Constance Scholten CEO & Co-Founder of Camarilla

Hey there, I'm Luca from TwentyThree and I am standing here with... Constance, I'm one of the founders of Camarilla. It's a place where you post your photos for your 15 closest friends and where our sponsors are always one on one. And Camarilla, you are now here at Savage Marketing Tech in Amsterdam. Are you out of Amsterdam or...? Well, I'm originally from Amsterdam, true, yeah. And you have offices in multiple places? Yes, we have an office in New York and one in Amsterdam. And I'm mainly based in New York and our development team is in Amsterdam. So talking about your platform, it seems like it's all about sharing experiences and rich media and so on. What do you as an internet pioneer, an internet person, what do you think that rich media, videos, images can do for us as people? Well, if you look back to how much photos evolved to becoming videos that we nowadays share or GIFs, GIFs, you see that there's a lot of things going on and that we will be very close to having even more richer media. And I think that, for example, mobile VR, so taking you really into my world. So 360 peoples, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And also just having the feeling that I can communicate directly with you even though if we would be in a different space. I think we can only underestimate where we will stand in the coming five years. So we could of course talk about your platform, but I think it's also interesting to hear about how you are marketing your platform. So how are you bringing your platform out into the world? Do you have any fun tips or good stories about that? Well, I think there we are a little bit an odd duck in the market because we have a, we didn't know that, we tested our product in the Netherlands and we didn't know that it would be virally spreading so much without even anything on marketing. So our marketing at this moment is really mouth to mouth and we will be going this direction the coming year. But I think the more interesting part is for marketers or people on a day to day busy with marketers, that they can see that the trend of sharing photos or videos in smaller groups like Camarilla where it's only focused on your 15 closest friends, but maybe if you are a motorcycle fanatic, you like sharing things about motors, that this trend is evolving so that there is a lot of platforms where you can really target your audience in such a personal way and that that is where marketers should have a definitely focus on because the high engagement and attention span of these users are really interesting. Yeah, so it's, I also think that's also what we see like it's all about personalization. So how can you give people as relevant content as possible, right? Yeah, true. Yeah, and that is, we are exploring these fields. So sometimes you learn from the experience that you spend a lot of budget with the same advertisement. But there if you hear what the new techniques are to really personalize but also that it really feels for you as a person that a company is talking to you instead of it sending something with the bots that Facebook is talking about. I think that those are the things we should watch. So just on a final note, of course that we are live streaming here today so everybody out in the world can see the conference. So this thing about real time, I think is also very interesting. So personalization and real time. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, if you look, it's giving people an opportunity to send out a message with a lot of people and I think it's interesting because it has a fun factor because you actually think that you are within the same area. But for us in our terms it's a real time will very much give a higher engagement because of course real time will give you the idea that you are with your mom who maybe lives in a different country or with your friends who moved to London. So I think it's fascinating the technology of real time. So last note, I would love for you to give a good suggestion to the marketeers out there and just so you remember that the marketeers are of course also working in businesses, so what can the marketeers out there learn from you and from what you are doing? Well, what I always love is following keynotes from the biggest companies around the world, especially the technology companies. If you see companies like Meerkat or Periscope, those companies triggered Facebook to develop live. So yeah, it's really, think of the unexpected, think of the things that we are experiencing now and then think the opposite to see how the markets are evolving because it's a trend on how things are going. It's a fascinating idea. So I think always think ahead and just out of the box.