Silicon Valley's Greatest Opportunity? Better Marketing

It's crazy how time flies.  In October of last year I marked my 6 year anniversary in Silicon Valley.  It's been quite a ride and I've been privileged to see and be part of some pretty amazing things:  the booming of the app economy, the explosion in Android adoption,  the growth of mobile gaming, and the launch of Google playjust to name a few.  

Like many, I'm perpetually amazed at the level of energy, innovation, drive and creativity here. I've lived in 11 countries and actively worked in 7 of them and I don't think it's a solely an American thing to claim that there is no place like the Valley.  There just isn't.  The unique mix of energy, technology, capital, innovation and cultures simply doesn't exist anywhere else.  It's what makes this place so unique and dynamic.

But the Valley has its dark sides and its own challenges as a recent article in The Economist points out.  Success and financial gain aside, one that's very rarely talked about but is becoming more widely acknowledged is the lack of focus on marketing.  I'm constantly surprised by how little focus there is on marketing at many companies - both big and small.  Many marketers will agree: For all the innovation in the Valley, marketing if often under utilized, misunderstood or de-prioritized as part of the business.  

Why?

To appreciate the answer you have to first understand what the role of traditional marketing is.  Philip Kotler, a professor at Northwestern considered by many as one of the gurus of marketing defines it as follows:

"Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identifiedmarket and the profit potential."

Sadly, marketing is often misunderstood or under appreciated in the Valley.  Ask many founders and even VC's and they will tell you marketing is about PR, advertising or "growth hacking."   

As a marketer with 20 years experience I've developed a thick skin and don't take this personally.  I remember being at Google several years ago in a staff meeting when a product manager proclaimed "marketing could go home and we really wouldn't feel the difference on the revenue side."  When you're Google and your app is pre-installed on every Android handset that comes to market it's easy to feel that way but sadly that didn't help the usage of that particular app. As a matter of fact, never has Google's marketing spend nor the size of its marketing team been larger than it is today.  

But let's get back to our earlier definition of marketing for a minute.  Another famous marketer, E. Jerome McCarthey developed what's widely known today as the 4-P's of classical marketing.  For the uninitiated these are Product, Place, Price and Promotion.  

This is also where things get really tricky in the Valley.  Product in technology is usually owned by product management / engineering team (and in early-staged companies by the CEO / founders).  Place, more commonly known as distribution, is usually owned by business development and sales. Price is owned by sales.  Which leaves marketers with...you guessed it "Promotion."  More commonly known as advertising or growth hacking here (cough cough).

Now I'm not saying marketing should own all of the above.    The complexities and skill sets needed are too great and you're not going to change the culture in which tech companies operate.  However, not having marketing deeply involved in all these aspects of the business can result in products not fit for market, brand erosion, and reduced profitability.  

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Product.  All too often I've seen startups fail because founders build cool tech in search of a market.  This happens because you have incredibly smart technical teams that love to build cool things but aren't close enough to consumers or customers to understand what problem they're actually solving or whether those people actually even need this technology (Google Glass anyone?).  The other day I met with a serial entrepreneur who showed me his "Instagram for VR."  I looked at it and was like "Cool.  Eventually, there will be a market for that but not now.  There simply isn't enough of an installed base and capturing and sharing content hasn't been established in VR.  You're at least 3 years too early."  

Another problem you get when marketing isn't involved in product is "feature creep".  I often see great products crammed with tons of cool features.  But the truth is that what makes products like Whatsapp, Instagram or Snapchat great isn't all the cool features. It's that they actually solve a real problem and do it simply.  Argentineans have a saying which is "A preuba de boludos."  Translated into gringospeak as "idiot proof."  Too often products (whether B2B or B2C) are too complicated, lack clear tutorials or onboarding and/or don't directly address a particular need.  The result:  cool tech with no clear market and possibly wasted VC dollars.  Building a successful product is about thinking about the long term.  Improving and adding features as consumer needs evolve over time. However, at the onset you have to solve 1 problem and do it freakin well!  

