Some seemingly insignificant events often say more about us than a resume…
Promised a scientific career in the family tradition, Karen Seror decided to make a 180° turn and listen to her growing professional instincts: to make a career in marketing and communication and infuse it with her taste for success and challenge.
Karen graduated with honors from her marketing school and has never regretted this choice. It is certainly her appetite for disruption, while surpassing herself, and her taste for excellence which are the two fundamental pillars of her career path. These have led her to join the sector of new technologies which promise to shape the future. She has, as a result, accompanied young startups that have revolutionized businesses, markets, and uses.
Karen first joined the web hosting company AMEN when it was created in 1999 as the marcom manager alongside the co-founders Patrick Chassany and Oleg Tscheltzoff.
AMEN was the first French company to democratize hosting and domain names. Patrick, the charismatic and bold CEO for whom everything seemed possible, instilled in her a taste for challenge and team spirit forever. With almost no marketing budget and facing an extremely large target group (individuals and SMBs), Karen took advantage of the digital revolution to make them the European leader in just two years. AMEN was sold in 2004 to Via Networks and then to the Dada Group in 2008 for $20 million.
This success led AMEN’s founders to propose a new adventure with the creation of FOTOLIA that
aimed to redraw the photography market by creating the first marketplace of royalty-free visual assets
priced at 1 Euro. By removing the price barrier, photographers could generate substantial or additional revenue from sales volume and companies could acquire affordable images to communicate more legally.
Once again, a disruptive approach in a very traditional and conservative market and the conviction that the internet was the ideal channel to democratize the use of images.
Karen also understood the importance of local specificities in a global market and the agility needed in order to keep up with market evolutions. “Think Global, Act Local” is her motto.
Since 2020, Karen Seror has led global marketing for GAMESTREAM, the world leader in Cloud Gaming solutions for the B2B market. In simple words, GAMESTREAM offers everyone the ability to play quality console games instantly and with unlimited access, on all devices (PC, tablets, SmartTVs, and set top boxes) via an internet connection, without consoles, without downloads. This has earned them the nickname, “the French Netflix of video games”.
Here again, Karen accompanies the success of a game changer that disrupts the traditional business models of gaming – much like Spotify and Netflix did for music and television – by democratizing the joys of the video game experience itself.
In these different roles, Karen has been at the forefront of several disruptions that have shaped the digital economy. Among them:
- Digitalization
“Digitalization aims at transforming traditional processes, objects, tools or professions through digital technologies in order to offer new revenue and value generation opportunities on a global scale.”
As with all the start-ups Karen has worked for, this principle of empowering payments, processing numerous logistical steps online, and massive content distribution has had a real impact on the productivity of GAMESTREAM’s services, all of which have allowed her to target the international market and quickly ensure the final profitability of their offers.
- The Cloud Economy
The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the cloud by changing the way we work, making telecommuting the norm overnight. Once considered a mere technological option, it has quickly become an essential part of business-as-usual across all industries.
The second age of the machine is the cloud economy. Driven by the pandemic, the European market reached 7.3 billion euros in Q2 2021. “The whole world is going digital. And we are seeing e-commerce become commerce itself,” says Seror.
As it has developed, we have seen the creation of an ecosystem based on two pillars: the high-performance hosting of applications and the feeding of them with content to generate regular revenues. “Content is key and complements technology,” Seror states.
- The Subscription Business Model
Karen Seror : “In just a few years, the distribution of services has undergone an interesting transformation. The unit purchase (pay per product/service) has given way to subscriptions allowing us to build customer loyalty and for companies to predict their annual revenues, which is very reassuring for investors! The popularity of subscription services with tacit renewal, symbolized by Spotify or Netflix or other office software, is no longer in question and Gartner has predicted that 75% of companies selling directly to consumers will offer subscription services by 2023. The challenge is to have the right approach to pricing, on boarding, and data analysis.”
Seror goes on, “This ongoing transformation of sales models provides an exciting field to explore for a Marketing Director, especially in the digital sector, and thanks to GAMESTREAM, I have the opportunity to observe many other service monetization models that are developing alongside the sacrosanct subscription model”.
“With the upcoming arrival of the Metaverse and NFT, new and exciting challenges are offered to marketing managers in all types of industries who, like me, have lived through several digital revolutions…” says Karen Seror, The Disruptive CMO.