The Benefits of Call Whispering for Sales Professionals.Tronc Inc., the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, has begun using the Whisper widget on some pages.
commissioned Whisper to create a campaign for "13 Reasons Why," about a teen's suicide, while MTV paid Whisper to promote its Movie and TV Awards. "Why don't we do this ourselves? We are developing a lot more interesting ways to automatically generate stories around topics and news."Ī few companies have started to notice. "Journalists were using Whisper to pull together content packages and attract a meaningful audience," Liew said.
Online publishers are eager to feature slideshows and videos in their articles, and Whisper's software can identify the subject of a story on a given Web page and automatically generate a collection of relevant Whispers to post alongside. The company's potential as a promotional tool became apparent to Whisper executives when they saw other sites, like BuzzFeed, using members' postings to attract readers and viewers. While Liew first invested because he saw a fast-growing social media app - Lightspeed also invested in Snap Inc. Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed, said Whisper is evolving to compete for ad dollars with Vice Media Inc., BuzzFeed Inc. Fortune reported last September that the company was trying to raise more money.
Whisper, which launched in April 2013 and has more than 30 million active monthly users, has had its own financial struggles. Secret, once worth $100 million, closed in 2016. It recently sold its technology and staff to Square for $1 million and shut down. Yik Yak, once worth $400 million, was the latest failure Heyward noticed. The anonymous-messaging landscape is littered with too many casualties to believe that's possible. Heyward has abandoned dreams of being the next Facebook or Snapchat. Whisper can stitch together a slideshow or video of users' posts and photos for dissemination on Facebook, Twitter and or any website. Software named Eliot sifts through the blizzard of messages to decide which clips and topics are trending, and creates stories for advertisers and media companies hungry for inexpensive material. That's where we're going."Īrtificial intelligence is a crucial part of that equation. We want to do it in under five seconds and make it better. "Let's say you work at Apple or Vice and you want to produce a three-to-five minute video," Heyward, 29, said in an interview from his Los Angeles headquarters. Now he's charting a new chapter by making Whisper a marketing tool - promoting the next Netflix or MTV hit - as well as a forum for controversial topics. Heyward, backed by $70 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, says Whisper sidestepped those problems by culling inappropriate posts. Allegations that some apps provided cover for cyberbullies and sexual predators led advertisers to flee and forced some companies to shut down. Others interested in similar topics answer with their own nameless replies and pictures, creating a visual story that can go viral on sites like Facebook.Ī few years ago, anonymous messaging was attracting financial backers and hundreds of millions of mostly young users.
Whisper's app lets users create and post brief messages, which appear in front of photos and videos, without sharing their identities. A few hours after learning a rival app would shut down, Michael Heyward started to explain how his social-media startup, Whisper, will avoid a similar fate.