Mobile Market Entry

Interesting issues are raised by the recent announcement that Kayak Synergenix has secured the licence from Sony Pictures to produce mobile games, based on the much-anticipated 2006 movie of the best-selling book ‘The Da Vinci Code’.

Why? Because we all thought that Sony Pictures’ entry into the mobile content market with its brands was being handled by its internal mobile department.

What happened?

The last movie to be licensed for mobile games by Sony Pictures was an agreement I negotiated for ‘Men In Black 2’ on behalf of Digital Bridges (now called I-Play) in 2002.

After that, Sony Pictures established its internal mobile team and, since then, no brands have been available for licensing.

Along with other subjective people, I rudely told them that it would not work, that their core business is making movies and TV series, that dealing with network operators and porting mobile content to multiple handsets is complicated and costly.

That they should heed the comparable past lessons of the costly failures of internal console game departments within certain Hollywood studios.

That they would have to recruit a large and expensive team worldwide and the revenues would not justify it, in the short to medium term.

Have we been proved correct? It has been noticeable that many of the talented people employed at Sony Pictures Mobile have moved on to other interesting roles recently.

Warner Bros followed the same in-house route as Sony Pictures. Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Studios have so far used the licensing method.

The strategic choice of market entry is an important one for brand owners large and small. They must balance risk versus return.

It can be boiled down to a choice of four market entry methods, based on selecting the method of handling the four main functions. The functions are Development, Technology, Marketing and Distribution.

The methods are Self-Publish (do everything), Co-Publish (share functions), Self Develop (make the content but outsource everything else) or License (grant brand rights and enable the Licensee to manage the functions.)