Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Am listening to Ralph de la Vega, Group President of AT&T wireless, talk about the new AT&T's content strategy.

Ralph argues that the next $1bn business is figuring out how to get content licensed for multiple screens (TV, PC, mobile) so that the content can follow the customer all the way through the customer's life.

Having spent a lot of time with a traditional music business in the UK, I know how thorny the issue of rights management is. For that reason, I believe that there are going to be massive opportunities for "greenfield" content producers who are going to create new content for which they will own all of the rights - and therefore be in a position to make multi-platform deals with companies like AT&T.

Labels: ATT, content, Video

Just met with Ben Turner-Brown, Sales Director at Pitch, the recently (November 2006) launched, London-based, mobile social network. By advertising on MTV and other youth-oriented TV channels, Pitch has managed to get 40k users to opt in to its service. Pitch allows all of the usual social networking functionality, plus access to a large catalogue of mobile content, including ringtones, wallpapers, etc. Users are monetised via sale of their attention to brands in the form of advertising in various formats. [Note - this theme of the value of attention is one to which I'll return later.]

So far, Pitch is serving 700k impressions per month to the 40k users - meaning 17.5 impressions per user per month. Since Pitch messages all users roughly 3x per week (12x per month) and counts those as impressions, the actual number of 'active impressions' (where the user actually goes to Pitch) is only 5.5 impressions per user per month.

The questions, as always, comes down to how many of those 40k users are generating 'active impressions' - and how valuable those active users are to brands.

Still, it's a great start, one that bodes well for the mobile content space.

Labels: advertising, content, mobile, social-networking