Meet Jacob

How long have you been at the company, and what kind of different jobs have you done at Random House?

I started at Random House Audio in October, 2000. I was hired as an audiobook producer as well as to investigate an early model for a digital audio archive. In addition to producing and directing audiobooks, I often consulted on issues around copyright protection and digital rights management and technology shifts in the audio field. In 2007, I went on to online marketing and digital strategy for all the imprints in the Crown Group.

What is a typical day like for you? When you’re at your desk, what are you typically doing?

A typical day involves a fair amount of meetings, phone calls and email. Often I’m sitting down with the publishers for whom I act as our online marketing liaison, along with either their “offline” marketing folks or their business development thinkers. Usually, we’re brainstorming new campaigns or new products and generally devising business strategy and creative approach.

What attracted you to your position? What is your favorite thing about your job?

I love technology and media, and I love the substantial strands within online marketing that have to do with understanding the web and how it functions and how people interact with a digital interface. I love working with graphic designers and web developers to conceive, build and improve sites and then, watching as those online spaces are published live for the world to absorb.

Tell me about a site or a campaign that you’re proud of. What did you do and what were the results?
I recently finished a new video demo for our language instruction imprint, Living Language. They offer online language learning courses and they wanted a video feature on their site that could quickly demonstrate to users how fully-functional and easy these online courses are to use. It was not a major project, but this combination of images, voice-over and music was a great example of the kind of variety of forms online marketing can take. And it was a lot fun to produce.

What’s the culture like at Random House and in your division?
The online marketing and digital content community at Random House is great. Recently, there’s been a great push to share experiences and ideas across divisions in a way that’s really fostered communication and a new sense of shared marketing goals. I’ve been learning a lot from some of the senior technology and marketing folks here, and their willingness and interest in providing direction and even, to some degree, informal mentorship, have been fabulous.

What new opportunities exist for Random House in today's digital environment?
Random House is at the forefront of an industry that is changing rapidly. So we’re not only faced with creating interesting, viable solutions to the problems presented when any large industry goes through a major shift, but we’re also given incredible opportunities to set forth practices, processes and approaches to marketing and distributing content in a landscape that will be very fresh and new in the coming years.

Do you have any advice for someone who would like to work at Random House in a position like yours?
To be able to communicate with any audience, you have to be able to grasp what that audience is really like, and you only learn from doing. So I encourage folks who are interested in any online pursuits to get in and get their feet wet: spend a lot of time hanging out online, play around on Facebook and MySpace and investigate the myriad other types of networks that are popping up out there with interesting services (Twitter anyone? FriendFeed? Blip.tv? Etc.) Do some shopping online, download an audiobook and sync it with your iPod, play a casual video game, etc. Do you know what the term Web 2.0 used to mean? Do you know what it means today? What about Web 3.0? The Semantic Web? Get out there and understand what the digital domain looks like, how it feels, how it behaves. Get to know what people are doing online.

How does Random House support your professional and personal development?
I worked for a long time producing audiobooks and loved what I was able to accomplish there, but when I began to search for the next challenge and wanted something new, I was happy to be able to move into a new position within the company and continue learning and growing professionally. It was nice that Random House allowed me to grow that way.

What has been your most challenging / rewarding / memorable task/ project so far?
There’s a venture that’s still in process here that involves taking a large database of both “professional” as well user-generated content and creating a searchable interface to display the content on one of our imprint’s web sites. Technically, this project was challenging to conceive and implement and has been really satisfying to wrap my head around and, with a great team of creative designers and astute web producers, solve the problems inherent in the project and get it off the ground.

At Random House, we have very diverse imprints, what do your imprints focus on in online marketing?
I guess at the end of the day we’re all focusing on selling books to some degree. But it’s the creative ways we employ to create that interest around our books that is the fun. With all the diverse kinds of books we publish within Crown, including audiobooks, video game strategy guides, travel books, language learning, cookbooks, crafting books, as well fiction and non-fiction books, I get to focus my efforts in a lot of different directions and reach out to pretty diverse audiences. We’re always working on our own web sites, as well as looking at social networks, viral email campaigns and enewsletters, promotional videos, flash games, affiliate marketing campaigns, software development and the list goes on.