MYMEDIABOX
Can you give us some background to your business – when you began, what led you into this sector etc as well as an idea of staff and offices that you have? Eric Rennagel, MyMediabox Founder and CEO started his career back in the 90’s in Los Angeles where he worked in Animation, Licensing and Television Distribution at companies such as Marvel Productions (Spiderman), and Tsuburaya Productions (Ultraman). He founded MyMediabox in 2003 after identifying a need for online product approvals and digital asset management as a way to help licensors and licensees be more productive. He knew first-hand how challenging it was to travel for foreign business and trade shows, while still keeping pace with approving product designs and delivering the latest updated style guide artwork to licensees, all while facing pressures to maintain high quality and hit ever-shrinking production deadlines and marketing windows. Like many start-ups, MyMediabox was inspired by a simple thought: “There has to be a better way.” Rennagel’s experiences in a licensor’s capacity and having “walked in those shoes” before getting into the software side of the business, made all the difference in genuinely understanding the problems faced by licensors, agents and licensees. Some recent competitive entrants to the market today would like to claim that being an “outsider” is an advantage. But it’s doubtful that many licensing professionals would agree that a new company, one with little knowledge about an industry as nuanced as Licensing, could be more understanding of the problems, and thus better at designing workable solutions. By comparison, Mediabox-PA processes over 29,000 new projects a month. That volume of data means we observe and are learning, at lightning speed, more about this special industry every day. “I’d like to say, ‘We’ve seen it all.’ But knowPAGE 26
ing this industry, I doubt that day will come -- even with 350,000 projects a year flowing through our systems!” claims Rennagel. Today, MyMediabox is wholly owned by Jonas Software USA, Inc., a subsidiary of Constellation Software Inc., the publicly traded Canadian company with a CAD $13 billion market cap. MyMediabox’s staff consists of 25+ developers and licensing experts located in the United States (Georgia, Ohio and Florida), Canada, Iceland, France and Japan. “Our partnership with Jonas Software/CSI, Inc. was a great opportunity for Mediabox to be a part of something bigger, and it enables us to offer a level of financial security to our customers that is unique in the industry. We are not a venture-backed company, going for a “Hail Mary pass” strategy with an upside-down P&L and balance sheet, trying to quickly buy its way into relevance. Mediabox is highly profitable on its own, and we got there one customer at a time.” Can you give us some information about the services that you offer in terms of contract management, product approvals, contract approvals and royalty reports? Today, MyMediabox offers the industry-leading, private-cloud hosted solution licensed by 125+ licensors and agents globally. Our platforms are used by over 9,000 licensees and tens of thousands of end users. With over 220 instances of Mediabox-PA (historically) implemented to date, it’s by far the most widely tested and adopted solution worldwide for approvals workflow management. In 2014, we launched Mediabox-RM for rights, contracts and royalty management. This important addition to the integrated Mediabox suite was solidly built following an exhaustive 12-month-process of gathering requirements, which included asking customers and industry leaders what was missing with the existing solutions on the market. Their top answers were: too expensive, too inflexi-
ble and not intuitive. This data led us down the design path to Mediabox-RM, a modern, robust and agile platform, purpose-built for Brand Licensing and Media (TV/Film) titles, that today boasts 45 customers worldwide. What other services does your system offer eg audit tracking, data management, brand protection etc? According to the 2018 Global Brand Counterfeiting Report, the amount from total counterfeiting worldwide was forecasted to exceed $1.8 trillion by 2020. In order to help licensors, agents and licensees combat growing global piracy, counterfeiting and ensuing lost sales, MyMediabox again crowdsourced input from our customers and technology partners, such as Authentic Vision, to create Mediabox-SM for holographic security tag management. Mediabox-SM is designed as a virtual marketplace to provide a space where licensors and licensees can source and purchase security tags from integrated, vetted technology partners. Data across all the product SKUs can be normalized and measured, taking a ton of friction out of an otherwise very labor-intensive, manual process. The latest addition of Mediabox-SM makes our solution full-circle in the licensing lifecycle. Developing a well-planned, 360-degree solution takes time and patience if you are trying to really take feedback from your customers in order to do it well. Are there other areas that your system covers? Mediabox-DAM is a secure digital asset management system that allows licensees to preview, transform and download their licensed style guide assets in a dynamic, color-branded workspace. In addition, Mediabox-DAM offers IP owners unlimited Marketing Pages. Marketing pages focus on users farther upstream, to the prospective licensees interested in acquiring rights to the property. Marketing pages offer these users alternative views of seTOTAL BRAND LICENSING
