Common & Jeff Sodikoff
Label veteran-turned-marketing entrepreneur,Jeff Sodikoff has his hands on all kinds of professionally and personally gratifying endeavors these days. His company, Chicago-based Platform One, has blossomed into an artist development, brand marketing and cause marketing company with over 20 years of entertainment industry marketing experience. We recently caught up with Soda and got up to speed on Platform One’s accomplishments and what lies ahead.
Let’s start off with a brief look at your career up to this point…
I started in the music business in 1990 working for Polygram Mercury Records in Boston. It was right when the Alternative format had started; there were like 28 stations on the panel. After working at Mercury in Boston for three years they moved me to Seattle to be the local from ’93 to ’94. At that point, Columbia Records reached out and asked me to leave the Polygram family to join the Sony family, and that’s when I became the National Alternative Promotion and Marketing Director out of Chicago working with Jon Cohen, Jon Leshay and Jerry Blair. In ’95 we broke Alice In Chains, Soul Asylum, The Fugees, The Presidents of the United States of America, Stabbing Westward and others. We had a great run and I loved being there from ’95 to ’98.
In ’98, Jon brought me in to help start Cornerstone Promotion with Rob Stone. Having felt like I missed out on running a major label department in New York on an executive level, Jerry Blair, offered me an opportunity to run the Rock department at Arista Records and I couldn’t refuse. In a short time we had great success with From Zero, Adema, Spiritualized, Run DMCand Outkast. I was proud of being a part of breaking meaningful Rock bands at Arista for the first time. A year and a half later, I re-joined the Columbia Records team as VP of Rock Music, making my mark from 2000-2004, spearheading campaigns for System Of A Down, Train, John Mayer,Pete Yorn, The Ataris, Our Lady Peace, The Xecutioners, and the Orange County andSpiderman soundtracks.
After my deal was up at Sony, I returned to my hometown, accepting a consulting deal with a sponsorship marketing company called IEG. That got me back into working with brands like Jim Beam, ATA Airlines, Sesame Street, and the New York Metropolitan Opera House.
Tell us about Platform One.
Platform One started with the mission of being the best, not the biggest, but the best artist management company in the business. With all the years of experience I cultivated by working with some of the best managers in the business and learning how they did their business, I decided it was time for me to be on the other side and represent the artist and not the label, and start this management company.
Our first signing was As Fast As. They were signed to Octone Records, and a publishing deal with BMG. About three to four months later we signed several more artists under our management roster. The first year we primarily focused on management. After that, we realized that even though the artists we were working with had label deals, we were running into the same issues, which was really encouraging the labels to think outside the box and find new ways to market our artists.
After a year of learning the business of music management, we discovered an enormous area that needed support – independent music. That’s how we came to create who we are today – a successful artist development, brand marketing and cause marketing company. We use all of the experience that I’ve garnered working for a major label, all the relationships that I had cultivated, all the successes and failures from each department of a record company that I’ve learned from and apply all of that to helping the independent artist and act as an extension to the staff of independent record companies. We take a 360-degree approach to marketing the artists. I’ve always loved marketing. I graduated from Syracuse with a degree in Marketing. We carved out a niche because we learned that nobody else exclusively focused on the independent artists.
Explain a bit about the different arms of the company as it stands today.
The company today has three divisions. The first division is music marketing where, again, we offer a full scale of marketing services for our independent artists, from helping with production and packaging to marketing, promotion and sales. We’ve developed a powerful network over 40,000 independent artists and a database of the most influential industry tastemakers. Additionally, we have an extensive network of online partners, and over 100 on-campus reps (we call them ambassadors) and an effective street team throughout the country.
What have you found to be some of the more successful aspects of your marketing approach?
The live component is probably the most imperative component in making any part of anycampaign work, so we always encourage touring. Even if it’s a small date in a small club in a market that the band has never played, we work on growing that value for the artist in those tour marketplaces. And then digital and college and all the other stuff we do are a lot more successful when the artist is on the road. But for artists that can’t afford to be on the road, artists that aren’t touring acts and are just starting out and looking for exposure, that’s what we specialize in – customizing campaigns to connect with the fans that we feel would be most rabid for that artist. We’re not a cookie-cutter type marketing company. Our methodology and our strategies are different for every artist and brand, depending on their target demographic.
There’s also brand marketing…
We apply the same methodologies for the brands as we do for music. If a client comes to us and says, “I’m looking to reach 18 to 22-year-olds, what do you suggest?,” we’ll develop a whole college campaign to help the brand connect with college campuses or cities around the country. We’ve developed an Emerging Artist Showcase, which is a monthly show in Chicago that’s now spreading throughout the rest of the country. We’re going to be in 15 cities in ’09 where every month, Platform One, along with a handful of sponsors, hosts an Emerging Artist Showcase that features the best up-and-coming independent talent for numerous reasons: to play in front of the biggest players in the business; to play in front of the biggest sponsors if they’re looking for corporate opportunities; and to play in front of fans. We guarantee sell outs every time.
How have the showcases been going?
Our last Emerging Artist Showcase was a tremendous sold out success featuring The Graduate,Never Shout Never, Holiday Parade, and Heroes & Villains. It was sponsored by Templeton Rye Whiskey, OurStage, Buzznet, Center Stage. They all continue sponsoring these moving forward.
You also work with brands outside of the music industry.
We work with some great brands. Some of our current clients are VholdR, ThePoint.com,CollegeGear.com, StudyAbroad.com, Tixem.com, DeVry and many others.
What is your relationship VholdR?
They’re an incredible, high tech, mini digital camera that also has a viral online community. Our mission is to market their brand and slogan, “Wear, Shoot, Share.” Part of our campaign will have our P1 team to go on tour with VholdR and hit four or five of the biggest extreme sport events between now and the end of the year. We will be connecting with the extreme athletes, sports enthusiasts, artists and wearing the cameras while they do their competing. Unwritten Law andThese Green Eyes performed in Salt Lake City last week. We were backstage; we did all kinds of interviews. We mounted one of these cameras on the mic stand so we got the performance of the artist. We had our people go to the local skate parks and we shot kids who were there. We had the kids use the cameras. We worked all the cool, little extreme sports stores in Salt Lake City. There are lot of them, from snowboard to mountain biking. We hit every single one of them and developed relationships with them all. They want to carry the product. They each had teams of sports enthusiasts that represent their brand or their store. We married the camera to the teams, and those teams wore the cameras at these and future events.
Tell us about your Cause Marketing Division, something I know is close to your heart.
I’m personally and professionally committed to developing meaningful events by harnessing the power of music and entertainment to raise tremendous awareness and funding for incredibly important causes. We hosted one last January withCommon for the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) where we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and media for this important cause – education reform. We produced and hosted another one in July. Cypress Hill headlined it to help benefit youth homelessness in Chicago endorsed by Mayor Richard Daley. All of our Dare 2 Dream benefit events involve every major media (TV, radio, print) and city government. We produce six to ten of these a year throughout the country with the aspiration of going global.
That’s got to be pretty gratifying personally.
I was incredibly gratified breaking some of the most meaningful acts in the world earlier in my career, but what Platform One really wants to do is use that experience to do good. These events have incredible impact in changing and saving people’s lives. We’re excited to announce our headliner for our next Dare 2 Dream in January, which benefits pediatric cancer. For me personally there’s nothing more gratifying than knowing that we’re doing something incredibly beneficial for the community. I’m fortunate to have had the experiences I’ve had in the record industry to help me accomplish what I’m most passionate about now.
** QB Content by Mike Bacon **
