KEY POINTS:
Auckland mobile phone technology and marketing company The Hyperfactory is going to Hollywood.
The business, which attracted several high-profile new investors in September, is hoping to become a star in the lucrative mobile marketing side of the US entertainment industry.
The Hyperfactory is setting up its second US
office in Beverly Hills under the wings of Hollywood agency The Firm Entertainment.
The Firm's chairman, Rich Frank, and its head of television, his son Paul Frank, took a minority stake in The Hyperfactory in September, along with 42 Below founders Geoff Ross, Grant Baker and Stephen Sinclair.
The Hyperfactory's founders, brothers Geoffrey and Derek Handley, have retained majority ownership of the business which began in Auckland seven years ago and now has offices in New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong and India.
The company has won multiple awards for its mobile campaigns and has a client list which includes Toyota, Vodafone, Motorola and Coke.
Speaking to the Business Herald from New York yesterday, Derek Handley said The Hyperfactory's new Hollywood-based entertainment division aims to give the company a lead on other players as US interest in the mobile market begins to heat up after initially lagging behind other sectors.
"There are a lot of lessons from around the world that we are going to translate to the US and push the medium forward," Handley said.
Text messaging campaigns and their more sophisticated offspring - 3G phone promotional games, graphical advertising and competitions - have become big business, especially in Asia where they attract a significant share of advertisers' overall budgets.
The phenomenon has been slow to take off in the US, however, partly because a lack of interconnection agreements between mobile phone companies has meant, until recently, mass sending of messages across multiple networks was not possible.
But Handley said that early inertia had now been replaced by intense interest from US advertisers and venture capital firms keen to cash in on the potential of the technology.
"We're making a lot of progress, getting a lot doors opened. The Franks can open any door in the country in the entertainment sector and we've had a few instances of that already in the last couple of weeks," he said.
The Hyperfactory's first collaborative project with Paul Frank and The Firm was a campaign for the band Korn's Family Values tour which involved a mix of mobile marketing activity including text voting, sending band promotions to subscribers' handsets, offering content for download and running phone-based sweepstakes.
Rich Frank, a former 42 below board member, said he invested in The Hyperfactory because it was "the best in this business" and had a history of doing creative mobile advertising. "Grant Baker, Geoff Ross and I helped transform 42 Below into a highly successful global consumer brand that ultimately sold to Bacardi," he said.
"We see the same opportunities with The Hyperfactory, and their already proven work with major brands gives them the potential to change the game in media and entertainment at a time when the industry must learn to leverage the power of the mobile phone to reach consumers."
