Vidyard Hires Tech Veteran, Former Hootsuite Exec Steve Johnson as President, COO

March 24, 2016

Sandy Pell

Johnson will help Vidyard scale its video marketing platform as he did for Hootsuite’s social media platform.

KITCHENER, Ontario – March 24, 2016 – Vidyard, the video intelligence platform for business, today announced the addition of Steve Johnson to serve as company president and chief operations officer.

Johnson most recently held the role of chief revenue officer for Vancouver-based Hootsuite, where he helped the company capitalize on the huge rise of social media for business. During Johnson’s tenure at Hootsuite, the company grew from a sub-$100 million valuation to over $1 billion and from 27 employees to more than 800. He plans to help Vidyard make similar strides.

“I can hardly believe how much innovation is happening in marketing technology these days,” Johnson said. “Social media was the biggest marketing trend over the last five years, and now video is taking up that mantle. I’m excited to be on board to help Vidyard continue to dominate the video marketing world.”

Five years ago, only the most forward-looking companies had implemented social media programs. Many simply dedicated an intern to manage the various channels and push out content. That evolved into companies dedicating entire teams to social media, and every external-facing employee was expected to maintain a social media presence. Social media has become a critical piece of nearly every business.

Video is in a similar state today with the most innovative businesses capitalizing on it. According to a 2015 survey by Demand Metric, 74 percent of marketing leaders say video converts better than other forms of content, and Cisco predicts that 80 percent of all Internet traffic will be devoted to video by 2019. But even with the effectiveness of video emerging, just 14 percent of companies leverage the full capability of advanced video engagement analytics to prioritize and convert prospects into customers, Demand Metric found. Video and social media also complement each other well. Social posts with video attract three times more inbound links than those without, according to Marketing Sherpa.

Meanwhile, Vidyard has tripled its year-over-year revenue for the last two years while growing its customer base to include global leaders including Honeywell, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, Citibank, Sharp and 24 of the top 100 global software companies.

Johnson will be responsible for continuing to scale Vidyard’s global sales and customer success programs while helping the company expand into new markets.

“Hiring an experienced professional like Steve is a signal of things to come,” said Vidyard CEO and co-founder Michael Litt. “We’re maturing our go-to-market model, and with his expertise, we will be able to provide exemplary service to our customers while continuing to grow exponentially for years to come. We’re the dominant player in this massive untouched category. Our plans are to continue leading the industry, aided by his experience and influence.”

In addition to his job at Vidyard, Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of Mobify, MarketLinc and Bench Accounting. Prior to his four-and-a-half years at Hootsuite, he was vice president for channel partners at Constant Contact, vice president for partners at Blackbaud and vice president of sales at Voice Automation, in addition to several other sales and director roles at other companies going back to 1991.

About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.

Media Contact:

Brad Hem
Phone: (281) 543-0669
press@vidyard.com