Yellow Brick Road

Joyce Yip talks to Yahoo, TVB and Next Media veteran, Ivy Wong, as she explains her big leap out of the corporate media world

Ivy Wong needs little introduction.

Having jumped as Yahoo Hong Kong’s first local member to heading its global sales office; building TVB.com, myTV and TVB fun up from scratch; and repacking Apple News with mobile interactive games, features and online exclusive documentaries, Wong is perhaps the only person who has swept the media industry across print, digital, TV and mobile.

Yet, she took a big leap this month, leaving Next Media where she had been acting as an advisor for the past four months.

Her new yellow brick road? One is to prove user-generated content is worth the dollars through a lifestyle-oriented, Instagram-like mobile platform, dubbed Viss; and two, to help local SMEs and charities do marketing and media planning via technology through a company called Rework. While these new endeavours are not the colossal restructuring missions she’s used to, her founding beliefs remain the same: to make a reputation for herself in no man’s land.

“I’ve always known what I wanted: CEO has always been my career path,” Wong says. “I like to make changes because it’s no fun going with the flow.”

Being the eldest in a family of six with parents who owned a restaurant in the sketchiest part of the city, Wong graduated with a bachelor of commerce at the University of Toronto and found her first real job in December 1997 at the doorsteps of Yahoo’s first office on Centre Street in Sai Ying Pun, where the team of five – all from the office’s regional side – were so unconvincing Wong had to “double check whether it was the same Yahoo”.

Yahoo!

But even at such a green stage, Wong saw the internet was never meant to be in one place – a revelation that not only prompted her to become sales director for Yahoo Asia and, eventually, senior director of the global sales team, but it also paved her mission statement of “localise and globalise” as well as a macho attitude for the rest of her career.

For most of those years, she would remember walking into a client’s office in
most Asian countries – usually Japan and Korean – with her team to be dismissed as an assistant for her bulky Caucasian colleague before exchanging name cards. Though the hosts were apologetic afterwards, Wong knew she’d have to work extra hard to convince them this petite Chinese woman could head the game.

“That was the most pressure I had at that job: to prove myself, to prove that my capability matched my title. It wasn’t easy.”

TVB

But after eight and a half years, it did get easy, and Wong became bored. Her solution was to move to a company where employees were betting she’d leave in less than two weeks: TVB – a place where she went in hoping to push the broadcaster into a global digital platform from its then online TV channel guide.

In an industry as conservative and as reliant on viewership, however, her efforts – even if they were for the same company – were seen as thievery: “the same stuff as any other online pirater”, she recalled one of the producers saying.

“Even really late into the game, I was never seen as a part of the TVB family. I kind of knew from tabloids and magazines what the company was like, but it wasn’t until I was working in there that I went, ‘Oh, it’s really like this’,” she says.

I’ve always known what I wanted: CEO has always been my career path. I like to make changes because it’s no fun going with the flow.

Ivy Wong

CEO of Viss and Rework

“For the first half of my time there, my job was pretty much about dealing with internal politics, educating staff: nobody really supported me aside from a few senior executives. Yahoo was a fun place to be: they were result-oriented; but in a Hong Kong company, nobody cares about the results when there’s no KPI – which was then the case for digital. It was all about micromanaging.”

To test the waters, the broadcaster gave her news and non drama-type shows as an experiment. Her breakthrough didn’t come until July 2008, when she got popular drama Heart of Greed as her lab rat. For it, she assigned designated pages on tvb.com for memorable quotes from the show, made snippets and behind-the-scenes of episodes as well as posts on popular forums and searches.

In return, her work attracted a group of younger audiences that was never on the broadcaster’s radar before: 10% to 20% of the online viewers were recycled back into the show.

With every company, I had the opportunity to handle my own project: it’s like nurturing a child from birth. TVB is still stuck in its adolescence.

“The producers’ attitude to us turned 180 degrees,” Wong says with a smirk. “They wanted to work with us after that. I’d probably consider that as the biggest milestone during my time with them.”

By early 2011, however, the then-politics of TVB’s handover put the digital operations into a freeze, and Wong had no choice but to leave after months of counting fingers at work. But despite having converted the producers to believers of the digital world and the success of the Twitter-inspired TVB fun, Wong’s original plan for the broadcaster was nowhere near done.

“Like back in Yahoo, I always believed that media is global: there are Chinese people everywhere, why can’t they watch TVB overseas like we do in Hong Kong instead of tolerating outdated shows? Why do we tolerate content being stolen by third-party platforms?” she says, adding myTV was never intended for Hong Kong, but rather to take a regional approach as an overseas licensing business.

Currently, however, TVB still officially distributes its shows overseas via local broadcasters, usually with a lag time of two to three years. In late March 2013, it signed a digital partnership with Youku Tudou for it to feed 2,500 hours of drama across the video sites and mobile platforms in the Mainland.

“After I left, nobody really wanted to do anything because these deals were complicated,” Wong laments. “For me, it’s a bit of a regret even up until now because with every company, I had the opportunity to handle my own project: it’s like nurturing a child from birth. TVB is still stuck in its adolescence.”

Next Mobile

The final jump before running solo was an emotional leap for Wong. Since Next Mobile already had an online platform, it was the first job in 12 years where she had picked up someone else’s work.

Aside from “just” fattening up the mobile platform with pseudo-ad placement commercial opportunities such as location-based games, as well as more serious online exclusive features and documentaries, what she did for Next Mobile was “purely business and managerial”.

“It was – I guess you can say – much less exciting. The good side, of course, was that people at Next Media were not afraid to go from traditional to digital. So for them, it’s more of compensating both sides, trying to find the right balance. But it was really purely business compared to what I was doing before.”

Wong’s official resignation date was 31 January, 2013; but without a replacement, she stayed on as an advisor until April.

Rework and Viss

Although now stripped of the backup and budgets of corporations, Wong’s enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed.

Her new baby, Viss, already has more than 3,000 merchants and more than two million users pinning their outfits on the platform since its launch late last year. In the next few months, Viss Baby and Viss Pet will also come out – all in an effort to prove consumer-generated content is profitable.

“Currently, media is owned by companies. My belief is that it can be owned by the public in user-generated content. With the right platform and the right place for their voices, people will pay money for this so-called ‘free content’.”

But like every new venture, Viss suffers the biggest challenge: engagement.

“Every app, including ours, is testing mobile behaviour. And ours is very greedy,” she says, citing Viss requires users to upload, tag, look at the product catalogue and buy. “That’s many actions that we’re requesting them to do, but we’re optimistic.”

Funding the endeavour is Rework, a business partnership consultancy for SMEs and – to satisfy the God-loving side of her character – charities. Her latest collaborators are Happy Tree Services – a charity that provides medical, educational and social help to underprivileged minorities worldwide – and Nick Vujicic, the author of World Without Limbs who is conducting a pan-Asia tour this summer.

“These businesses’ scales are really small, so the 4As definitely won’t have them; but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to do O2O marketing – where their audience is, that’s where they need to be,” she says.

For a superwoman who’s had the world in her hands, this new change seems to be an immense step down; but for Wong, the biggest drive is always where the biggest challenges lie.

“With these start-ups, I have close to no resources. It’s not like my time at Yahoo, TVB or Next Media, I have to do everything by myself. Is there regret Perhaps, but the motivation is enormous. Take Nick for example, it feels good that through marketing alone, I have the power to help him raise funds and help spread his word of encouragement and life to the world. That, to me, is priceless.”