B2B Is Still Human - Jake Nishimura

0:00Jake Nishimura:Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Jake Nishimura, Vice President of Marketing at Kizwi, a company that's quietly changing the way some of the biggest names in sports, music, and entertainment connect with fans around the world.

0:40Jake Nishimura:Now, Jake's career started on the live event side of the business, promoting concerts for artists like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, before making the jump into streaming, where he's helped bring live experiences to audiences for everyone from Queen and the Rolling Stones to Jack Harlow. Now, he's also been instrumental in helping Kizwi expand into the creator economy, working with bands like Smosh, Rhett & Link, and the Try Guys. Today, his role goes beyond partner marketing as he now leads Kizwi's broader B2B marketing events, efforts, excuse me, giving him a unique perspective on where technology, content, community, and brand are all headed.

1:18Jake Nishimura:Jake Nishimura, I said it right, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. I practiced all day or at least the last 30 seconds, one or the other. Okay. Your career, dude, it's just incredible. And you started promoting live concerts before moving into the live streaming. And now you're into B2B marketing. I want to take a step back and talk to us about some of the biggest lessons from those early concert days that still resonates today. Yeah, I was very lucky to have ended up at Messina Taurian Group and cutting my teeth really with some of the best in the business. We share mutual contacts over there.

1:57And I know you know firsthand that, you know, the people at Messina Taurian are - Shout out to Kate.

2:02Jake Nishimura:We got to say her name. Shout out to Kate. Go ahead. Yeah, shout out to Kate. Yeah, absolutely. So I was very lucky to be brought in to kind of lead their digital marketing efforts there. And man, you know, a lot of the lessons that I learned there, I'm still applying today at Kizwi, right? how to find and cultivate an artist's audience and ensure that they're aware of everything going on on the touring side and make sure they're aware of the events and how to find them and how to create an enticing message to ensure you're selling tickets. And then also a lot on the artist relation, management agent relationship side of things, Really how to exist and engage people in the business.

2:58And these are things I'm still doing today at Kizwi as one of the senior members in the entertainment kind of vertical that we have here. I'm still interfacing with management and artists and talent. And learning how to navigate those relationships is super important. And I think an unsung skill that needs to be developed by somebody working in the entertainment space.

3:27Jake Nishimura:So I touched on Kisby in the beginning, but for those not familiar, give us a little more in depth. What is the company about? What do they do? Sure. Yeah. We are a streaming technology and services company. So we build and power direct-to-consumer streaming events and platforms for some of the biggest entertainment and sports brands in the world, as you mentioned at the top of the introduction here. So on the music side, we worked with BTS for the longest time. We broke multiple Guinness Book of World Records with them on livestream attendance. We did the Black Sabbath's final show we streamed last summer, which was amazing to be connected to help connect a global fan base like that for such an important celebration was something that was really special.

4:24We operate in the creator vertical as well. You mentioned Smosh and Mythical with Rhett and Link. We've also done shows with Daniel Howell as well and a number of others. That's an exciting vertical that we're really excited about the growth of.

4:41Jake Nishimura:Yeah. And then in sports, we power a lot of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms for big sports teams. like we work with the Smith Entertainment Group on SEG +, which is the localized streaming platform for the Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth. We work with the New Orleans Pelicans. This is our first season with the Portland Fire on Fire +, which is really exciting. They're a brand new WNBA team, and that's one we're really excited about. And then coming up next week, we are launching MW +, for the Mountain West Conference. So it will be the streaming platform for them. But among a number of other sports clients that we have, yeah.

5:23Jake Nishimura:Yeah, and it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that sports, it's always been big, but it just seems like the last 6, 12, 18 months, it's just exploding. It's just in general, not just you mentioned the new WNBA teams, but this year's the World Cup. And just in general, do you get that sense too, even agnostic of your role, just as a consumer? Yeah, there's a lot of, there have been a lot of developments and changes within the sports space that are really exciting, especially for a company like us. In the last 12 to 18 months, we've seen a lot of movement with sports teams taking advantage of the opportunity to really own their digital distribution a bit more, especially as it relates to their local audiences, own that relationship with their fans, and really drive deeper engagement with their whole fan base.

