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Reggie Bradford, Chief Executive Officer, Vitrue

Founder and CEO Reggie Bradford brings nearly two decades of experience as an industry pioneer, having blazed a successful path for technology companies under his leadership. With funding from General Catalyst Partners and later from Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner Broadcasting-Bradford founded Vitrue in 2006 to help brands and consumers connect more meaningfully with each other through online social networking and user-generated video. The company currently boasts a growing roster of customers that represent some of the world’s leading media companies and consumer brands. Most recently, Vitrue was named to Business 2.0’s “Next Net” Top 25 for 2007.

Bradford’s leadership experience spans 16 years in the consumer packaged goods, Internet and television industries. Prior to Vitrue, he was President and a member of the board at TANDBERG Television, an organization of more than 400 employees and over $100 million in revenues. In his 14-month tenure, he led the company to a 40% annual growth rate, successfully integrated two major acquisitions and led the global repositioning of the re-launched brand.

Bradford also served as President and CEO of N2 Broadband, the leading provider of open-platform, on-demand entertainment solutions. During his tenure, N2 Broadband grew annual revenues from less than $1 million to more than $35 million in just under five years. The company, which achieved cash-flow profitability during the same period, boasts a customer roster that includes the world’s top 10 cable operators and the world’s leading entertainment companies Bradford was named one of Television Week’s “10 to Watch” for 2005.

Prior to joining N2 Broadband, Bradford served as Chief Marketing Officer at WebMD from 1998 to 2000. During his tenure there, the company grew from 40 to 4,000 employees and received more than $2 billion in funding. While at WebMD, Reggie was instrumental in defining interactivity on the Web as an early pioneer of social communities. WebMD later became one of the world’s leading Internet destinations with over 38 million unique visitors a month. He previously held various marketing and management positions with Miller Brewing Company, a subsidiary of Phillip Morris.

Bradford received a BBA in Finance from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Emory University. He and his wife Holly have five children.

More articles by Reggie Bradford





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Behind Every Great Brand There Is A Great Audience

Written on
Feb 22, 2008 
Author
Reggie Bradford  |
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Behind Every Great Brand There Is A Great Audience



Think of your UGC community in this way: most brands have comprehensive marketing calendars and social media should not only be part of the mix but act as the hub – where key interaction is not only captured but provides a truly robust extension of your brand experience. During my years at the Miller Brewing Company (I focused on MGD to be specific) we had a promotional calendar for dozens of retail-focused events throughout the year, like football tailgating (both college and the NFL), Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Spring Break, some sort of summer thematic, Halloween and many more. Are you going to run some sort of promotion around the Preakness, or the start of spring training in baseball ?…then tie a real-world campaign to a UGC community and maximize the experience and consumer touch points.  Start it early and let your consumers shape the promotion and define their experience. The opportunities are truly limitless.
 
User-generated content is cost-effective; tailor it to fit your needs.
 
I don’t believe that marketing initiatives incorporating UGC and related communities should simply be undertaken because of their relatively inexpensive nature compared to traditional programs. Yet there is no denying this fact, and it enables UGC to be quickly and easily altered for each promotion. The beautiful thing about social media is that once you’ve got the technology infrastructure in place, you can easily swap out the creative and thematic at the flip of a switch, and with minimal costs. As such, social media efforts should be tied to all of your other “offline” campaigns and promotions, as there’s really no additional cost in doing so other than applying your marketing team’s creative to alter the look and feel of the community during a given time – and again, this creative should be consistent and aligned with your other marketing elements that are already underway. These assets are reusable – easy to remove if they’re not working effectively enough, providing unmatched flexibility as a program for marketers like us.
 
By treating social media as a continual element of branding and not a simple one-off end goal, you can stay relevant in consumers’ minds and build meaningful relationships and communities year-round.
 
And once you’ve done all this, remember: Don’t keep social media in a vacuum; pepper it into every aspect of your brand outreach.
 
Like I’ve mentioned before, social media and UGC should be constant elements of your company’s marketing efforts. They’re not tools – they’re mediums just like television, mobile, Internet, print and search. Soliciting consumer content isn’t worth much if you don’t use it as a means towards an overarching goal, to increase brand loyalty and sales. Every marketing effort across all media should be aligned and on-message. There should be clear synergies across all channels – your print campaigns should reflect your TV spots that may use some of your UGC that could be focused around a key event you’re running. The key factor is to think about UGC as a core part of your entire marketing mix and align it with your other programs.





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