An Orange County entrepreneur with zero dance experience has built an international dance empire that’s now on prime-time TV on NBC. And its business model has obtained such a wide reach that others want to emulate it.
David Gonzalez created Fullerton-based World of Dance in 2008 with a one-off dance competition in Pomona.
The single event spawned a world competition and a digital platform with more than five million subscribers, half of them on its YouTube channel.
The result: a global lifestyle brand revolving around World of Dance.
Even with all of the existing dance reality competitions, such as “America’s Best Dance Crew” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” a new studio thought there was still more room on the TV dance floor. Los Angeles-based Universal Television Al-ternative Studio approached World of Dance to develop a competition series for broadcast television, and parent NBC Entertainment bought a 10-episode series. The first episode aired in prime time on May 30.
World of Dance has now transcended dance. Its brand has become such an influencer that the founder and his team lend their expertise to building others’ brands. They recently created a studio in Fullerton, World of Dance Digital Lab, to work with various brands on their content and enhance their influencer quotient.
While L.A. beckoned as a natural fit for the World of Dance headquarters, Gonzalez stuck to his Fullerton roots. So did his chief executive, Matthew Everitt, who grew up in Orange and joined the team in 2012.
“We had set up an office in Cerritos to be closer to L.A. since so many of our sponsors, advertisers and talent are in the Hollywood and greater L.A. area,” Everitt said. “It felt like we would be better off from a business perspective locating in L.A., but being long-term residents … we really love OC. We really wanted to keep it here.”
World of Dance closed its office in Cerritos. The private company does not disclose revenue.
The First Step
Gonzalez started the first World of Dance event after being involved in building event and lifestyle brands for 20 years, most notably as marketing director of Irvine-based Hot Import Nights for seven years. The series of events held throughout the U.S. welcomed owners of imported cars to customize their cars and enter them into competitions. The events combined a nightclub-like atmosphere with a car show.
After leaving Hot Import Nights, Gonzalez concluded that dance and media would be a powerful combination. Dance is best experienced as a “visual art, not a static picture,” he said. In 2008, “dance did not have a strong media space,” he added.
“Our first event came together at the right place and the right time, when social media networks were taking off,” said Gonzalez, who serves as president of World of Dance.
The first event was at the Fairplex in Pomona. He expected about 5,000 attendees and 8,000 people showed up. What was different about this event, he said, was that it united the various genres of hip-hop dance communities and competitions that typically keep to themselves, such as choreography, break dancing and krumping, a street dance characterized by free, expressive, exaggerated and highly energetic movement.
“It blew our mind because the dance community had never been united in this way,” he said.
The goal was to bring all the dance styles together under one roof with urban and pop music, which he describes as music under the umbrella of contemporary hit radio.
Gonzalez then took the events to San Francisco and New York City. In its second year, World of Dance obtained its first sponsor, L.A.-based Paul Mitchell, which became the “presenting sponsor” of World of Dance. Paul Mitchell and other sponsors received more than 200 million “impressions” from World of Dance’s YouTube channel last year, according to YouTube. World of Dance started filling the channel with content in 2011.
2012 was a turning point as subscribers to the channel started to rise meteorically, Everitt said. He attributes that to the way World of Dance posted its performances, calling it “front row.” World of Dance posted all of the video from its dance competitions for free. At the time, most other dance competitions sold the performance videos to participants, he explained.
“It was the secret sauce to building this brand,” Everitt said, adding that many major dance competitions now film their videos from the same front-row perspective, and publish them online for free.
Then World of Dance entered into a partnership with Culver City-based Fullscreen Inc. to create a network of dance-focused YouTube channels. The World of Dance Network had nearly 400 channels at its peak. Ultimately, World of Dance decided to focus efforts on its own YouTube channel, which has more than 5,000 dance videos, as well as its website, worldofdance.com, where it now puts the majority of the videos from World of Dance events.
Living up to its Name
By 2010, World of Dance was producing eight events a year, so it changed the name of the events to World of Dance Tour. It added one-off events in Canada and Europe as part of the tour. Initially, the company owned, operated and produced all of its events. Ultimately, Gonzalez and his team decided to license the international ones, which allowed the tour to grow exponentially to nearly 50 events in more than 30 countries around the world.