6:18And we've seen this, you know, across a range of sports entities, right? So it's not just the biggest NBA and WNBA and hockey teams. We work with clients like the Next Chapter League, which is a digital first 1v1 basketball league on their subscription platform. And direct-to-consumer digital gives the mid-tier sports companies an opportunity to distribute their content beyond the possibility of – where they wouldn't have had access to linear, right? But digital gives them the access to their fan base and allows them to build a company without having to go through the traditional gatekeepers.

7:01Jake Nishimura:Right. You're in a unique position to talk about this next topic and its events. So there's in-person, right? And then there's digital. Now, like I said, you've marketed both in-person concerts, events, and digital events. My assumption is a lot of people think there's – it's basically the same playbook, if you will, with different channels. Talk to us about where it's similar and then where it's fundamentally different between an in-person and a digital. Yeah, there are some really important differences, but quite a bit of similarities, as you would point out, right? You know, fans still expect a high quality, uninterrupted viewing experience, something that they can access easily.

7:40And that's something that we deliver both on that we delivered on all of our in-person concerts, but certainly at Kiswi with our streaming events. You know, we still need to be able to find and activate fan communities to get them excited about whatever event we're marketing. And yeah, so those are the biggest, you know, we operate across a lot of the different same channels as it relates to paid media and the importance of ensuring that the artists or the talent are posting and supporting the events are all crucial. I think where it gets interesting is in the differences, right? With a lot of events that I was working on at Messina, at the arena and stadium level, reserved seating meant that there was an incentive for fans to buy tickets early to get the best seats, right?

8:36With digital events, every seat is the same and there's theoretically infinite inventory, right? So the challenge is how do you incentivize user fans to purchase as early as possible and still get them excited about an event in a world where they know if I just wait until the last second, my experience is going to be the same regardless of whether when I purchased it. Right. So, yeah, the sales cycle is much different. We see with a lot of our combat sports partners that the the the the tickets, the sales cycle is really, really late. Maybe, you know, in a marquee boxing event where the final match is really what people want to see, we see oftentimes people will spend full price on a pay-per-view boxing ticket just to watch the final event and won't really engage or watch any of the undercard, right?

9:41So how do you adapt your marketing plan to get in front of people at the crucial moment when they're making their buying decision when it happens so close to either the start of the event or like the headliner of the event? So it brings up interesting marketing challenges from that perspective.

10:00Jake Nishimura:Yeah, I would imagine, you know, an advertiser is going to go, hold on, wait a minute, why are you, not to you, but just in general, if I'm going to advertise on an event, and it's a it's like a card of fights, like you mentioned, and they're not stupid, they know going in that the majority of people are not going to watch those preliminaries, like you're saying the undercard. I only I only I only want my message in front of the crowd who's watching the main event. But there's only so much ad time to go around. Yeah, I think that challenge and that specific scenario as it relates to boxing is unique in the sense that we're typically not running ads for those types of events.

10:39Typically, there's a main promoter, they have a main sponsor, it's plastered over everything the entire time. And that's typically how those have been working for us at least. But with like a basketball game, we certainly do like for the jazz or any of our NBA partners. We we handle the the DAI for them, the insertion. And we're really good and really efficient at delivering those ads throughout the entire game. And those games tend to be watched from tip off to through the end. Right. So, yeah.

11:14Jake Nishimura:So we hear a lot about the word, the phrase attention economy. Right. But nowadays, simply putting the word live on something doesn't necessarily create urgency, right? So when you're marketing a live stream today, what actually motivates someone to show up instead of just saying, hey, I'll catch the highlights later? Yeah. It really starts with the content itself. What is the event? before we even build out a paid media plan or an organic marketing strategy, it's really important to work with our partners to help them define what an attractive offering would be for their fans. A lot of the time in the digital space as it relates to events and not so much like subscription platforms with some of our NBA partners or anybody else, but with our kind of like one-off tentpole events, What is the offering and how can we make this a special experience for the fans beyond just tune in and see it live, right?

12:14With what's so great about Kiswi and what we do particularly well is we have a suite of fan engagement tools that help to enhance the live experience for fans. So that's live chat. We allow fans to submit short video selfies that appear kind of as a ticker at the bottom of the screen so fans can see their fellow fans in the experience. We've done events with creator partners in particular, utilizing our polling feature to actually allow the audience to influence the direction of the show, kind of like a choose your own adventure in real time. And then we are able to incorporate some of the talent into the chat if they'd like.

