind of funny. I know but I like that part because we get to
meet new people, there's always new people coming around the booth and hanging out and
I love it. So what is Red Touch Media? Red Touch Media is a content distribution and
management platform which sounds really techno I always like to think of it as we empower
people to find the right content, distribute it to who needs that content and just connect
the right people to the right content that's really what it's about is connecting people
through content. And where did this concept come from? What was the spark of this innovation?
Well it's interesting actually because we started off not really as a content management
company, we started much more as a content distribution company licensing music and then
distributing it around to different places like retailers in Australia for instance was
one of our first places there was literally allowing consumers to download music in kiosks
I mean way back in you know the early 2000's and back then we used to even burn CD's and
it's bizarre to think about it now because it seems so long ago, but we used to burn
CD's so the long story short is the more we had to learn how to push lots of content when
we would update the content the more we learned how to manage content and so we learned very
quickly how to manage really large packets of data you know 30-40 terabytes a week of
content and went to really remote places that were just in the middle of nowhere and so
the more we got better at that the more we started to look at it and say now hold on
a minute, we are actually really good at managing content not just sending it out and selling
it we're actually really good at managing it and we realize that at one point we were
managing a couple hundred million files a month then we started thinking maybe there's
more to it than that so we spent a lot of time actually figuring out what we could do
with content management and now we manage 2 billion files a month for companies you
know great partners like Sony pictures, Paramount and NBC. Just correct me did you say 2 billion
a month? That's a lot. Yeah 2 billion files a month and i'm probably underestimating it
because it grows every single day ya know I think by the end of this year we'll certainly
be at about 3 billion files a month which is a huge amount of content. That's a lot
of content. We do it in a lot of diverse places I think the thing I like about what we do
is that it's applicable to almost any marketplace. I don't care what market somebody is in we
can always find a way to help manage and distribute content and that content can be you know it
doesn't have to be movies or TV shows or music files it can be as simple a thing as a spreadsheet
and powerpoint presentation so one of the things we do for Sony for instance is we manage
all of the content that they have and we push it to their sales offices globally so when
somebody wants to change a powerpoint presentation in Sao Paulo but the people in London want
to have a look at it as well they can pull it from the same server and they can also
access the same files and we manage that flow for them so it can literally be anything from
a document 3 to a full 1080 or 4000 K movie it doesn't matter what it is. Now how did
you go about doing your talent acquisition, putting your team together because obviously
it took some bright minds in order to figure out how this all works so we've been very
fortunate to meet the right people at the right time and just be able to show them what
we do we've never had anybody quit the company and i'm proud of that because it tells me
that we've got a really tight team and the people really love what they do so you know
we've definitely I don't want to say poached but we've definitely poached a few. Invited
a few how's that? You've invited a few. Yeah absolutely so you know we've worked with lots
of different agents there's lots of different companies around the world and generally speaking
people really fall in love with the brand we're a fun place to be and I like the fact
that people like who we are and they start to say gosh you know I really dig what you
guys do and I like how you do things if anything ever comes up let me know i'd be interested
and we never hire to resumes I can honestly say I don't really like resumes and part of
it is because I don't get them i never understood a resume because all it does is give me something
to read. You're absolutely right! who cares what the paper says it's who the person is.
It doesn't matter they can write whatever they want I can't approve it one way or the
other so i'd rather sit down with them, hang out with them a little bit and talk to them
about their family, talk to them about what their aspirations are I like to find out what
people are proud of I want to know what they're proud of in their life and what accomplishments
they've reached and I think some of that goes back to their personal accomplishments it's
much more for me about what motivates the people to do the right job and so we've been
very fortunate to get the right team together we've got some from New York that have moved
out to Utah we've got a great team in South Africa and we've got some great people in
London so we're very fortunate. Now you know you're talking about Utah, Why Utah? What
made you decide Utah? I'm from St. Louise Missouri so I can ask a question like that.