How Marketing can help Product

The key to nailing product-market fit and avoiding feature creep is having product teams and marketing work together from product concept through launch.  Don't build a product, throw it over the wall and expect marketing to "acquire users."  What's worked for me is what I simply call D2; the "dynamic duo".  This duo is a PM (product manager) and PMM (product marketing manager) who develop the product together from the onset.  While the PM develops PRD's (product requirement docs) and works with engineering to build, test and iterate on the product, the PMM's role is to look at the market, consumers and competition and ensure that 1.) We're solving a real pressing need 2).  We can differentiate against what's out there currently and 3). We can make money doing that.  Good PMM's are both technical enough to understand how products are built but also business savvy enough to understand the economics of the business and where there is an opening to position the product uniquely to have a competitive advantage.  This structure worked for me both in games (studio heads + PMM's) and even at Google (PM's +PMM's). Once the product is ready, PMM's will also work to develop all the necessary assets, brand materials and tools to bring the product to market.  In larger organizations they will then hand this off to consumer marketing teams that handle acquisition and retention while in smaller orgs they may even handle this themselves.  Often the PMM will also run market research and work with the PM to do client interviews, qualitative research and focus groups to more deeply understand consumer needs and how the product can meet these needs.  It's usually a win-win scenario where PM's and PMM's both own the product and the P&L and have clear responsibilities to ensure everybody wins.  Likewise, if things fail they both take the rap ;)

Place.  More commonly known as distribution.  Distribution can make or break a product.  Regardless of whether it's hardware or software.  You can have the best product in the world but if you're competitor has a slightly weaker product but is more widely available you're probably going to lose.  When I worked at Pepsi in the 90's (yes, totally dating myself) one of the big reasons why Coke kicked our ass wasn't advertising (Actually Pepsi's advertising is better than Coke's - I'm biased like that) but because they have way better distribution.  The joke in the industry is that you can find Coke more easily around the world than drinkable water.  Sadly, that's also statistically true.  

The same is true in tech.  You have to be where your customers are and even where they aren't.  The more consumers see you the more brand "recall" you have (ie. the first brand they think about when they are considering a purchase). Twitter and Facebook aren't massive just because of their product and virality. They are successful because you "see" them everywhere.  They are distributed by 100,000's of 3rd party brands on their websites, apps and in the press.  In effect, their ubiquity is a reflection of their distribution.  It's the power of being everywhere.   Coke and Pepsi have enjoyed a duopoly in the soft drink market since the 1890's mostly due to distribution not just advertising.  

How Marketing helps distribution

The key to unlocking distribution is to identify all your possible distribution channels: ie, where are users / clients going to find my product and figure out how to market to each based on their own, unique characteristics.  Once you establish the different channels or partners you have then marketing usually works with your BD teams to develop channel marketing plans.  That's marketing-speak for marketing programs specifically tailored to the needs of that channel.  Here's an example.  When I ran Google Play marketing, one of our programs was called "Comes with Google Play."  It was a program targeting handset vendors and carriers where we provided them with programs, assets and tools to communicate to users that Android devices came with Google play content.  The goal was to ensure that consumers considering Android wouldn't buy an iPhone because Android lacked content.  So we developed the program to provide those channel partners with assets and programs to help carry that message to prospective users.  We even had a partner marketing team who helped push the program to partners and provide them with the framework for brand approvals to communicate this to end users.  

One of the best known programs of that sort was Intel's famous Intel Inside campaign (developed in 1995).  Not only did it help users understand what a processor was and why it mattered but, more importantly it told users why they should only consider PC's running with Intel processors.

Price - show me da money!

Usually the domain of sales or senior management effective pricing can dramatically increase profitability, extend product life cycles and destroy competition.  

Getting pricing wrong can also have dramatic consequences on your sales.  In 2011 Blackberry introduced their first tablet: The Playbook.  Aside from having a terrible name which had nothing to do with the product (they had virtually no games or entertainment content and were targeting business owners) they priced the device initially at $499 to $699 which was the same price as the market leader: the iPad.  The result was a dismal flop.  It should have been intuitive.  After all why would I buy an inferior product, with less content at the same price from a company with little expertise in tablets?  Blackberry's fall from grace had many contributing factors but a large one was marketing or the lack thereof.  

The other two things to consider when thinking about pricing are your business model and your product life cycle.

One of the biggest challenges when I started working in mobile gaming back in 2005 was that we were effectively asking consumers to fork over 4-5$ to experience something they had never experienced before.  Consumers, especially when considering new products and services, often are hesitant to shell out money for something they've never experienced.  At glu mobile we solved that by providing Try-b4-u-buy versions of our java games.  Years later, this eventually morphed into free-2-play games which is now the standard and has helped turbo charge the entire industry.  For years what held the mobile industry gaming back wasn't just shitty distribution (yes that's you Verizon, T-mobile and Vodafone) but bad pricing.  Once games became free to play, a big reason not to download them suddenly melted away and the market exploded.  Today free to play games account for the vast majority of revenue on both the App Store and Google Play.