13:02Or we can create exclusive VIP aftershows that are kind of like Q &A session, like more intimate Q &A sessions with fans and artists. So how can we take the core idea of the event that they want to do and expand that to make it a can't miss event for their fans? And it really starts with the core idea of what the event is.

13:29Jake Nishimura:Yeah, and it kind of brings me to partnerships, right? Now, KISWI is not just providing technology, right? You're helping partners maximize these events, right? So talk to us a little bit about what does collaboration actually look like and what separates the strongest partnerships from ones that struggle? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that this is another area where KISWI really shines. So we are not, we don't look at ourselves as a technology provider, right? We're not a vendor. We are not a company where a customer wants to do a live stream. They come pay a fee to access our technology and off they go.

14:05We are invested in our partner's success. And that means we provide them not just the technology to reliably deliver their live stream event, but a number of services to help them achieve whatever their business goals are for that particular event. So that means, you know, we talked a lot about marketing. We provide a lot of marketing services. You know, we engage anywhere from simple consulting advisory role on best practices and strategies all the way to handling paid media for our partners. We do that with a number of partners that don't have that resource in-house, so we provide it to them.

14:43We also have an operations team, a dedicated operations team that is with our partners from launch of the product all the way through the end of the event to ensure a seamless fan experience, meaning they can buy a ticket really easily, get right into the show, have an uninterrupted viewing experience, but also ensure that our partners also can reliably deliver the event to their audience. knowing that we build branded platforms and it's really our partner brand on the line if something happens during the stream. And we take that responsibility very seriously. We also have a customer service team that is available to answer any questions fans have throughout the event and leading up to it, right?

15:33So this is not something that our partners have to handle. We handle that in-house. We have piracy services where we can get pirated streams taken down in real time during the event. So yeah, we provide a lot of support services to ensure that whatever event, campaign, subscription platform that we're working on with partners, that it's a flawless experience for everybody involved and that our partners are able to, you know, meet whatever their business goals are for that campaign.

16:01Jake Nishimura:Now you've also made this transition kind of from leading partner marketing to overseeing B2B marketing, right? Now they're related disciplines, but they're not the same. And I'm curious, like, what's changed the most in how you think, measure success, et cetera, building a marketing organization? What's different? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I think at the core, they're similar in the sense that we still need to understand the audience or customers' needs, what they want out of the transaction. And like even in a B2B scenario, there's still a bit of emotion attached to the marketing that you need to bring out, right?

16:47It's not just in the B2B, in partner marketing sense, but also in B2B. You really need to, you can't just like list features on a website and expect that to sell your product, right? So I think at its core, they're similar from like that philosophical standpoint. Tactically, they're a bit different, especially as it relates to Kizwi. We operate at the highest level of brands across entertainment and sports, as we mentioned. So our target market is relatively small. And so it requires less scale as it relates to some of the campaigns that we would be running on the partner side and more high-touch custom outreach and sales materials and messaging to ensure that our potential partners know that we can handle whatever it is they have in mind for a digital event or subscription service.

17:44Jake Nishimura:I'm so glad you said, I don't remember what you said verbatim, but basically saying that, hey, Mr. and Mrs. B2B marketer who are listening, they're so human on the other end of that line. There's emotions. And it still blows my mind in June of 2026. I think we're always going to be telling that, to be honest with you. Like, hey, don't forget, even though it's not called B2C, there is still a human on the other end of that line. Yeah, businesses are made of people and people are and there are people making the decisions and what do they care about and what's what keeps them up at night, you know, and and how can we ensure that they know that if they go with Kiswi, they they'll they'll rest easy at night, you know?

18:22Exactly, exactly.

18:24Jake Nishimura:Okay, so we've started this conversation about your past. We've gone into the present, what you currently do and all that good stuff. I kind of want to put your prognosticating hat on. Look at the present as well, but also project out three, five, seven years. What do you think marketers are still underestimating and will underestimate or whatever about how audiences want to engage or should be engaging with brands and content? Yeah, I think more so than ever, authenticity is the key to success across both D2C and B2B marketing. You know, I see this now so much more than ever in my current role on focusing a lot on B2B.

