The internationalization of ByteDance is not a smooth journey. Can Disney’s “quasi-successors” shoulder the heavy responsibility?

Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Entertainment Capital” (ID: yulezibenlun) , Author: Deng Yingchuang Mark Lee.

Regardless of whether you admit it or not, as the leader in the byte-beating international strategy, TikTok has become the well-deserved first app to go overseas-the world has downloaded about 1.9 billion times, ranking third in the Apple Store downloads for three consecutive quarters. One.

Under the tremendous uncertainty of Sino-US relations, ByteDance is going on a super-adventure—establishing a separate super-flow system in China and overseas, each with its own division and the same division.

On the one hand, the business is independent of each other, overseas data is stored overseas, and the auditors are placed overseas to meet overseas regulatory requirements to the greatest extent;

On the other hand, the personnel are independent of each other. Under Zhang Yiming, ByteDance China is led by Chairman Zhang Lidong and CEO Zhang Nan, while ByteDance Global is inviting senior executives from well-known international companies to recruit widely, and recruiting a large number of local employees .

Search Tik Tok on Linked in. There are a total of 533 positions in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Stockholm, Seoul, Sydney, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur … Almost all major international cities have relevant job requirements.

According to the incomplete statistics of entertainment capital theory, the “luxury executive team” of ByteDance overseas has already covered many top companies from Disney, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Sony, Warner, Hulu, MasterCard, etc. High-rise.

The personnel appointment announced the day before was the most important-former Disney executive Kevin Mayer (Kevin Mayer) will officially join ByteDance on June 1 this year as COO He is also the global CEO, responsible for TikTok, Helo, music, games and other businesses. He is also responsible for byte-beating global functional departments (excluding China), including corporate development, sales, marketing, public affairs, security, legal affairs, etc.

During Disney ’s time, Kevin Mayer participated in or dominated the Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 21The acquisition of Century Fox. Disney + ‘s streaming media Disney + was also launched under his leadership.

In April of this year, TikTok just hired Nick Tran, Hulu ’s vice president of brand marketing and culture, as North America ’s marketing director.

The latest three rounds of byte beating are all led by US dollar funds, and the current valuation has reached as high as 90 to 100 billion US dollars.

Obviously, the Chinese market alone cannot afford such a valuation. Expansion of overseas markets is the way it must go.

However, in the process of products going overseas, it is inevitable that they will encounter national regulatory issues in various countries, problems arising from the initial establishment of cooperation with a large number of companies from various countries, issues related to adequate mergers involving overseas companies, localized operations and commercialization.

Establishing a strong localized team in overseas countries is an important part of ByteDance ’s overseas ambitions.

Image source: Zhixiang.com

The same set of products, from China to the world

In addition to having native genes and huge peopleChina, which has a base of numbers, and overseas fans from India, the United States and other countries, have become important promoters of Douyin and TikTok to the throne.

Data from App Annie shows that Indian users ’stay time on TikTok in 2019 has increased by 240% compared with 2018, and its proportion accounts for 48% of the duration of Douyin ’s overseas users …

TikTok, from the No. 1 free App Store in Japan in November 2017, to the No. 1 local App Store in Thailand in 2018, and now it is popular all over the world. How did TikTok do it?

In fact, the most fundamental reason for the popularity of TikTok around the world is that the business layout is early. When other giants have not yet deployed short video tracks, TikTok has already covered the track, and at the same time, the way of buying large amounts has been further expanded. The gap with competitors.

Sima, the co-founder of Huatai Interactive Entertainment, has been studying the development and industry opportunities of Tiktok. In his opinion, TikTok has been the largest advertiser of Instagram in the past few years, with an annual investment of about 1 billion The US dollar, “TikTok did it earlier and is now half way ahead of other giants.”

