In July of 2009, TAI Alum Jordan Kretchmer (’06) founded Livefyre, a content marketing and engagement platform. In the past seven years Livefyre has grown tremendously, acquiring customers like CNN, Coca-Cola, Major League Baseball, and Cisco. Due to their growing success, Livefyre caught the eye of Adobe, who has since acquired and integrated it into their Adobe Experience Manager.
In his time at SMU, Kretchmer was a member of Praxis, SMU’s award-winning Ad Team, for two consecutive years. He served as Vice President and Creative Director and was a presenter for the Visit Florida campaign, which won the 2004 National Championship in the American Advertising Federation’s National Student Advertising Competition.
Kretchmer had a successful career in advertising before founding his company. He worked as an Art Director at Tribal DDB, VP Associate Creative Director at Mullen, Associate Creative Director at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, and Vice President Brand at Current TV. He is also currently on the Board of Directors at Mashable and is a Venture Partner at Draft Ventures and will continue his work as CEO of Livefyre, while also working with Adobe.
After being acquired by Adobe in May, Livefyre became a product available within the Adobe Experience Manager, as well as remaining a stand-alone service outside of Adobe. According to Adobe, “[Livefyre is] an all-new capability of Adobe Experience Manager that lets you tap into everything shared on the web to create a constant flow of fresh and high-quality content on your own sites.”
The purpose of Livefyre is to allow companies access to user-created content in one aggregated location. Originally Livefyre was created as a commenting platform, where companies can gather all the comments being posted online about their product, service or event, in one place. Many of the major news sources, including Fox News and CNN, use this aspect of Livefyre to display comments during live events, like political debates.
In an interview with Branding magazine, Kretchmer explained “when you integrate user-generated content with professionally-created content you get to tell your story alongside all of your best fans.” Livefyre was created to be this solution for brands, and now the company that Kretchmer created from scratch seven years ago is providing that solution to some of the biggest brand names on one of the biggest platforms available, Adobe.