Another way to juice up adoption and sales and maximize profits is life cycle optimization.  This is commonly done in many traditional industries from consumer electronics to fashion and cars.  It can and should be used in software as well.  The simple notion is that as a product ages and a replacement approaches you should gradually decrease price to extract additional value.  In 2007-2008 we had amazing success at Glu in Europe by doing this.  Once mobile games had been on the market for six months, we would reduce the price and 1-2 months before a sequel we would reduce the price yet again.  In this way we were was able to capture users who wouldn't pay full price while also seeding awareness for the next title.  The console gaming industry has also seen some success doing this.  

Marketing and pricing

Let's go back to our dynamic duo - D2.  Ideally, both the PM and PMM who own your product should have a pricing strategy not just for launch but for the entire duration of the lifecycle of the product before you launch it.   This pricing strategy should reflect the competitive landscape, the introduction of new features (and whether your going to charge for them) and the planned obsolesce of a product to pave way for a new one.  In the Valley not only do teams spend too little time on pricing (often finishing a product without even figuring out whether to charge for it or not) but they often will either underprice a product (our competitor charges X so we should charge X) or fail to identify features that should justify higher pricing.  Pricing is important not only for profitability but also as an indicator of perceived brand value / strength.  

Let's say your positioning your firm as the "market leader" in X space (who doesn't?).  What does it say if your pricing is the same as everyone else's?  It says you don't have enough confidence to charge more for it.  If you don't have enough confidence to charge more for it than is it really better than what's out there?  It might be but that's what your customers are going to be left asking.

Marketing teams need to be assessing how sales and volumes change over time as a function of pricing.  They should be looking at one-off sales promotions targeting specific times of the year and they should be planning price reductions when products are being phased out and pricing increases when products ad valuable features.  Lastly, if you're selling physical products your marketing teams should be working with sales to identify opportunities to price discriminate according to different channels.  Ever notice how a can of Coke (or Pepsi) costs more in a restaurant than in a gas station?  There's a reason for that.

Last but not least Promotion (aka Advertising, Growth Hacking, UA)

Congratulations.  If you've actually read this far and didn't realize what other things marketing can help you with you may have actually learned something ;)

Yes, it's true.  Advertising does remain a core function of the marketing team. But here's the catch: Advertising isn't as effective as it used to be - particularly among millennials.  Why?  There's simply too much noise and too many fragmented channels to market through.  Too many ads, too little time coupled with consumers and clients who are sometimes a bit lazy and usually irrational (if you don't buy this read Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational").  Consumers are filtering out all the noise and are basing purchasing decisions based on other things (friends, the latest fads, what they've used before, the first thing that comes to mind etc.).   Even Google admitted last year that possibly up to 50% of Adwords clicks are accidental.    On the B2B side, many customers are saying that they are actually more into buying products and services from companies who they trust and who "help" them with their business.  The translation in B2B is a greater focus on content marketing and developing materials that actually teach customers something that helps their business as opposed to trying to sell them something.  Content marketing is on the rise and an increasing number of marketers are finding that this is the friendliest path of least resistance to building relationships that eventually translate into greater sales and longer retention.  A great article in Adweek captures why content marketing is on the rise and some of the trends we're seeing.  

The key to understand advertising is simple:  advertising is a process and a journey.  I've often used a framework to help explain this journey: ALTR. Awareness, Likability, Trial, Repeat.  

Before a consumer is going to buy your product they have to have heard of it. Once they've heard of it they need to "like it" or accept it as part of their consideration set among other products they might buy.  Third, they have to try it.  They may buy it or try it but that doesn't mean they will stick to it.  The rule of thumb among marketers is that a customer you already have is always worth significantly more than a new one you have to acquire.  That's why many VC's are placing so much emphasis on retention.  Acquiring a user on Facebook at $5-7 is one thing but loosing 92% of them after 30 days is another.  

What your marketing team should be doing in regards to advertising

Good marketers will develop advertising strategies that capitalize on each stage of the consumer journey as outlined above.  Successful marketing strategies will have different messaging, different creative applications and different advertising channels depending on the goals at each phase.  Each step of the process should be measured and evaluated based on its own metrics.  For example, awareness should be measured in terms of aided versus unaided brand awareness, visits to your website, shares, posts etc.  Trial can be measured in terms of the number of consumers / clients that tried your product and the duration during which they used it while retention is a function of how long a consumer continues to pay for and use your product.  

