How we built a business out of recession - chapter 1
The story of CitNOW
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
When our business* finally started to succeed, I was often asked about the story. How did it happen? How had I reached this point, sitting on the other side of the desk in a dealership, talking with a manager, who was more interested in my story, than how video would benefit their business? In fairness, they already knew the answer to that question, the trade was already talking about it.
As Donna will testify, I often told an extended version, especially if the person asking seemed genuinely intrigued. I also had a habit of wandering off-topic. I promise not to do either here.
The history of CitNOW and any of those dealership discussions can best be summed up in a few words. One that definitely can’t be left out is Honda. They provided a small budget of £20,000 and a friendly Holdcroft Honda in Cobridge for us to start testing a new way of selling cars.
The original conversation was at least three years old before I first set foot in that Stoke-on-Trent dealership. It first got mentioned when I bumped into Simon, Honda’s Marketing Director, in an HQ corridor.
How’s it going, Andrew?
He was busy and late for his next meeting. And before I had a chance to reply,
I’ve had this thought, and I’d like your opinion. Can you spare a minute?
Of course I could.
In the agency hierarchy, we were a tiny, insignificant nothing compared to the likes of Weiden and Kennedy, the creative hotshots behind their TV advertising. We just happened to be doing things with video that Simon found interesting. He’d supported our previous venture into interactive TV, joining a consortium of advertisers, including Proctor and Gamble, Unilever and BT.
I want customers to view our cars without necessarily going into a Honda dealership. Can we do that? Think about it, book a slot in my diary and we’ll talk in a few weeks.
With that, he was off.
Our chance meeting that morning only happened because I was discussing extra footage for Honda’s TV channel with Ian, his number two. I’d grabbed the opportunity with both hands to continue working with Honda after Zip TV, our previous company, very publicly (in certain TV circles) painfully went bust, a casualty of other forces with vested interests and deep pockets.
Our rise and fall had happened in a whirlwind 24-month period, leaving Donna and me bruised, battered and in need of jobs. The cause of our folly? We’d been daft enough to start an interactive TV channel on Sky’s platform which hosted nearly all of the early interactive TV initiatives.
If you are wondering what that might have looked like, one of the most successful early examples was the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon. Viewers watching the BBC through their Sky box could select one of the half dozen live matches on offer. The terrestrial alternative was to flip between BBC1 and BBC2 until the scheduled 6 o’clock evening news. Sue Barker would close the proceedings on BBC1 telling viewers to switch channels if they wanted to continue watching the live coverage on BBC2.
My eye-opening experience of what might be possible came while I was still working for Omnicom (BMP DDB) next to Paddington Station. Because of our relationship with Hasbro, Sky commissioned us to help develop an interactive TV version of Trivial Pursuit. The game was free until the viewer got to the sixth question to earn their pie. The last question had to be downloaded, an opportunity to use a premium-priced telephone line because all Sky boxes had a BT socket with a phone line plugged in, least they were supposed to. It took over a minute to download the question and cost the household about 75p. At the time, less than 1 million households had a Sky box (12.7 million customers today). For the first six weeks of broadcast, the revenue from the game was about £900,000.
I remember Adrian at Sky teasing me, suggesting I should have taken him up on his offer of a revenue share rather than the £18,000 invoice I sent him for design and production.
Before meeting with Simon and Ian, I researched what was technically possible and whether any manufacturers had ever done anything with video before. Ford and Land Rover had developed their own TV networks at least a decade earlier, using satellite to broadcast business videos into dealerships to help communicate with staff members. It must have been costly because it had gone, and competitors hadn’t bothered.
The corridor idea was different though. This was about video for customers. Why not provide a personal presentation of a new Honda for a potential customer sitting in the comfort of their home? Unfortunately, one essential ingredient prevented us from doing that, and it was a deal breaker - no broadband.
It was the time of the early Internet. Email had arrived, but most household access to the World Wide Web was handled through a dial-up modem. (Click on the audio link to experience time travel back to the early noughties).
If you remember this sound, your desktop computer connecting to somewhere deep in space (at least what I thought), was using a modem. More than capable of handling words in an email, a document, even a spreadsheet, but nowhere near fast enough to handle the data required for a short car video.
In the end, there was nothing to discuss. It would be possible, but not yet.
The conversion process to faster data had already started, and by 2007, half of all UK internet users were now enjoying the luxury of broadband. They might have even seen their first video on YouTube, a hosting platform launched two years earlier.
*CitNOW was the trade name of our company.
Great to hear a modem again…
I didn’t realise it had been sold again. Who to this time? Have the usual suspects cashed out yet?