Another moneymaker is World of Dance merchandise. Competitors and attendees at the worldwide events can buy hats, T-shirts and hoodies with the World of Dance logo. This summer the company is planning to launch its first line of high-end apparel for dance performance. The line includes athletic gear, made by and for dancers, that stretch and wick appropriately, Everitt said.
Branding Out
About 2015, World of Dance started helping other companies with their brands. One is international toy company, New Zealand-based Zuru Inc., known for its Bunch O Balloons product, which enables a user to fill up 100 water balloons in one minute. In February, the product won the Outdoor Toy of the Year award at the Toy Industry Association’s annual event in New York.
Zuru had already penetrated the children’s market, along with their parents, Everitt said. In seeking the coveted teens, tweens and college-age demographic, it reached out to World of Dance. Zuru asked World of Dance to help create an “authentic connection to the audience, leveraging the expertise in video and influencer marketing that World of Dance used to develop its own global brand,” he said.
World of Dance created a user-generated content challenge for Zuru called Unleash Summer, which invites users to post videos on Instagram showing a trick, a move, or something they can do to impress with water balloons.
“The challenge has been extremely successful,” Everitt said, adding that a number of dance influencers have performed tricks and posted photos on their own social media sites. Last time Everitt checked, the Zuru campaign had generated more than 2 million impressions.
Next for World of Dance is creating a branded video for Zuru.
A Studio of Their Own
Helping Zuru and other brands inspired World of Dance to create its own studio dedicated to helping other brands gain more exposure. The company is looking to hire producers and content experts for the studio.
World of Dance has also dabbled in virtual reality, teasing some content produced by Newport Beach-based NextVR Inc. for the TV show at live events in L.A. Everett said the company is exploring several VR projects, and plans to move forward with at least one of those early next year.
Another expansion is “World of Dance Live,” a noncompetitive series with dance talent from TV or social media, some of whom have millions of subscribers. It would be a package of 10 to 15 dance acts that World of Dance would aggregate and sell to malls, performing arts centers and the like. It would provide an afterlife to the talent from the TV show, Everitt said, adding that the idea is to produce dozens of the live events around the country as the TV show draws to a close.
World of Dance has already been doing live noncompetitive shows for five years at Universal CityWalk in Universal City that draw “record-breaking crowds,” he said.
TV Show
Everitt says Universal Television Alternative Studio reached out to World of Dance last year through LinkedIn. He believes the TV interest is based on World of Dance becoming the “default destination” for dancers to showcase their work in live events and online after they compete on shows like “America’s Best Dance Crew” and “So You Think You Can Dance.”
In the process of selling the show to NBC, Jennifer Lopez’s film and TV production company, L.A.-based Nuyorican Productions, got involved. Lopez started her career as a dancer, is an executive producer of World of Dance, and is one of three judges on the show.
While World of Dance already had the young, hip demographic, the company felt that in order to entice the best dancers in the world to compete, there had to be a compelling prize. The final episode, scheduled to air on Aug. 8, will see the winner waltz away with a $1 million cash prize.
More than 9 million viewers watched the first episode, according to Nielsen data. World of Dance was the most-watched summer alternative series debut on broadcast TV in nine years, according to news reports.
While audience voting is not part of the TV show this season, there is a fan voting experience enabled by Snapchat, a partner of NBC TV. Sixteen of the show’s contestants will compete in a separate competition, developed exclusively for Snapchat, Everitt said. There will be eight rounds in the competition with the same judges, who will narrow down the field to four finalists. Snapchat viewers will vote for the winner in the separate competition. The winner of the competition will receive $3,000.
More OC Connection
In Orange County, The Source in Buena Park is hosting its own World of Dance event in conjunction with the TV show. The Source is a 400,000-square-foot food and entertainment destination that opened this year and also hosts special events and live entertainment. The event will feature dance battles between 32 individuals who will compete for various prizes. The competition, on June 17, is free and open to the public.
The Irvine Spectrum Center will host an event on Aug. 11. That World of Dance Live event is a showcase event featuring “the hottest stars and dance icons from YouTube and television,” Everitt said.
