Speech Summaries

Barry Diller Chairman and CEO InterActiveCorp

Creating A World-Class Consumer Experience

Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO, InterActiveCorp, had an intimate Q&A session with Henry H. Harteveldt, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research.

Questions And Answers

HH: What do you do that you shouldn't do?

BD: Most development in my experience has been by trial and error, bouncing off walls and having serendipity.

HH: So you stumble into these things?

BD: Stumble is too awkward a word, more like fall head first! Ten to 15 years ago, nobody talked about vision.

HH: You were the king of entertainment, why move?

BD: Running a movie company is as glamorous as washing windows. There is actually not a single new idea. The business of entertainment is an editorial process. If you have any curiosity, you won't mine it in the world of entertainment. Compare entertainment and its cynicism with the world of interactivity, activity on the Internet, where every day is so infinitely challenging. The Net is still at the beginning, these things are joyous. There is this great good luck to be in the area I'm in. Look for monumental track development online in the next five to 10 years.

HH: You said "We care less about synergies than we do about acquiring brands." eBay and Amazon are umbrella brands; why do you like the approach of being a house of brands? Do you think there is a challenge that when you try to share customers across brand sites, they will have different experiences?

BD: Consumers have different experiences on Amazon and eBay. Our strategy is to be the largest and most profitable eCommerce business using a multibrand strategy. We could find some central brand that you come to to do everything. For us, the individual brands themselves and what picture they create with consumers is enormously valuable for us now and in the future, especially when you think about search and disintermediaries. I don't know how long you can do that in the future, but now, if you have something the consumer wants and can market it, it's the best defense for anything that comes at it. We build it with the most focus we can and with few distractions. We have a different idea -- there are experiences where our brands relate to each other. If you're on Citysearch and want to find out what's going on in New York City, it'll take you to Expedia for the tickets, then match.com to see if you can get lucky. We are not trying to slug them home -- we are not Disney, a totalitarian regime. If you have a brand like Disney, you impose order on everybody, the brand needs that organization. But that's the opposite of the experiences we have.