Different advertising strategies need to employed depending where in the consumer journey you're targeting users.  Billboards or display ads may be good for awareness but not for trial.  Re-targeting is effective for consumers already considering your product but not for those already using it.  Blog posts, white papers and webinars are only effective if the content is tailored to the right audience at the right point in their customer journey.  If you're writing posts on your product features and expecting leads than you're simply wasting keystrokes.  

The good news in all this?  There's still a ton to do to improve tech marketing in the Valley.  As a marketer, I'm excited and optimistic about marketing's prospects.  The Valley is in many ways building the future of consumer and enterprise products across many different industries.  Better marketing will result in better products, targeting the right audiences, with the right message, at the right price available wherever those consumers expect the product to be available. It's a good time to be a marketer in the Valley (if you have a thick skin) and never before has marketing been more important both for the top of the funnel as well as for the bottom.  Marketers should embrace this opportunity while CEO's and VC's should encourage both their marketing and product teams to work more closely together before they actually launch their products.  Firms, clients and investors will be much better of for it.  

Mad Mork

Google's Next Opportunity Could Spell Serious Competition for Facebook on Mobile

As I mulled over Google's (GOOG) Q2 earnings a few weeks ago I couldn't help but think that Google is still missing a huge opportunity:  helping more developers get discovered on the Google play store.

Ask any mobile app developer today what their biggest problem is and they will probably say two things:

1.  Make more money on Android
2.  Get their app discovered on the Play store

Apps have become big business for Google.  Android's +Sundar Pichai claimed that it had paid out over $5 billion to developers over the past 12 months.  Some back-of-the-envelope analysis coupled with folks I spoke with estimate that the play store will pull in between 3.5 - 4 billion dollars this year in topline revenue.  Not bad.

Impressive numbers but in reality - Google is still scratching the surface.

When it comes to discovery on Android the solution basically boils down to one thing: Facebook (FB). Every single developer I talk to, including those in our portfolio here at Signia Venture Partners, will tell you that Facebook is the biggest, most important and most expensive source of app installs they have.

The problem with Facebook ads though is that as Facebook's targeting and quality has improved, larger players like King.com (KING), Supercell, Machine Zone, Zynga (ZNGA) and others have gobbled up inventory driving up the cost of installs to levels that simply exceed the Lifetime Value of Users (LTV) for most developers. While the cost per install on Facebook today is somewhere between $3-$4 per install, in September of last year, for example, one of our companies saw CPI go north of $5 which simply wasn't sustainable for their business model.  In fact, according to data released by Superdata, between 2012 to December 2013 the CPI has gone from $1.30 to $4.36; an increase of 288%!

(source: Superdata)

The solution: the industry needs more sources of quality inventory to help bring down prices.  But while some industry watchers think Twitter (TWTR) might have the solution it's actually Google that's sitting on a goldmine: the Play store itself.

Before I joined Google in 2011, I ran marketing for a venture-backed alternative app store called GetJar (acquired this year by Sungy Mobile: GOMO).  GetJar provided an alternative to then Android market by allowing developers to distribute apps to consumers via its mobile web store.  So how did it make money?  Through advertising on the app store itself.  GetJar has an ad-based solution where it allowed developers to bid for actual placement across the store.  Developers could bid for installs by OS, handset and country and a high enough bid coupled with the apps quality score would get them featured in one of several listings either on the home page or across one of the other pages in the store (these appeared in the store as a "sponsored" listings - see below).  If a consumer then clicked on the ad and installed the app, the developer would pay GetJar the value of its bid.

(Source: GetJar homepage on mobile)

The whole model functions much like say... Adwords actually.  So imagine if Google actually added an advertising solution to the play store itself allowing developers to bid for visibility and installs directly on the store front?  What could the economics look like on the revenue side?

For starters, at GetJar about 8% of our downloads were monetizable (back in 2011) - that is we were able to get paid for those installs.  Now GetJar didn't have Google play's scale so lets say Play is only able to sell 4% of their installs. If we assume play downloads are somewhere around 2.9 billion per month (45% more downloads than IOS which is roughly tracking at 2b / month according to Statista) then we're talking about 116M downloads per month.  If we take the median CPI for Android downloads globally according to +Chartboost of around $1.10 then we're talking a high margin ads business worth an additional $1.5B a year in revenue.  Better yet, the cost side of running this business would probably be small for Google.  The existing sales team and ad ops team that currently sells Admob and other mobile search inventory would probably manage this business and 100% of the traffic comes from the store itself (so no traffic acquisition cost (TAC).

