Conversation with Benoit Vatere, CEO of Mammoth Media

Tell us a bit about how you started working with Science and how that relationship has evolved over the years.

When I joined Science as entrepreneur-in-residence in 2012, I was working across several of our portfolio businesses and projects. I focused a lot on user acquisition and monetization with Mike and I also worked with Kartik on SpringRole. In 2014, Science acquired a mobile gaming network called PlayHaven and I became the CEO of that business. After we sold PlayHaven, we continued to think about all of the opportunities on mobile, and how we could do what gaming publishers were doing in terms of dialing in monetization and acquisition with product, but for entertainment content on mobile. That sowed the seeds for Mammoth Media as a content-centric destination and a mobile entertainment network incubated by Science, so I began building Mammoth’s product and the team as founder and CEO. A year and half after founding the company and launching two products (Wishbone, our social polling app, and Yarn, our micro-storytelling platform), we raised our Series A funding with Greylock Partners as our lead investor.

What are you trying to do with Mammoth Media? Has that evolved from when you got started?

The question we are trying to answer with Mammoth is: how can we entertain people through the devices they engage with the most on a daily basis — their phones? My goal is when you pick up your phone, you are either going to play a game, open up your social feed, or access one of our entertainment destination apps. Drawing the analogy between mobile and the TV industry, it’s what Viacom did. They started building MTV and VH1 and other properties for specific audiences with specific types of content. I believe we will do that exact thing for mobile. A mobile app cannot just be one single destination to entertain everybody all the time. You need to have unique destinations that are tailored to different audiences, with different formats.

You have a multi-product strategy. Are those standalone products or do they support each other for growth and retention?

Our three products do feed off of each other. The value of building a mobile entertainment network is in the ability to leverage cross-promotion and to have the ability to move a user from one destination to another. So while each of our apps is mostly standalone product in terms of code base, they share some of the same infrastructure, especially user fingerprinting. We understand how our users move around within our network. We can see our users on Wishbone, and then on Yarn, and then on Arena (our latest product, a live trivia battle app). There is a bit of audience overlap across our products but Wishbone is generally popular with teens, Yarn is popular with younger millennials and Arena is popular with older millennials. While we are going to keep expanding the audiences we reach, we will also start to serve our existing users with new products.

How does cross-promotion work from a user’s standpoint?

When a user opens one of our apps, we can show them an ad for another product from our own inventory. For example, we use in-app banners to promote Yarn stories in Wishbone, to encourage users to download Yarn. We also incorporate native ideas. When a user is playing a trivia game on Arena, the questions and answers could come from a Yarn story.

How do you think about the organizational structure and building teams when you are small and running three different products?

It can be challenging. We have product-centric teams and each team has front-end engineers, back-end engineers, a user acquisition expert, content lead, product manager, etc. For each product, depending on where it is on the growth curve, we have to determine what skill sets we need and how many people we need per skill set. Each stage on the growth curve is defined by factors like revenue size and number of users. We also have some people working across products on our services team. They deploy all the proprietary SDKs that are used across all platforms.

What trends is Mammoth capitalizing on?

One major trend we’re capitalizing on is the increase of users’ screen time on mobile. More people are spending more time on smaller screens these days. In addition, people are spending less time watching cable TV and more time on OTT. Due to this, a lot of people misread what’s happening by saying “TV is dead.” But TV is not dead — how we consume content is just changing. The big screen is still the best way to enjoy storytelling but we need to block off a significant amount of time for that. You can’t always find the time in your busy day to watch 30 minutes of content. What we are leveraging is the smaller screen, where you can enjoy stories and characters at any given time, in just a few minutes. We are looking to become the bridge between long-form and short-form content. A lot of people might say long-form and short-form content are competing for consumers’ attention but I think these two formats are complementary and we’re simply riding that wave. We’ve been working with several large entertainment studios that are producing great stories but don’t know how to get in front of mobile users. We are using our expertise to help them do that.

What are some emerging consumer behaviors that you think legacy entertainment companies are underestimating ?

I think the importance of programming, serialization and anticipation are very underestimated. With the rise of “binge watching,” people are disregarding what made old-school TV successful in the first place — you could only watch one episode each week. As a human, if you like something and I keep feeding you with it, you will likely never stop consuming it all at once. But if I pause and tell you there is more to come in a week, the emotions that triggers are powerful. These emotions were leveraged so well by traditional TV in the past and that is so underestimated in the digital age.

Interesting, that goes against the social network entertainment ethos. You are saying that the behavior and expectations around TV still exist but it’s just a different format. Your thesis seems to be taking what worked on TV and bringing it to mobile.

Yes, 100%. We see that in our data. When content is executed well, retention shoots up. A high percentage of people show up every week to watch the next episode of the same story. We also see this happen when we serve new content every day at a fixed time, so users expect it and it builds anticipation and excitement. We call this “appointment viewing.”

What is your strongest belief about how we will be entertaining ourselves on mobile outside of social media in the future?

I think we will see very immersive formats. Entertainment will be less passive and more interactive, with viewers deciding how the story unfolds. The interactive aspect could simply be tapping the screen to see what’s next, like in Yarn, or something even more immersive. There is so much you can do with engaging content between mobile and live streaming. We will also start seeing more companies that do a great job on bigger screens with TV and movie content figuring out how to tell their stories on mobile. We are just getting started. It will be quite exciting.

Any thoughts on how you use analytics in product development?

Data is at the core of what we do. In fact, we have to make sure we don’t make the mistake of listening to the data first, before letting our creativity speak. We decided in Mammoth’s early days that we need to build and own our data tools and not use any “out of the box” solutions. We think those standard tools are good to get started but they are poor at scale. When you start using different tools to meet all your needs, each of those tools has its own definition of each metric you are tracking, so the data doesn’t match and that causes inconsistencies. This makes it difficult to understand the value of your users and what their future value will be. So instead, we started building our own SDKs to track events, payments and user identities, so we have a single way of looking at our data. That has been crucial in building our business.

Does being in LA meaningfully help or hurt your company?

A little bit of both. It helps a lot in the industry we are in, as Los Angeles is the entertainment industry hub of the world. In the beginning, it hurt us in terms of finding engineering talent but the success of Snap drew more content companies and talent to LA and now it has actually gotten a lot easier to find the right people.

How do you think about the LA tech ecosystem and how does it compare to NYC?

The external perception of what an LA-based company is has been changing. I am a long LA guy. I am bullish on what Snap can do — I want to see it succeed. I was a big Ring fan and they recently got acquired by Amazon. I would love to see some good crypto stuff come out of LA. I think LA’s startup ecosystem is similar to New York’s, since startups in both areas tend to be very focused on sustainable growth from the beginning, versus prioritizing growth at all costs and figuring out the revenue model later.