M+E Daily

G2M (“Go 2 Market” Digital) came via a simple idea from president Stephen Brooks: being a start-up in the media and entertainment space can be nearly impossible, with major studios and giant distributors not exactly opening their doors for just anyone.

Enter Brooks. With more than 15 years of experience in strategy and marketing for major Hollywood studios (Paramount and Warner) and a notable stint with Technicolor where he first got into the start-up arena, Brooks started G2M to offer guidance and support for companies at a critical time in their growth, offering go-to-market strategies and business plans, interim CMO resources, and support for brand launches. Already half a dozen companies have taken advantage of what he offers.

Brooks — an advisory board member for the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), chatted with MESA about the state of start-ups in the M&E space, G2M’s more technical offerings, and how at least one company went from idea to reality with his company’s help.

MESA: Why did you start G2M Digital, what market gap have you looked to fill?

Brooks: In 2012 I had been working for Technicolor for two years in their media services division, and a lot of great technologies were being brought to market including second screen,, but they needed to operate in an almost incubator-like environment, which for a company like Technicolor requires a completely different managing style. You’ve got sales reps responsible for selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of long-term media services contracts, and at the same time you’re asking them to sell proofs of concept and with smaller margins and smaller order sizes for something like second screen apps. Really hard to pull off.

Technicolor, in its wisdom, decided to spin the technology I was working on — at the time called MediaEcho — into a separate company called Magic Ruby. From July 2012 to June 2013 I headed marketing for Magic Ruby, and I got the start-up bug. When Magic Ruby ran its course, and it was time for me to decide what to do next, I knew I wanted to really dedicate my energies toward being involved the next great organically developed technologies that would change the way that consumers access and enjoy media, and that could make the monetization of that activity a little more rational.

That’s what I’ve been doing since the middle of 2013, and it’s been working all over the industry and sometimes outside of it, on go-to-market plans, product launches, marketing and PR, branding, basically any part of the marketing and strategy side that would help one of these companies get to market and realize their goals.

MESA: What’s changed of late in how start-ups get the ball rolling, and how is G2M uniquely positioned to help?

Brooks: The first one I notice right off the bat is the level of understanding and humility of the founders is more appropriate to what they’re trying to do. In other words, earlier attempts to reshape the way content was created, marketed and distributed did not take into account the massive ecosystem that existed, or the players in that ecosystem and the reasons that those players were where they were. So in a lot of ways it was somewhat disrespectful to the incumbents in the entertainment industry, who, after all, held the content. They were the shops that created the product that makes the whole ecosystem work.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Folks are much less likely run over the toes of studio and network executives, and studio and network executives are very receptive to new technologies that may further their interests and keep an individual asset in a profitable state. So there’s a lot more respect coming from the start-up side of things, and acknowledgement of what we don’t know, and a willingness to work within the system in order to change it.

I try to utilize my knowledge of both people inside the entertainment industry, how studios and networks are structured, and what the pain points are within those organizations, helping the start-up to actually address those pain points in a way that’s logical, instead of saying ‘This system of distribution is inefficient, so let’s just change it wholesale.’ You need to have buy-in first, you need to know why it is the way it is, and if you’re going to change it, you need to know what the dependencies are. I offer a lot of guidance on that side, and I’m also the friendly face of the organization that understands the studio and network systems, to be able to sell a new concept in a way that’s more palatable.

MESA: G2M offers a lot of help in broad areas like business plans, investor pitches, branding and strategy. But can you elaborate on your more technical offerings, like cloud SaaS, app and Web development, and IT resources?

Brooks: With the digital shift, needs are ever changing and there are multiple layers of technical intervention and renewal that need to take place. On the one hand is the enterprise level, where you’re deciding to completely remake your digital asset management system, or your supply chain. And you’re deciding whether to go on premises or a hybrid of on premises and cloud or fully cloud, depending on the security requirements you have for your particular content or asset. That’s stuff for the larger players, for the consulting firms that specialize in mega-installations and execution.

At the same time, each studio has dozens of departments with legacy software and systems, differing storage requirements, different progress toward a fully digital workflow, different business processes that probably don’t require a complete enterprise level overhaul, but do require some updating, whether in the area of mobile, measurement or enabling commerce. And the ability to quickly adapt to that changing environment, to those needs with either a storefront, or an automated tool, or an API to Web or mobile software, or even a software as a service platform, that’s where I can come in, and evaluate the needs and come up with something really quickly.

G2M has access to a team of top-notch engineers and can implement at the lower level, the sub-$100,000 level for studio and service providers across divisions, some really great tools at a very reasonable price.

MESA: What are some of the company’s favorite use case examples to date, times where G2M’s services were put to especially good use?

Brooks: We are in the proof of concept stage for two different tools that I think are really exciting. The first is a tool to automate the packaging and delivery of digital extras that will save a ton of time throughout the workflow. We also have a localization tool that, when fully articulated, will be able to localize content in any number of languages for any number of territories – all fully automated. It’s early days yet for both of these, so I can’t share too much more detail about them right now.

On the consulting side, the best example I can give is a start-up called myLINGO, which was founded by a brother and sister who have a fantastic technology, utilizing automatic content recognition to synchronize an alternate audio track – whether another language, enhanced English or descriptive audio – through the user’s headphones and smart phone in the movie theater. It solves the problem of language accessibility for a number of potential theatergoers. In a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society in the U.S., where a three-generational family might want to go out and see a movie together, the grandparents might only understand very little, the parents a little more, and the children understand English entirely, each generation would have a different experience. This app restores the experience.

We came in when the company had been funded, but had really no roadmap to generate the type of metrics they needed to convince studios and exhibitors there was a product-market fit. The founders are young, extremely bright but had no studio or exhibitor experience, so being in the room speaking with high-level executives from Sony, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Carmike, Regal and AMC, they needed help presenting the message in a way that was understandable and graspable for all sides, that made sense business model-wise to all sides. To add complexity, because myLINGO is sitting between two industry giants, they couldn’t afford to play the ‘We’re the plucky little start-up out of our garage’ angle. When you’re in that room, the expectations are very high, and you need to present in a manner consistent with those expectations. We helped them do that, by creating their go-to-market strategy and then I took on a role where I was their acting CMO for a number of months, until they received strategic funding. Now they have re-launched, emerged out of beta, and are bringing their product to market.

MESA: What’s next for G2M, what can we expect in 2016?

Brooks: What I’m trying to accomplish both personally and professionally is establishing a thought-leadership beachhead in a number of areas, but specifically in and around smart content and how it intersects with multiple screen experiences.

We went through the first wave of second screen experiences in 2012-2013, and it turns out the market didn’t quite accept the value proposition we had the time. We had built a cage for a certain bird and the bird never came. But the trends that are already upon us for augmented reality, virtual reality, and the fact that the studios are embracing these technologies as a new wave. The continued move away from cable and into OTT on multiple devices also reopens that discussion of how studios can create multiple screen, simultaneous experiences, and monetize those. There are two key elements necessary for monetization going forward: ubiquitous content identification, and measurement. That’s where the frontier is, and that’s where G2M needs to be.