More importantly, everybody gains from this.  Developers gain a new, lower cost traffic source for their installs.  Consumers win by discovering new apps / games and other content promoted by the content owners that they might not find otherwise and Google unlocks an additional high growth, high profit revenue stream.

The only possible losers - Facebook (FB), Twitter and nearly every other app install service / ad network out there.  So what is Google waiting for? Well there are a number of reasons why they haven't taken this on.  First, it's a question of focus.  Google has been scaling at an incredible rate and has also been very busy continuously launching new verticals internationally.  Books, Movies and Music continue to expand abroad and this is surely taking up a lot of their resources.  They are also constantly working on improving payments and stability for users which requires resources if they are going to keep users happy.  Second, their could be anti-competitive reasons.  It's well known that over 90% of their business is from games.  These same game developers acquire traffic from many different sources.  Launching an ads business might be good for developers and users but it would negatively affect folks like Chartboost, Fiksu, Twitter and even Facebook.  This could be seen badly by regulators and those affected would likely cry foul.  Finally, there is always going to be the user to keep in mind.  Users might react badly to ads being injected into the store front.  Likewise, they might think Google is using their data to promote certain apps to them which, though it might be welcome by some users, would have privacy zealots running to man the barricades.

So Google must have its reasons for not launching this type of a service to date.  However, given the natural consumer and developer need I think it's more a question of "when" not "if" Google plans to launch a service like this.  The opportunity is simply too obvious to be missed.

Licensing a brand for your mobile game? Some things to consider

I was at the Login Conference in San Francisco the other day and had the chance to listen to +Henry Oh from Animoca give a great talk about IP licensing for mobile games. Henry had some great points I wanted to share and elaborate on that I think all developers considering IP licensing should really take note of as well as add some of my own.  A few other experts worth seeking advice on include +Greg Suarez and +Steph Ansari who led all our IP licensing efforts when I was at glu eons ago.

One of the first things to consider is why do you want to license a particular brand?  Is it a particular target audience you want to reach?  Are you looking to build the profile of your studio by associating yourself to a particular IP holder or brand? Are you trying to build awareness with platform holders who you think won't notice you without a brand being attached to your game? Do you think you can leverage the marketing of the IP holder to give your game a boost?

These are all critical questions you should be asking yourself since they are fundamental to the success of your game.  Let's look at them in order:

1.  Audience:  Different audiences react and engage differently with different brands.  If you're looking to reach the affluent hardcore male gamer 25-32 (middle/ upper middle class) in the US market certain properties won't resonate as well as others.  Halo may work well while a property like Doom might be too old.  That said if you were targeting veteran, old school gamers 32-45 years of age, Doom might be a great choice. Understanding your audience and what brands resonate with them is the first step to choosing the right brand.  I recommend really doing some research and also asking IP holders to share their own research and demographic profiles to see how their brand resonates with.

2.  Company Profile:  There is sometimes the belief that getting a big movie brand or licensed property will do wonders for your image.  When mobile gaming was in its infancy and carriers and platforms wanted strong brands to drive consumer interest that was partially true.  Today with over 120M Americans playing games the market is already fairly mass market so the need to use brands to drive user engagement is less true than it used to be.  In addition, using big brands can have two drawbacks as well.  Sometimes it creates an expectation on the behalf of the user which the product doesn't live up to.  On the flip side some platform holders have become weary of certain games (particularly movie tie-ins) where the pressure to get the game out in parallel to the movie creates an average or even disappointing product for users.  The reality is that users and platform owners want the best, highest quality product; period.  Slapping a brand on the game only heightens that expectation so living up to it is critical.

3. Awareness with platform holders:  Though having the rights to a big brand might help get a meeting with Apple or Google's marketing team keep two things in mind:  First the brand should be relevant and very mass market.  Picking up the license to something that was big 5-10 years ago has far less impact than something that's either about to come out or can be released to coincide with the release of the digital movie in the store.  Few titles by themselves generate meaningful downloads for Apple and Google at this point (they simply have too much scale) though some generate meaningful revenues (Clash of Clans, Puzzles and Dragons, Despicable Me).  Platform holders are interested in brands that really cut through the noise and hopefully provide a tie-in to other content that can be promoted in parallel (book, movie, album).

