Iker Merchán joins Soda.tv as CEO

Soda.tv incorporates Iker Merchán as CEO, a professional with extensive experience on the Internet. With this addition, Paula Garaialde and Gorka Dolls, founders of Soda.tv, put one more piece in the team of professionals who from Soda.tv offer integral solutions of audiovisual communication on the Internet. After his appointment, Merchán has highlighted the importance that for a company must have the presence on the Internet and the commitment to video.

Soda.tv incorporates Iker Merchán as CEO, a professional with extensive experience on the Internet. With this addition, Paula Garaialde and Gorka Dolls, founders of Soda.tv, put one more piece in the team of professionals who from Soda.tv offer integral solutions of audiovisual communication on the Internet. Merchán was responsible for the start-up, development and success of one of the most innovative and longest-distanced projects on the Spanish Internet: consumer journal Consumer Eroski, web version of the monthly printed magazine of this distribution chain that is also a consumer association. During his time at the helm, Consumer Eroski became, according to OJD, the fifth most read media in Spain, with more than three million monthly readers. subsequently, Merchán became responsible for Eroski's global presence on the Internet, task he performed for two years. Outside the cooperative, coordinated Semantix products, the new business adventure of Mikel Urizarbarrena (creator and honorary president of the antivirus company Panda). Parelamente, has developed his career as a global strategy consultant on the Internet and has worked for prestigious entities such as Corporación Mondragón. After his appointment, Iker Merchán has highlighted the importance that for a company must have the presence on the Internet and the commitment to video, commenting that “on the one hand, we spend three and a half hours a day consuming audiovisual content on television, on the other, YouTube is the second most used search engine on the Internet. As YouTube enters TVs and those two realities converge (something that has already started and that will accelerate in two or three years) companies will need to convert the bulk of their current textual communication (blogs, corporate websites...) to an audiovisual language. It is about giving the information in the format that has been proven most effective, the audiovisual. Making videos is no longer the work of four large multinationals. Nowadays for most cases it is more profitable to make a video than to tell the same thing in a written text”. The new CEO of Soda.tv has been convinced that “soon we can all zapping from the sofa between Antena 3 and Nestlé's recipe channel. Companies will stop investing in other people's media (advertising on conventional chains) and create their own content channels. Those who are not pioneers and do not take the step now, they will have to work twice as hard to get half. It is a matter of pure profitability and efficiency: it's cheaper to have your medium than to pay for interrupting a program that has produced another”.