A Vook Opportunity

Director of Acquisition Marketing

Vook, the leading digital publisher that lights up the world’s content with its mixed-media reading experience, is looking to hire a Director of Acquisition Marketing for a cutting edge opportunity in a fast paced environment.

About Vook

Vook is the leading mixed-media digital producer that lights up the world’s content and connects people around stories and ideas they love. A Vook unites words, videos, pictures and interactivity into new media experiences that allow users to engage with content the way they want. Vook publishes titles in a variety of genres, including lifestyle, business, entertainment, cooking, fiction and sports, working with authors such as Seth Godin, Deepak Chopra, Anne Rice, Gary Vaynerchuk, Slash of Guns N’ Roses and Karen Armstrong. Vook partners with industry leaders including Simon and Schuster, Penguin Group, Harvard Business Press, Harper Collins and Hachette Filipacchi. Vook is based in Alameda, CA with offices in New York. For more information about Vook, visit www.vook.com.

About the Job

The Director or Marketing will be responsible for helping to craft and execute the firm’s marketing strategy — with a particular focus on digital channels.  They will work closely with multiple internal departments on the planning, progress, and reporting of marketing activities. They will also manage external partnerships, building strong relationships and  ensuring cross promotional opportunities are maximized.

Other duties include writing and proofreading marketing copy, e-blasts and all other external communications, working with the sales and sponsorship team on updating the media kits with current research, tracking circulation statistics, and charting specific industry trends or in house research results.

If interested in developing and executing a marketing strategy for brand new, innovative reading products in a true start up environment (small team, proven success, huge upside) then send us your info!

Duties include:

• Develop and execute customer acquisition programs principally through online marketing channels (SEM, SEO, affiliate, display, social media and email)
• Ability to generate profitable ideas; motivate direct-report team members and launch new products into acquisition channel
• Understand pricing yields and promotional offer relationship
• Accountable to revenue and profit goals
• Monitor and analyzing key business metrics (e.g., registrations, subscriptions, subscriber acquisition cost, lifetime value) on a campaign-by-campaign basis, and taking appropriate action based upon such analysis
• Lead both the internal marketing team and external agencies critical to Vook’s marketing success
• Incorporate cross-channel creative, message, media, offer testing and subsequent effectiveness measurement and rollout
• Manage the marketing creative development process to ensure the creative is constantly optimized
• Ability to forecast campaign results and manage to department budget to reach revenue objectives
• Budget management with proven ability to optimize the marketing mix across multiple channels
• Uncover new opportunities with existing publishing partners.
• Identify new ways that Vook can help publishers grow their business
• Engage business development team and management as appropriate to assist with deals
• Uncover opportunities with new and non-traditional content providers
• Develop and deliver compelling sales presentations
• Work with the product team to help deliver on a superior partner and customer experience
• Exceed customer expectations by going above and beyond
• Meet or exceed new title selection and revenue growth targets
• Manage negotiations and content delivery schedules with publishers and content providers.

Skills and Experience

• Understanding the dynamics of customer acquisition, publishing and media
• Previous business development experience
• Solid track record of developing successful relationships
• Proven record managing big and meaningful partnerships
• Previous experience in developing partnership opportunities with clear deal parameters
• Strong Internet background required

Education & Qualifications

• 5-8 years direct response acquisition marketing experience, in an online / internet / e-commerce environment
• Comfort interacting with a broad set of businesses and presenting both over the phone and in person
• BS/BA is required, preferably in advertising or marketing; advanced degree preferred
• Solid online customer marketing background – expertise in SEM, SEO, affiliate (CPA and non-search CPC), social media and display (CPM) advertising channels; retail/ecommerce customer website background a plus.
• Superior analytic skills, and the ability to compile, analyze and leverage performance data to both identify new opportunities and optimize current campaigns
• Experience with A/B and multivariate testing
• Experience managing, optimizing and growing multiple direct response online media campaigns and partnerships
• Demonstrated ability to meet and exceed acquisition targets and a desire to own and be accountable for the online acquisition funnel
• Deep knowledge of advertising creative development, including an understanding of how consumers engage with direct response media and the levers that drive performance
• Great written and oral communication skills
• Understand all online/offline evaluation and benchmark metrics: impressions, click-through rates, email open rates, conversion, and call volume
• Consistently organized with attention to detail
• Willing to work under strict deadlines
• Strong Microsoft Office Excel and PowerPoint skills
• Familiarity with web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and with business intelligence tools

