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Chris Kraft is bridging the gap between television and the Internet.
“We’re pioneering a new part of the industry,” said Kraft, founder and president of Splash Media. “We have the best product on the market. We have a neat, broad vision. It’s never dull here. Every day is an adventure.”
Kraft, a married, father of four and North Carrollton resident, heads the Addison-based company, which offers online video training. Splash Media offers three networks, including The Mortgage Professionals Training Network (to be officially launched in September), The Success Training Network and Xtrain.
The Mortgage Professionals Training Network offers training and business news stories for mortgage professionals. The Success Training Network is a series of motivational and self-help videos. Xtrain is geared toward the creative professional, offering training programs for Adobe products and other graphic design products. Each network is a premium service, with varying monthly costs and is updated daily from Splash Media’s state of the art television studio in Addison Circle.
“People are conditioned to get their news on the web now,” Kraft said. “That’s one of our key competencies.”
Kraft, 40, has a long entrepreneurial history. During his senior year at W.T. White High School, Kraft went to school for half a day and worked at his own business the rest of the day.
“It was an easy transition,” he said. “Both my parents and grandparents were entrepreneurs.”
After graduating from high school, Kraft was involved in a business venture in the plastics industry which failed after the stock market crash of 1987. That’s when he decided to take $600 and invest it in a Nikon camera and taught himself professional photography. He worked for a weekly newspaper in Addison and North Dallas before stumbling upon a New York-based agent.
“I was given an assignment to go to Austin to shoot a concert with ‘Rolling Stone’ (Magazine),” he said. “That became a regular gig for two years.”
Kraft shot a lot of country music concerts, so it was relatively easy for him to move into shooting music videos, including a No. 1 hit for Dallas artist Brad Hawkins.
“It was fun, but I knew I had to move to Nashville,” he said.
Kraft didn’t want to move, so he took his video skills to the corporate video industry, founding Chris Kraft Productions.
“We were doing marketing video, PR, training,” he said. “It really was a boutique company. We gravitated toward training products. I liked restaurant compliant-based stuff. That was interesting.”
In 1999, Kraft met his current business partner who had a software company across the street from Kraft’s business in Addison Circle. Kraft’s partner sold his software company and the two formed Splash Media with the idea of solely making programming for the Internet.
“Our core belief is training is marketing,” Kraft said. “It was something the market was going toward at that time. From the beginning, we never were YouTube or garage style video.”
Splash Media employs 28 full-time workers and six contractors. Four members of Splash Media’s team recently won local Emmys n two in the Animator/Motion Graphics Designer category and one each in the Informational/Instructional and Video Editor categories.
“We have an amazing team,” Kraft said. “It’s great. Everybody wants to grow and has a passion to succeed. Everybody’s focused on the same goal.”
