Ten months ago News Corp paid $188 million for a majority stake in D2C giant Jamba
Stuart O’Brien asked Jamba CEO Lucy Hood, COO Lee Fenton and chief sales officer Markus Berger-de León about life after the Crazy Frog…
What was the rationale behind News Corp’s acquisition of Jamba?
LH: Obviously News Corp has taken a bold step into mobile, which is how the company operates. Quite simply if you put the might, reach and creative expertise of News Corp together with Jamba’s technology and innovation you’ve got the world’s first fully vertically-integrated mobile content company.
Fox Mobile Entertainment continues as a brand within Jamba, headed up by Mitch Feinman. If you think about that it’s like having a studio that’s focused on bringing the best Fox content to Jamba, which of course remains a channel for third party content too. Jamba’s job is to be a freestanding digital division within News Corp.
LF: If you look at the external factors that validate the investment News Corp is making, you see data pricing coming down and operators becoming more attuned to consumer needs beyond the walled garden.
The size of the D2C opportunity is enormous. If there’s one metric that is consistently going north across all of the markets we operate in, it’s WAP page impressions and WAP unique users. Content publishers are seeing that opportunity and are piling in accordingly.
However, this industry is also a doubled-edged sword. In terms of downloads we have to support 1,800 handsets. For WAP browsing it’s 1,300. The News Corp/Jamba combination means we have the scale to cope.
LH: Exactly – it’s a big but tremendously exciting challenge. Certainly mobile data is already a multibillion dollar business, but we think the industry is ready for the next level. For example, I think Jamba can play a key role in helping the mobile games sector deliver its potential in the D2C channel, particularly in the areas of consumer discovery and adoption.
And we’re building on the key verticals – personalisation remains core, but video and full-track music present extraordinary opportunities. For example, Keifer Sutherland shooting original made-for-mobile footage for the 24 Debrief mobisodes is really raising the content bar.
And then we’ve got Homer Simpson (see cover story). Mobile is a virgin market for Simpsons content and the fans are hungry. Mobile is also a way to reach people who can’t or don’t watch the TV show. That’s the essence of what we’re doing with Jamba.
What’s the role of third-party content within the new Jamba?
LF: Jamba is expanding its third party line-up all the time. We’re acutely aware that our customers don’t just want Fox properties – they want content from Universal Music, EA, MTV and so on too.
LH: An operation like this requires a huge amount strategic coordination and, if anything, we have too many opportunities. News Corp has more than 60 divisions. We were recently talking to News Corp-owned Star TV in India about creating a game based on their hit show Kaun Banega Crorepati – the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? That game will soon be available to India’s 200 million mobile users.
We have similarly integrated companies across Europe, Asia, Latin and North America – it gives us an extraordinary opportunity to offer brands global distribution, but it also enables us to deliver the local content that people want.
And of course we can take advantage of multi-platform promotional campaigns. We’re co-marketing our Simpsons content with the movie around the world, while the Fox Network, BSkyB and dozens of our operator partners are pushing 24 mobisodes.
What are your plans for taking the Jamba/Jamster D2C brand into new markets?
MBL: Jamba is active in 35 territories and 25 languages, with 100 operators. There are two ways we are going to grow that business. The first is to increase the footprint where we already operate with new web portals, WAP portals, on-device catalogues, etc. For example, we just became the first D2C portal in Germany to offer ringback tones and we’re preparing to take that product to other markets.
The second objective is to move into new territories. Lucy has already mentioned India, which is very interesting because of the sheer number of mobile users. And there are countries like Brazil where we’re negotiating with carriers and aggregator partners to get connections up and running.
And China? Some of your competitors have struggled there…
MBL: We’ve been in China for nearly two years and I don’t think we’ve seen the problems that some of our competitors have. We’ve steadily built the business and it works really well. China is a key market for us.
The way D2C mobile content has been sold in the past has come in for heavy criticism. Does that concern you?
LF: The strategy we have lined up for The Simpsons Yellow Plan in the US isn’t just about launching a site and flogging a load of content – it’s about refreshing the service with new products and concepts and providing a compelling subscription experience.
And Jamba is not all about the subscription model. We also offer a la cart purchases across a range of content products and have inked advertising deals with Cisco, Mastercard, Toyota, Burger King and Amex for 24 mobisodes.
Ad-funded content is an evolving concept – we need more definitive metrics in place to make it sustainable – but it’s coming and we’re active participants.
The likes of LaNetro Zed have made big investments in so-called Web 2.0 concepts – can we expect to see the same from Jamba?
LF: Check out Jamba.de. What you’ll see there is a very different web experience from the one you’ll see at Jamster.co.uk or Jamster.com. Because of Jamba’s rich heritage in Germany we often try stuff there first before a wider roll out. We’ve layered in a range of community elements that give the customer more opportunity to engage both with us and each other.
A big part of that is user-generated video. We also launched a new Jamba WAP site in Germany in June ...
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Germany has also been the focus of Jamba’s D2C full-track music offering – how has that service performed?
MBL: We’ve seen a big uptake – not just in music but also for other richer, larger pieces of content that we’ve made available on a D2C basis, such as video files and smartphone games. Obviously, flat rate data has played a role, but the proliferation of handsets that allow Wi-Fi connections and sideloading is also having an impact.
For Jamba Music specifically we are offering a million tracks, whereas most operator music services are around the 400,000-track mark. We believe very much in the long tail effect and for that to work the user experience is paramount. We’re quite proud of what we’ve achieved with the music service in that respect.
And it was Fox that coined the term ‘mobisode’. How do you plan to take the genre forward?
LH: We’ve sold millions of mobisodes across 30 countries and I can give three quite different examples of how we’ve approached the genre. The best known are the those we created around the TV show 24, for which the creativity has increased greatly since they first debuted as part of the Vodafone 3G launch in late-2004. We’ve also offered bite-sized chunks of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s adventures in The Simple Life.
Most recently we launched Boratisodes – outtakes from the Borat movie that like the latest 24 mobisiodes are only available on mobile. We’re looking more at what we can commission in terms of made-for-mobile video and we’re speaking to our colleagues in the Fox TV and film divisions at increasingly early stages in their production cycles to see what creative concepts we can come up with.
Obviously social networking is a hot topic – what are News Corp’s plans for taking MySpace to mobile beyond operator deals with the likes of Vodafone?
LF: Right now Jamster is providing the mobile content storefront for MySpace in the US. As part of our agreement with them we’ll be launching that internationally over time. We’ve only been live since May 14th, so it’s very early days and we’re learning how to make the most of what is a phenomenal opportunity. We’re also collaborating on a MySpace text alert product. We’re in numerous on-going discussions as to how we develop the mobile side of the MySpace community.