Contact: Amy.Wong@vook.com

Twelve months ago today, we launched four Vooks in partnership with Simon & Schuster. At the time, the idea of video combined with books seemed innovative but perhaps a tad crazy — even to our supporters. But just one year later, we’ve seen an explosion in enhanced books and mixed media (kudos to the Apple iPad). At Vook, all we can say is, “Wow!”  It’s been an exciting ride since that memorable date with great publishing partners, authors, agents, engineers, filmmakers, investors and so many supportive readers and users. With 100 Vooks published including 1,000 videos, more than 175,000 Vooks have been downloaded.

What we have learned:

1. How to make better Vooks. The secret sauce includes great authors, well-written text, and smartly integrated and relevant videos. Almost all of our new Vooks earn out in about two months and begin making everyone money very quickly.
2. How to  produce Vooks faster. Our first four Vooks took four months to create. In September, we created 30 new Vooks. Goodbye to the 18-month book publishing cycle.
3. Vooks have a long digital shelf life. One of the first Vooks that we created was “The 90 Second Fitness Solution” by Pete Cerqua, which continues to sell well every day. In just the last four months alone, Pete’s Vook has sold almost 1,500 copies.
4. The hottest categories. We love Business Inspiration, such as our vooks from Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, Tom Peters and Steven Covey; Health, Fitness & Sports  is very popular with our new Pilates vooks with Alycea Ungaro and The 8-Step Golf Swing with Jim McLean ; Spirituality is hot with titles from Deepak Chopra and a series on Jesus Christ; and Entertainment is rocking with our Guns N’ Roses Vook. (That Vook was not as hot as Slash, but it burned up the charts for us!)
5. How to deliver what our readers want. They love our video, they want short-form text and they love to share.

What we are still striving to figure out:

1. Rights roadblocks. It represents a deterrent to innovation. We would rather hire more engineers, filmmakers and authors and hire fewer lawyers. But the legal landmines are holding back progress for all digital publishers. We have found collaboration works much better than confrontation.
2. The standards spaghetti. We have had great success with the Apple platform. But the new readers, devices and platforms have a myriad of different standards and make it difficult for all of us to get our creations in the hands of more consumers.
3. Meeting the needs of creators. We are paving new ground with creators of all kinds and they crave new digital platforms. The demand is overwhelming and we are working night and day to serve them, but it is a little daunting at times, even with our smart, agile and tenacious team.

In the end, this is so much fun that we can hardly contain ourselves — it’s the kind of experience you’d want to make a Vook about. As our founder Brad Inman likes to say, “We are like Lewis and Clark, stuck somewhere in Missouri, trying to figure out whether to carve a path this way or that. But we will get there!”

Vook is thrilled to welcome Peggy Garry as Legal Counsel and Tenesha Gleason as Senior Director of Business Development!

Over the last few months Peggy Garry has been a great help to us with our legal contracts and we are overjoyed that she will now be a full-time member of the company. Prior to joining Vook Peggy served as Senior Counsel for Disney where she was part of the team that started the Hyperion book division. She has also worked at Golden Books as a VP of Legal and Business Affairs, as well as at John Wiley & Sons where as a Legal Director she negotiated rights contracts and managed Wiley’s trademark portfolio. Most recently she was in private practice, counseling literary agents, book designers and authors. Additionally, Peggy has served as adjunct professor at New York University for 12 years, teaching First Amendment and Intellectual Property law. Her favorite reads are The complete works of Marcel Proust and CHRONICLES by Bob Dylan.