It's funny though cause everyone asks us the same thing and they always go alright so you
guys seem like a really company and you're in, where is it again? And I go yeah we're
in Utah in Salt Lake. Part of it is that I just love what Salt Lake has to offer with
the business community it's a fabulously aware community of technology it's one of the fastest
growing in the country for technology with great bands like Microsoft, Adobe you know
don't be just moving your marketing team to Utah it's those kinds of companies that are
gravitating towards Utah and it's not just that they've got nice tax laws and they've
got good tax banks, stuff like that it's more than that there's a great population there
for staff for talent, you can find people who speak any language literally any language
you want in my staff alone I think we've got something like 15 languages I mean it's just
astonishing the talent that's there and when you're a global business these days you've
got to be aware of being able to do business in other peoples languages you can't just
rely on the fact that english has been the predominant language you've got to be able
to speak other languages which you know doesn't necessarily apply to me my french was a lot
better when I was 20 when I lived there it's not so great now but I can get by and I can
order drinks for people and that's the main thing so utah has definitely got that great
business vibe but the other side of it is I love the family atmosphere there and I love
the environment that you can people are friendly there, they're just kind I always find it
when people come visit us they always leave saying yeah for the first day I thought everybody
was lying to me because everyone was really nice and now i've been here for a week they
are the nicest people ever so you know Utah for us has been great from a business standpoint
but certainly from a staff standpoint a talent standpoint it's been fabulous and we love
living there we do. Now how do you connect the three different headquarters together
in terms of your corporate culture in terms of that familiness you know do you skype with
each other, like how do you create that oneness? So we have what we call portals in all our
offices so for instance if London was to talk to somebody they simply walk up to one of
the 16 screens that are vertical and it's a live feed to the other offices so they can
just walk up there and say hey go get Jon for me or go get Rob for me or whatever and
they can have a conversation one on one with the cameras they're these full screens cause
I think sometimes I hate to say that I don't like skype but I don't like skype. That's
okay, he doesn't like skype for the record. No it's that little screen it's having that
little face cut off I always feel awful well cause i'm always thinking oh cause everyone
is looking at my chin they're all looking at my chin so I always like it when I can
have a full screen I can have a conversation with them as I would if I have met them in
the hallway and it was actually an idea from the VP of marketing Jon Accarrino he said
look we've got to find a way to have stand up conversations with these other people on
the team and really be able to communicate as if they were in our office with us and
so you know we did and people like it. You know I'm 5 foot and you said 60 inches I could
actually like lay down horizontally right? they could see the whole thing my whole body,
my shoes what i'm wearing you know. And that's exactly it we can critique each other all
day long on the other side I travel there a lot and we do office swaps we make sure
that if the staff want to come work in a different one for a couple of weeks then they can no
stress we also make sure that we have the same kind of brand with the slightly different
interpretation for the low cal so for instance dave Alder who decorates all our offices worldwide
and has a lot of brand management responsibility for us you know spent 20 years as a CMO of
*** and he's just a really great guy for our brand he knows how to take the flavor
of London and put into our brand so that each office is individually personalized for that
city rather than it being just a transplant of what they have in Salt Lake you know Salt
Lake is a very different place than London and so we like to make sure that London has
got it's own flavor. Talking about flavor maybe even like a cultural exchange of food
like a little fish n' chip day a little popcorn at the other office, it could be fun. It totally
could be it's funny actually cause we're big fans of cooking at the office mostly because
I think I don't know if it's cause i'm too lazy to go out eat or cause i'm too busy to
go out to eat i'm not sure which it is but we do like cooking in the office so we do
have lots of fun and we'll send each other treats so we'll send american candy over to
England and the english will send a bunch of english stuff to us which everyone in the
office just loves we're definitely chocolate fans in the office. Thank you for giving us
this in depth look of what Red Touch Medias all about and the fun of it, it sounds like
a great company and thanks for watching if you'd like to reach out to us you know how
can at Red Touch Media, Yay!