The world is changing and Colin Decker is loving it

 
Colin Decker scoffs at the notion that the millennial generation lacks the energy, discipline and desire to do whatever it takes to achieve success.
“We make a video product that is aimed at a younger, more Internet-native audience member or consumer and so we have a lot of young employees,” says Decker, head of Discovery Digital Networks. “Personally, it’s been so rewarding to work with these people who are incredibly passionate and hard-working. They self-organize, they are engaged and they are motivated to create results. Our job as managers is just to keep them on track.”
DDN is part of Discovery Communications LLC, the $5.5 billion company which operates such well-known pay TV channels as Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, and has 2.8 billion cumulative subscribers in more than 220 countries around the world.
The company was formed in May 2013 and has a portfolio of original online video networks — Revision3, TestTube, Animalist and SourceFed — that cover topics from animals and pop culture to science and technology.
“We’ve got about 125 employees and we’re built around five major brands,” Decker says. “We make programming that is more intrinsically enmeshed with technology than cable TV was in the past. That explains why we would be based in San Francisco.”
One of the challenges in an emerging business, of course, is finding the right path to growth. A blank canvas presents the opportunity to go in any direction you like, a situation that can lead to trouble if you’re not careful.
“When you are in something that is evolving as rapidly and changing as quickly as video is on the Internet, the greatest challenge is to keep a steady hand at the wheel,” Decker says.
“That’s another way of saying to not fishtail left and right all over the highway with every new press announcement or prospective competitor that comes up on a weekly basis. It’s very easy to be overly reactive in emerging marketplaces. So the ability to have strategic discipline coupled with the ability to pivot quickly, that’s the biggest challenge.”
Here’s a look at how Decker and his team at DDN built a model that is changing the way we view the world.

Searching for answers

One of the first pivots DDN had to make was to move away from its firm devotion to achieving search engine optimization.
“The evolution of the Internet was accelerated so significantly by search and by Google Search in particular,” Decker says. “If you were trying to grow your footprint, SEO was the bible. You would live or die by SEO and your ability to succeed would be measured by how well you could be discovered by Google Search.”
The company was investing heavily in original programming, making new shows and publishing them on its site. But the numbers were not meeting expectations.
“We had a lot of long, difficult conversations about what’s wrong with our SEO,” Decker says.
“We need to be better at SEO. We obviously haven’t paid enough attention to how these videos are going to be indexed by Google and we need to double down on that. We went through a couple weeks of this existential crisis. Do we just make the coolest videos we can think of? Or do we make it so it better indexes with Google? Who is the master we are really trying to serve? We started to lose confidence in ourselves.”
A turning point was reached when the company decided to stop worrying about search metrics and start focusing on social media.
“Ultimately, it boiled down to one thing, the woman who leads my audience development marketing team,” Decker says.
“We simply said we need to make our content more shareable. That was an important moment because we realized it had implications on the creative process. “We were still making great content and putting our heart and soul into it, but that content was going to travel on Twitter and Facebook and through all those other channels. We needed to bear that in mind if we were going to succeed. So we put in motion a pretty significant effort toward shareability.”
Decker’s team quickly moved past the discussion on whether shareability is even a word and moved to the next step of developing a structure that could develop shareable content.
And that’s where the group found its next pivot point. What was shareable in the early days of the Internet wasn’t really all that shareable anymore.
“In the new economy of social sharing, what you choose to share says a lot about you,” Decker says. “In the early days, fail videos of tractor/trailers crashing on the highway or other disasters created an incredible spectacle and people were wowed by the power of the medium. But it’s changed so completely due to the power of social media. Those videos don’t travel well anymore because they are so negative. It doesn’t say much that’s positive about you to your followers.”
So the focus at DDN became about creating content that fit the mold of its parent company, Discovery Communications.
“It stands for satisfying and inspiring curiosity,” Decker says. “That has become the currency for the social generation.”