The View from the Office.

I met up with Dan Page, Global Head of Media and Licensing Partnerships at TikTok, at Cafe Luxxe in Brentwood. He had coffee. I had Hibiscus tea. We were introduced by a mutual friend and LinkedIn demon John Kraski.

Dan is British and Canadian. He grew up and spent the early portion of his career in Toronto, moving to Los Angeles several years ago.

He started in the telco business working in mobile content, which at the time meant doing deals for ringtones, mobile games and whatever else could be rendered on a small screen. A big part of the game at that point was tracking which websites were gaining traffic and betting they would eventually move to mobile.

Dan did early partnerships with YouTube (before Google bought it), MySpace and Facebook (it was so early, he worked with co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.)

Fast forward to today and the landscape is again in flux.

Dan has been positioning TikTok and its creators to expand into premium video formats beyond mobile. That has meant partnerships spanning TV, radio, cinema, automotive and in-flight entertainment.

We spent most of the conversation talking about how everything is becoming content and all content is looking for a home as a channel which can be watched somewhere.

People are just starting to come to terms with the fact that YouTube has become a huge TV destination and is increasingly serving as a home for content created by people on social media from TikTok to Instagram.

Dan said one trend we are seeing emerge from social media is longer-form and serial videos that tell stories over an extended period such as video podcasting which is having its moment right now!.

One platform he says creators are sleeping on is LinkedIn because so many people on the platform have money to spend. Think of TikTok as your B2C brand and your LinkedIn as your B2B brand.

I told him the biggest shift I have seen is the extension of yapping – talking casually into a camera – move beyond fashion and consumer products to business. I started yapping a year ago and it’s driven more awareness and business to my ghostwriting firm.

His advice to everyone is to do a podcast. You can shoot it on a phone. A light and a microphone at home runs a few hundred dollars. Studio time with editing can run $1,000 to $3,000 an episode. One hour of tape produces a week of clips, which solves the problem of having to generate new ideas constantly.

He points to iHeart licensing its podcast library to Netflix as evidence that what you record now can become something you license later.

He recently launched a podcast network at TikTok. It selects creators and greenlights shows, fifty episodes each, produced in-house. The clips run on TikTok. The full episodes go everywhere.

You can connect with Dan via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.