Compared with other companies crossing the river by touching stones, all products of ByteDance ’s overseas markets can find corresponding templates in China, for example: TopBuzz corresponds to Toutiao; Hypstar corresponds to small volcano video; TikTok corresponds to Just vibrato …

These template products have been polished for many rounds. At the same time, after being tested by the Chinese market, they now have a mature and stable business model, and the closed-loop implementation is particularly good.

These valuable experiences are of great reference to the development of overseas markets, which is also an advantage that other companies cannot compare with.

In the eyes of many people, the byte-beating head product Today Toutiao is essentially a flow machine. After successfully capturing a large amount of traffic, it began to incubate various projects. In overseas markets, its operating logic is almost identical.

But again, TikTok, which is so beautiful, also needs to face tremendous pressure, and this pressure does not come from the commercial level, but from the government regulation level.

In November 2019, TikTok was questioned because of information security and was included in the US Senate hearing. The main promoter of this hearing was US Senator Josh Hawley, who repeatedly questioned TikTok ’s information security on Twitter.

Reuters reported that at the March 5 hearing, he claimed that he would promote legislation prohibiting federal employees from using TikTok on mobile devices related to government affairs, and accused TikTok of sharing information and data with the Chinese government.

To eliminate this concern, ByteDance hired network security expert Roland Cloutier as the company ’s first chief information security officer. His arrival showed TikTok’s determination to protect user information.

In fact, with the exception of Kevin Mayer and Roland Cloutier, who have just joined, the current level of luxury of the TikTok management team is enough to describe it as a “Galaxy Battleship”, and all of this is done to localize the overseas products Better, turning the company into a truly global enterprise.

Overseas “Galaxy Battleship” with byte beating

In 2020, ByteDance exhibited an unprecedented emphasis on international business.

In March, Zhang Yiming announced the company ’s structural adjustment in an internal letter: He will serve as the global CEO to lead the company ’s global strategy and development, and will spend more time in Europe, America and other markets.

In addition to the current inclusion of Disney’s “former presidential candidate” Kevin Mayer, in the past two years, ByteDance has successively found many talents from many top companies in the world.

In January, Erich Andersen, then the chief intellectual property consultant of Microsoft Group, joined the ByteDance family and served as the Vice President of ByteDance Law.

As we all know, TikTok users can choose the music in the music library to create and can also add music to create their own. As the number of users increases and the content is rich, TikTok will definitely encounter more and more music copyright issues And the arrival of Erich Andersen can obviously provide TikTok with professional guidance on music copyright.

It is worth mentioningWhat’s more, TikTok has caused government investigations in the United States due to national security reviews and child safety issues. Although the incident has not yet been encountered in the UK, British officials have mentioned TikTok in both parliaments last year, so the company should not take it lightly. How to establish a good relationship with the local government has become a top priority for TikTok.

To this end, in December 2019, ByteDance dug Google from Theo Bertram, its senior manager in charge of public policy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Theo is not only a veteran of Google Europe, but also had a very deep background in government work in his early years. He served as a manager of advertising campaigns and communications for six years in the British Labor Party, and then served as a special consultant for four years in the Prime Minister ’s Office, mainly responsible for information and research. During Google’s nearly nine years of work, he was mainly responsible for public policy.

After taking office, Theo issued a recruitment demand on LinkedIn, seeking to find talents in public policy and government relations in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London. In a LinkedIn post, he said, “TikTok wants to create a cohesive, fun and safe community.

In June of the same year, Blake Chandlee, the former global vice president of Fccebook, publicly stated on his social platform that he has now joined ByteDance as the vice president of TikTok ’s global commercialization business.

Blake Chandlee, who has worked in Fccebook for more than ten years, is his first international employee. He is even more outstanding in business commercialization. Previously, Facebook ’s overseas commercialization team was built by Blake Chandlee, the United Kingdom and the European Union. After success everywhere, Blake Chandlee copied its model to Asia Pacific and Latin America.

In October 2018, Ole Obermann, Chief Business Development Digital Officer and Executive Vice President of Warner Music Group, joined ByteDance as music director.

