Taking talent to the net

• Source: Global Times
• [10:47 July 23 2010]
• Comments

The pair shared an interest in the creative culture being developed by young Chinese, and wanted to help it grow. In 2007, Neocha was being approached by third-party commercial clients interested in the site's core users, which Schokora described as "young, edgy content creators, opinion leaders and trendsetters in China."

To take advantage of the interest in Neocha's users, Schokora and Leow created NeochaEDGE, which allowed its Chinese artists to post profiles that third parties – say multinational corporations, for example – could search to find creators and content for a specific project. According to Scho-kora, NeochaEDGE acts as an online talent agency, taking a cut from an artist when he or she gets a deal with a third party.

"We launched NeochaEDGE because we were working with more and more commercial clients and needed a separate 'brand' from Neocha.com. We didn't want to mix our client work with our community site," Schokora said.

The biggest obstacle that Schokora and Leow have to overcome is the lack of awareness about Chinese artists, which stems from the perception that China is not a fountainhead of creativity, Schokora said.

The primary problem for most of Chinese artists is the language. There is a lot of content on the Internet created by Chinese, but most of it is cloistered away on Chinese websites that the rest of the world can't navigate well, Schokora said.

Since 2007, Adam and Sean have developed deep and wide relationships with thousands of artists. In their mind, the trust in a talent agency model is something akin to the trust of a friendship.

"It takes time to develop mutual trust, which is based on personal connections with the people involved," Schokora said. "We have all of our artists under the agency agreement, but we don't rely on this as this is just a piece of paper at the end of the day. Trust and respect goes a lot further than a contract, especially here in China."