With a love for all things innovative, Tenesha Gleason most recently worked at Amazon.com focusing on Mechanical Turk. While working at Amazon she refined her strategic development expertise, working with several major corporations and countless tech trailblazers. Tenesha is originally from Salt Lake City, UT (cue stereotypes and typical bar jokes) but she now calls Brooklyn, NY her home. She has an unhealthy obsession with the written and spoken word and is usually reading ebooks or listening to podcasts. Speaking of obsessions, her love of technology, creation, distribution, consumption and monetization of digital media is one of the reasons she joined Vook. Prior to working at Amazon she worked at Audible as a Senior Partner of Content Acquisition. Between Audible and working at Tantor Media, she developed many friendships in the publishing industry. She is typically watching movies and/or reading books (doing both with Vooks) and secretly seeks out opportunities to show off for her 16 nieces and nephews.  Tenesha doesn’t eat pork or beef but loves hot dogs and filet mignon.

The Vook Team is pleased to announce today the launch of our first vooks, all published in partnership with Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. These four titles—Promises, a romance by Jude Deveraux, The 90 Second Fitness Solution, a fitness book by Pete Cerqua, Embassy, a thriller by Richard Doetsch and Return to Beauty, a health book by Narine Nikogosian—elegantly realize Vook’s mission: to blend a book with videos into one complete, instructive and entertaining story.

As you will see from experiencing one yourself, a vook is an entirely new innovation—there’s nothing else like it available. A vook lets you read books and watch videos that enhance the reading experience, either by illustrating key moments in works of fiction or demonstrating important techniques and concepts for non-fiction. With a vook, you can read, watch and connect all in one place, without the hassle of switching between a book, your computer and your TV.

To see why we’re so excited, please check out our launch titles on our product page. There, you can get a vook and find out for yourself why Vook is both a vital innovation for books and a powerful new way for readers to engage with them. Try a vook on your computer or download one to your iPhone or iPod Touch at the Apple iTunes Store.

We’re not the only ones convinced that Vook is the future of reading. We are pleased to join forces with Simon & Schuster, one of the world’s leading publishing houses, to release these initial titles. These four titles are a true joint venture—Simon and Schuster represents the best of publishing’s editorial expertise while Vook contributes the understanding of engaging visual content, the power of video production and technological expertise.

Simon & Schuster’s authors—Jude Deveraux, Richard Doetsch, Pete Cerqua and Narine Nikogosian—have all been strong champions of the Vook platform. Their understanding of books, video and the Internet have made them the perfect partners for our filmmakers. And Vook’s filmmakers have risen to the challenge of crafting a visual story to complement these author’s narratives. Filmmakers Michael Franchetti, Adad Warda, Christopher Chambers, Mario de la Vega, Chris Cassidy and Robert Sobul all contributed their visions to create videos that raise the quality of our vooks above any other offering on the market.

You can expect to see many more vooks coming soon. But right now, we’d love it if you would check out one of our inaugural titles and let us know what you think. We’re thrilled to share our hard work. If you’ve been following our story from the beginning, then you know that we’re committed to revolutionizing books and helping devoted readers — readers like ourselves — get more out of every moment they spend with a great book. If we have our way, you’re soon going to pick up a great book and wonder what it would be like if it was a great vook.

Thank you for all your support. Please check out one of our launch titles and let us know what you think by emailing the team at info@vook.com.

PROMISES by Jude Deveraux ($6.99) – a novella set in 19th century South Carolina, from the beloved author of 36 New York Times bestsellers.

THE 90-SECOND FITNESS SOLUTION by Pete Cerqua ($6.99) – an innovative new fitness program from one of New York’s most respected trainers that can be practiced at home, in the office, or using Vook’s mobile application, at the gym.

EMBASSY by Richard Doetsch ($6.99) – a suspenseful thriller from the bestselling author of THE THIEVES OF HEAVEN

RETURN TO BEAUTY by Narine Nikogosian ($6.99) – natural, old-World, time tested skin care recipes from a well-known Hollywood aesthetician.