Mr. Jones of “You and Mr. Jones”
It sounds like our friends over at Mofilm have a new boss. Last week it was announced that the world’s first “brandtech” group, You and Mr. Jones has acquired a majority ownership stake in Mofilm. The group was created by David Jones, a “founding member of the Facebook client council and former global CEO of advertising group HAVAS.” Jones wanted to launch an investment and development firm that would “bridge the gap between brands and technology.” Apparently Jones isn’t the type of guy to do anything half-assed because he managed to raise $350,000,000 for his new venture. According to TechCrunch, You and Mr. Jones will use that money to “acquire companies that create user- and machine-generated content” and that focus on brand and content strategy, social media marketing, programmatic media buying, multi-channel networks, and real-time measurement analytic. The group’s first two acquisitions were Mashable and Mofilm and it sounds like more high-profile purchases are already in the works.
So what does this mean for the filmmakers that use Mofilm? It means the company’s financial future will be nice and secure for years to come. And that’s good news for the entire Crowdsourced Video Community. There’s been a lot of “Video Contest News” in the last 6 weeks but unfortunately it’s all been pretty grim. Userfarm and Poptent pulled the plug on their new joint effort, Vizy, after a few disappointing weeks. Vizy was Poptent’s last hope of survival so once the merger with Userfarm was dead, Poptent also had to shut down. Poptent is so broke that the company stopped paying their staff and eventually someone just locked everyone out of the main office in Philadelphia. These developments have caused a lot of panic because it looks like Poptent will probably wind up declaring bankruptcy. And that means dozens of filmmakers will get screwed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.
But thanks to this Jones guy, filmmakers can enter Mofilm contest and not worry about whether or not they’ll actually recive their prize money. It’s really funny how these type of things work out. The market has rewarded a good company (Mofilm) and eliminated the crappy company (Poptent.) It’s survival of the fittest. The folks at Mofilm actually care about their clients AND their filmmakers and the market took notice of that. On the other hand, Poptent spent the last few years screwing their members. All of the best filmmakers left the site which meant that their clients were unsatisfied with the ads they received. Sales went down and eventually the investors got tired of bailing out a sinking ship and pulled the plug.
So anyway, this You and Mr. Jones stuff is great news for all of us. I have a feeling Mofilm will start running a lot more contests and I also suspect their prize packages are going to get bigger. And that in turn will probably drive up prize amounts on all the other (remaining) video contest sites.
By the way, Mr. Jones, if you’re reading this I just wanted to let you know that for the right price I suppose I would consider selling VCN. Ask any filmmaker and they’ll tell you this site is basically the Mashable of the video contest world so you’d be crazy not to make an offer!
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