4. Marketing:  Always the Achilles heel of most developers.  The expectation by platform holders will be that if you're bringing a big brand to their platform you'll also have negotiated solid marketing support for the game.  That would be one reason they would feature you and co-promote your title.  It's really key to discuss this with IP holders at the contract stage and get a firm commitment from them to co-market the game on your behalf.  This is easier with titles that are launching in conjunction with a movie or book since the IP holder has a vested interest in driving exposure of the property overall.  Otherwise it's extremely challenging.  Things you can request / negotiate that typically are doable:  1.  Mention in any press releases related to the broader property.  2.  Mention in any below the line marketing (email) the IP holder is doing for the property.  3.  Mentions on the IP holders' social channels. 4.  Introduction to other licensing partners the IP holder may have to investigate co-marketing opportunities with them (think cereals, soft drinks, chocolates, plush toys etc.).  In some cases IP holders will actually organize mini events to get all the licensees together to foment cross promotions.  These things typically don't cost the IP holder anything and should be fairly straightforward.  Other things you can try to negotiate which are typically harder: 1.   A link / badge on all outbound marketing material that promotes your game - magazine ads, online, mobile, email. and even billboards.  Years ago when we launched Fast and Furious Universal agreed to have a small call to action on their billboards in London for the game.  This type of marketing is sure to generate interest among platform owners.  2.  Unique promotional items to be used with partners.  For example, if you're doing a movie game you could request signed merchandise from the cast to give away as promo items.  You could then run a social competition on Facebook or G+ with Apple or Google.  3.  In person appearances / interviews.  This is really tough to do but when I was at Google play we were able to secure an interview with Spielberg for Lincoln over a live hangout with fans.  This hangout was then broadcast using ABC's Jumbotron in Times Square.  Again, this type of deal is very challenging to do but if your marketing team is good you can try to negotiate these types of marketing activities up front with IP holders.  I would typically even have these conversations with IP holders at contract stage so you can set expectations.  If IP owners are lukewarm or non-committal you should really consider whether to develop their game at all since you'll loose a key leverage.

As Henry mentioned, lots of other factors go into determining a successful branded game launch and a good and fair contract.  When negotiating these deals keep in a mind a few other points:

1.  Timing:  Does the game release happen in parallel or after a major event related to the IP.  Timing has an impact on development milestones and will impact quality.  As mentioned above timing can be key to securing great marketing support as well so make sure you pay close attention to this and time your launch accordingly

2.  Economics:  Pay careful attention to deal terms.  Many IP holders will demand a minimum guarantee which is sometimes recoupable against future sales as well as a royalty on sales.  I would avoid up front guarantees if at all possible and try to keep royalties under 30%.  In addition if you have to give an up front payment make sure that it is recoupable against future sales and not on top of the royalty rate you need to pay.  You're already sharing the brunt of the burden and risk by developing the game so you should minimize further payments that could suck up valuable cash you'll need elsewhere in your business

3.  Geographic distribution rights:  I would always negotiate global rights where possible.  In particular I would make sure you at least have rights to cover Apple and Google's top markets (you can typically get this data from the likes of +App Annie and Distimo).  Make sure you at least get the US, EFIGS, Korea, Japan and China (for iOS).

4.   Creative control: I would try to get as much visibility up front on who has creative control and at what point you have to share the beta and alpha versions of your game (or even the early script for that matter).  You need to know very clearly who has control over what and how many people are involved in this process.  Typically the fewer people and organizations involved the better.  The last thing you want / need is for the movie studio to say one thing but the family / author who developed the book or franchise to say something else.  Establishing clear owners, milestones and responsibilities is key to getting a quality product out on time and on budget.

5.  Platforms:  Be forward thinking when negotiating this.  I remember when I was a glu we failed to sometimes negotiate or secure rights to certain platforms because we didn't think they were relevant.  This can really come back to bite you in the a@! if you're not careful.  Always negotiate the key platforms first and give yourself the option to develop on future platforms as well.  Who knows, Ouya might not be relevant now but in 18 months it could be very relevant in emerging markets.

Anyway, hope this helps and good hunting.  Whatever you do if you build a great quality product you should always do well regardless of whether you're using somebody else's brand.  Who knows, that next big brand might even be yours...