Ole has rich global digital music copyright resources, and unlike most people who have long been engaged in the music industry, he has both artistic and commercial thinking. In the words of Steve Cooper, CEO of Warner Music Group: “Ole has an artist-centric sensitivity and a data-oriented business acumen.”

This may be related to his career experience. Ole ’s first job was as a product manager at BMG (Betasman Music Group). Perhaps this job was the way he developed a digital way of thinking.

During the ten years that Ole worked at Sony, although the highest position was EVP (Global Digital Partner Development and Sales), it also played an important role in driving Sony ’s audio and video streaming strategies and led Sony ’s digital analysis Infrastructure construction led Sony’s early work on digital playlists.

At the time, although ByteDance had merged Musical.ly and TikTok, and could use the resources of record companies that cooperated with Musical.ly, 80% of global music copyrights were concentrated in the three majors of Universal, Sony and Warner. In the hands of record companies, TikTok and their copyright contract expired in April last year and are still in the stage of negotiating authorization. Therefore, talents like Ole Oberman are indispensable to the group.

Among the many executives joining, Alex Zhu must be the strongest one. It can be said that Alex Zhu and Musical.ly created by him have changed the fate of TikTok.

In July 2014, Musical.ly was launched in the US and China application markets simultaneously. One year later, it received 500 yuan of Series A financing from Cheetah Mobile. At the time, Musical.ly ranked in the Apple App Store at about 1400. In July of the same year, the soaring number of users pushed Musical.ly to the number one position in Apple ’s US App Store list.

At the beginning of 2016, Musical.ly ’s daily activities had stabilized at around 2 million. In May, it completed US $ 120 million from Cheetah, SIG, GGV, Qiming Venture Capital, and Guangxin Capital.C round of financing, while users exceeded 70 million.

In November 2017, Toutiao announced the acquisition of Musical.ly for US $ 1 billion, which contributed to the largest amount of acquisitions disclosed by ByteDance and also included Alex Zhu as President of TikTok.

At present, with the addition of Kevin Mayer, Alex Zhu will be transferred to Vice President of ByteDance Products and Strategy, responsible for the company’s strategy and product design. At the same time, the current positions of the current heads of TikTok countries and regions around the world remain unchanged, and they will continue to perform their original duties and report to Kevin Mayer.

From the partition operation of the Xbox, to the byte-beating “two nets”

In the entertainment capital theory interview, some investors made an interesting analogy:

The global market regulatory issues that ByteDance is facing are somewhat similar to the “strong regulation” that foreign products such as Google and even movies enter China.

Currently, console games such as Xbox and PS4 are implemented in China and overseas in the strategy of zoning operations. Similarly, ByteDance makes Douyin and TikTok operate completely independently, but the regulatory issues they face should also be encountered, especially in the more sensitive period of international relations.

So today, Toutiao needs to hire some talents who understand the foreign regulatory red line and know well the operation of foreign markets, commercialization and even capital operation.

Compared with selecting large numbers of talents from abroad and sending them overseas, it is clear that it is better to directly hire top talents from overseas. With their own past experience, they can make ByteDance not take the old road of their previous enterprise and avoid many pits.

In addition, byte-beating offshore business lines are too scattered.

According to incomplete statistics, the current sub-brands include: comprehensive information products TopBuzz, News Republic, short video products Tik Tok, Flipagram, Vigo Video, BuzzVideo, etc., and this series of complex business lines also need a Professional overseas team to carry out integrated planning.

Disney ’s former CEO Robert Egger commented on Kevin Mayer in his autobiography “The Journey of a Life”: “Master strategist and negotiator”, “A person who knows how to make 1 + 1 greater than 2” .

As we all know, the North American market is trying to stop the rapid expansion of Tiktok through relevant laws, and the local genes injected into the byte bounce by a series of executives such as Kevin Mayer can straighten out the government relations overseas and let the word The situation facing the festival from “non-cooperation” to “win-win” is undoubtedly an important mission for executives.