Catching a buzz

[by Todd] I have become somewhat fascinated with the story I wrote earlier this week about the Mosquito, the tone inaudible to adults, meant to scare away teens, that has been instead co-opted by kids into "Teen Buzz, a ring tone their teachers can't hear.

What is really gets to me is how the company quickly embraced this behavior and is now launching a ring tone, to sell to kids. I suppose it's rather sad when reacting to consumers in a positive way is an anomaly.

According to news stories, the actual Mosquito teen repellent device, made by Compound Security Systems in the U.K, has sold about 1,000 units, at £495 ($927). Now the ring tone the company is rushing to market is being compared to last year's hit tone Crazy Frog, which by some estimates sold more than £14,000,000 (that's nearly $28 million).

What the story doesn't say is that CSS isn't a big company. In fact it's apparently the brain child of two guys, Howard Stapleton, the inventor, and Simon Morris, the marketer. And according to Simon they have a pretty simple marketing strategy: pursue the positives and minimize the negatives.

That's doesn't mean dismissing negative issues that came their way. Indeed, the Mosquito has weathered complaints from people that the tone is detrimental to youth or causes noise pollution. But Simon explained in an interview, that he used each as a platform to let the product sell itself.

We have had problems. Human Rights issues were thrown at us on the very first TV interview and this has stayed with us until very recently... But in all cases we took positive action to overcome them. We did this by contracting top legal council, top environmental consultants and respected national testing facilities to provide us with answers and then religiously getting this information out to the press and everyone who had ever enquired about the product.

In fact, if I looked at what I have used my time for over the last 6 months, I would have to say that 90% of my work time has been spent on communications,  obtaining answers and disseminating them on a daily basis to all the stake-holders, users and press.

And the results were impressive, within six months the guys struck a 65% royalty deal allowing a big American security company to produce a second generation of the Mosquito that will be sold in 70 countries.

But what about that pirated ring tone, Teen Buzz? They first learned of it in April, when the inventor's daughter (whose boyfriend was the primary test subject for the original device) came home with it on her cell phone.

I suppose we could have tried to take legal action against the Teen-Buzz inventor, but when you consider the cost of finding out who it is, where he/she is (someone said Denmark) and bringing legal action, there is probably little point, as it was probably produced by a teenager with no money. Simon said in an email.

To be honest, the thought did not even cross our minds until other people asked us why we did not attempt to sue. From our point of view, the Teen Buzz guy/girl should be applauded for their ingenuity. Shame they did not contact us in the first place.

Let us pause and think for a moment, what if the RIAA had taken this approach to Napster? How much further would online music be today? Of course not suing the creator is one thing. Deciding to develop a higher quality version of the ring tone than the kids had created, that was the second stroke of genius that CSS has displayed.

And now the Mosquito tone has taken on a life of it's own. It took a couple days to get Simon to compose his thoughts about all that's happened. Seems he's too busy making deals.

We are now going to take all this one step further. We have been speaking with several mobile communications / content providers over the last 4 days. There seems to be a consensus of opinion that the Mosquito brand is becoming a ‘phenomenon’. We are now exploring the possibility of licensing the brand to other companies in the clothing, perfume, video game, bedding sectors etc.

This could be as big as Pokemon.

Ah, if only the Pokemon theme were inaudible to adults.

Comments

[Jake]

As a heads up, I tried this in the office and it indeed does work. One of our 19 year old interns as well as several of the mid/late 20s colleagues could hear it clear as a bell. I could hear something, but it was low, while other old folks couldn't hear anything.

Crazy.

I wonder if you can create words rather than tones...