Mad Mork

Why Google's Play Store will eventually trump the App Store - Ads

A lot has been written this past year about how Android's Google Play store is catching up to the App store.  Certainly, a lot of the numbers seem to bolster this claim.  The Google play store boasts in excess of 1 million apps to date which is slightly ahead or an par with Apple (though the number of tablet based apps is far less than IOS and continues to present a challenge).  In addition, Play has launched music, movies, books, magazines across a number of major markets in the past year and matched IOS in games with the launch of its Play games service (though no numbers have been disclosed to give us an idea of how many games have integrated the service nor the current number of users).  More importantly, Google has been smart to capitalize on its digital content platform beyond simply consumer facing content.  At Google IO they announced the launch of Google Play for Education which will allow educators and IT administrators to essentially use a version of the play store built for education to provision students using Android tablets with apps, books and other materials.  More recently they also released Textbooks to allows students to buy their textbooks online (the backs and shoulders of many will be thankful)

But I believe more is yet to come...

The biggest challenge for content owners / creators continues to be discovery.   Though services like Play Games will help developers find new ways to promote their content to a more targeted audience while search and better merchandising help users find new content, the truth remains that as more content becomes available it necessarily becomes more and more challenging for consumers to find what they want.  Let me use my own situation this morning as an example.

Here's a screenshot of what I saw today on the home page of Apps when I opened Play on my laptop.

So what's wrong with this picture?  Well for starters, I don't really give much of a damn about Fantasy Football and don't, no matter how many companies they buy, ever use Yahoo! services so right off the batt 1/4th of the recommended list doesn't really interest to me.  Last I checked I also haven't been in school for about 13 years so the entire row of "Back to School" apps goes down the drain as far as I'm concerned.  Scrolling down the page I was also presented with a "Keep in Touch" section which, though cool, presented 4 apps I had already installed.  I'm not sure the value of reminding me about stuff I already have to be honest but understand the challenges around merchandising content for a mass market audience.

The problem here: relevance and lack of customization.  Luckily, Google has both the tools and brains to fix this and in my opinion (yes, obviously I'm biased) in a better way than Apple.

When I was a GetJar, our whole reason for being was to offer developers the chance to better reach consumers by allowing them to bid for targeted placement across our app store.  Developers could bid for placement to get heightened visibility and depending on their bid and the relevance of the ad and level of interest they would get featured in premium placements across the store which helped drive downloads of their apps (sounds familiar?)

So it would seem that Google could easily solve the discovery problem in part by introducing an Adwords style system directly into Google play. Introducing ads into Google play would:

1.  Enable developers to have some control over the effectiveness of their ad dollars by bidding for placement directly where consumers happen to be.

2.  Provide a level playing field where developers would compete / bid against each other for placement.  Successful placement would depend not just on the level of the bid but also on relevance and also consumer interest (as measured by the click through rate the developers app has received to date).

3.  Better monetize the play store with a product (ads) which is far more profitable for Google than content. (I can see Google's CFO +Patrick Pichette smiling already)

4.  Provide Google play with a unique differentiator against the Apple App store by giving developers much more control over their ability to market their content to consumers

5.  Provide Google's ad sales team with a unique, highly differentiated product targeting a highly prized audience of Android users (minus those in China of course...(sigh)).  +Jason Spero rejoice!

So it would seem like a no brainer coming from the company that pioneered online ads that this would solve a lot of problems both for consumers, developers and the folks on the Play team.  So when will we see ads in Google play?  

who knows...but surely the obviousness of the opportunity hasn't been lost of the folks in Mountain View.  Stay tuned ;)

MM

App Marketing 101 at Google IO 2012

This past week was an amazing week at Google IO.  For those of you who weren't able to make it I put together a 60 minute preso on app marketing 101 for developers.  Here's a link to the presentation and for those of you interested in understanding more of the details on how to market your Android apps to consumers check out the full video below.  During this talk I covered:

- the traditional 4 P's and how they apply to app marketing (product, place, price, distribution)
- discussed specific examples of how to market your apps to consumers
- interviewed two top developers (Pocketgems, Storm 8) on how they approach product development and marketing)
- provided frameworks for how to build app marketing plans
- discussed the various business models used to monetize apps and addressed some of the key pitfalls around some of them
- talked about what affects consumers' decision to install apps and how developers can take advantage of this

Enjoy!  Also let me know if there is anything you didn't understand or if you have any questions.  If there's anything you'd like me to dig deeper into please shout!