19:06Our customers want to know that Kizwi has not just the expertise, but have earned that expertise and have lived in sports and lived in creators and have a deep wealth of knowledge in music. And it's not enough for us to present them a list of solutions and ways that we can help them. They want to know that we are coming from a place of lived experience and know what their challenges are and be able to communicate those challenges to them and provide solutions that meet these challenges for them.

19:43Jake Nishimura:Perfect. Great. But now take a step back. Agnostic of Kiswi. You're talking to a room full of marketers now, hypothetically, right? What should they be thinking about present and future about how their audiences want to engage and have successful events, be they in person or digital when it comes to just engaging with content? Yeah, I think especially on D2C streaming and subscription platforms that we provide, what we're learning is that the wealth of data that we're able to collect through these experiences and these platforms provide brands an opportunity to more deeply understand their audience and have knock-on effects in areas of their business outside of just streaming and platforms.

20:33You know, anywhere from selling in-person physical tickets or selling merch, finding ways to authentically connect with your audience through your content is a way to, you know, rising tide lifts all ships, right? is a way to have positive impacts on your business outside of just that one digital stream or platform initiative. And I think our partners are starting to see that as well. And it's really exciting to be able to provide them that fan insight, not just how they're purchasing and how they're interacting at checkout, but also how they're engaging with the content during the events has provided them, you know, a wealth of data for them to make business decisions with outside of the streaming experience.

21:25Jake Nishimura:Yeah, I could not agree more. Absolutely. Okay, coming up on the end, we do the random five, where I'm going to ask you five personal questions. Given your background, there's going to be, you'll see a theme here, but for sure, because I'm sure my audience is going to want to hear some of these answers. So I want to start with, I mentioned before you worked with everybody from Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, the queen, Rolling Stones, who, once you got to see the behind the scenes, either from that list or someone else completely changed your perception of them. And what did you learn from them? Easily Taylor Swift.

21:55I am, I come from my, you know, my roots are in like the DIY kind of, you know, indie scene. And when I first went to a Taylor Swift show, I will be honest. I was very skeptical about the experience, but I remember walking into the arena and in 1989, she had this stage that like raises up and like spun around over the top of the crowd. And I just remember seeing that in person and being like, okay, I get this. Like, I understand why the fans go crazy for this. And my cynicism immediately evaporated in that moment. And yeah, It really brings us back to understanding the audience and what they're hoping to get out of the relationship or the transaction.

22:45And in that moment, I understood.

22:47Jake Nishimura:Is there another moment, if you will, since you went to that concert, live stream, sporting event, wherever, where you stopped and kind of thought almost like pinch yourself? Like, I'm lucky to be here. Like, oh, my God, this is surreal. Yeah, I mean, being involved in just how just playing such a small role in the in the black and the final Black Sabbath show was probably, you know, a show that I'm never going to forget, you know, watching, seeing 250 ,000 plus people in a in a single stream connected from everywhere around the world at once to celebrate, you know, one of the greatest bands in history.

23:24and knowing that, you know, you play such a, you know, even the smallest role in it was really special. And yeah, that was one that we celebrated for quite a bit internally here because that was one to write home about for sure.

23:38Jake Nishimura:So every marketer has a campaign, Lord, I know from personal experience, it keeps them up at night. What's the most stressful launch you think you've been a part of and what did it teach you that maybe you still carry with you today? I transitioned into this role. And as I was transitioning into this role now being put in charge of B2B, we were also launching a new product, Kizwi Core. And as somebody who has never launched a B2B product before, that was definitely a very stressful but really, really big learning experience for me. You know, I think in the end, I'm super proud of the work we did to launch it.

24:16You know, are there things I would have done differently knowing what I know now? sure but that's part of going through the experience right so that was that was probably the biggest you know stressful yeah the most stressful launch for sure yeah so you worked

24:32Jake Nishimura:all of these artists and we we know the list is there one thing jake that before you started into that world that you got completely wrong about fame and influence and famous people and I didn't have as many direct interactions with talent as somebody who's maybe on the ground at every show, right? But I will say that the interactions that I had, the handful of interactions that I was lucky enough to have with some of the talent that I worked with is that they're just people. And I don't mean that to belittle any of their accomplishments, but I mean it in a sense that they are also stressed. They are also there to do a job.