My MediaBox

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 know

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 inflexible 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 se-

lected assets and product look books. Instead of the pragmatic two-pane UI and folder tree, these users get an interactive brand experience while they explore the dynamic web pages, curated to present the property in exciting ways that spark creativity and sell the brand.

How do you deal with counterfeit in terms of security systems?

Mediabox-SM integrates with Mediabox-PA, so that licensees required to use security tags may visit the Marketplace, order the tags, and incorporate the tag placement into the packaging design during the approval process. The tag numbers are tracked in Mediabox-SM and offer additional transparency when licensees upload their sales reports through Mediabox-RM, or during an audit.

What impact has the coronavirus pandemic had on business?

The Coronavirus pandemic is a global challenge that’s caused uncertainty in most sectors of business. MyMediabox is grateful to be able to help. Mediabox solutions are more essential than ever, because licensing teams need solutions that support a reduced and remote workforce. In order to keep pace, teams need the tools and resources to stay engaged, productive and on task. We’re super excited to have implemented 20 new Mediabox sites so far in 2020. As the pandemic persists, the demand for our hosted, online platforms continues to increase, as leading licensors and agencies seek the most trusted, efficient solutions on the

market for their licensing businesses.

Technology changes continuously. How do your systems guarantee to keep up to date with the latest available technology?

We don’t try to keep up. The reality is the latest available technologies are often not ready for “prime time,” and we know our clients value reliability over everything else. They have to be able to count on getting their work done. We certainly watch and test new technologies and plan for upgrades over time, but we intentionally lag a bit, so those new technologies have a chance to mature a bit before we fold them into our upgrade road map. 100% of Mediabox software development is done in-house and is never outsourced to third party developers. Our development schedule rolls out new features and enhancements every three weeks, and updates are added free of charge, in most cases. The development roadmap is determined by our partners’ feature requests. With 125+ licensors and agents and thousands of licensees utilizing Mediabox platforms, there are more great suggestions than any one company could fulfill in a lifetime, but we’ve found over the years that the best ideas tend to be voiced from multiple users, independent of one another.

What are the unique selling points of your system that you believe make it stand out from others in the market?

1) EXPERIENCE: Experience matters, and Mediabox brings it in spades. Anyone who’s actually worked in Licensing and M&E Distribution understands the myriad nuances and growing complexities of doing profitable deals these days. What’s involved when tracking rights and royalties? What can a good style guide do to help a licensee? How do you navigate the challenges of delivering great product designs that maximize royalties, while hitting immovable “on-shelf”/product launch dates? That industry experience puts you in a much better position to truly understand what software really needs to do, to help people achieve their goals. Licensing and M&E Distribution ARE very complex, but people want simple, yet flexible solutions to complex problems. MyMediabox delivers intuitive solutions that are simple to learn, easy to configure and manage, while being able to handle high volumes and complex, unpredictable exceptions. That’s a very tough balance to strike, and impossible to appreciate if you’ve NOT done any licensing or distribution work, in real life. We believe our experience is a key reason that 125+ leading licensors worldwide have chosen Mediabox. 2) FINANCIAL STRENGTH: Financially speaking, Mediabox is proud to be a part of Jonas Software/CSI, Inc., Canada’s largest publicly traded software company with a CAD $13 Billion Market Cap. Mediabox has the autonomy, flexibility and creativity of a start-up company, while having the monetary strength and security of a financial giant. That security means we can make long-term decisions about what’s best with our clients and the industry, and not short-term revenue- or market-grabbing ploys. 3) INTEGRITY: We speak honestly to our clients. Sometimes we make mistakes, and when we do, we own up to them and make them right. 70%+ of our new business these days comes from referrals. It’s vital to us, when someone is asked about MyMediabox, that the customer can honestly say, “Good software. Great people. They will always do the right thing by the customer.”

How do you see your system and business developing over the next few years?

Ultimately, we endeavor to provide technologies that streamline processes for every point in the licensing ecosystem, from IP to consumer. In addition to serving licensors and agents, future Mediabox products will focus on solutions to challenges faced by licensees, manufacturers, marketers, retailers, auditors, and more. Our development roadmap is heavily driven by input from our customers. They tell us where we can have the most impact, and their needs ultimately determine the direction we take. As we look ahead to an exciting future, we remain committed to living our motto: “Excellence, integrity and passion, in all that we do.”