Julia Dimambro and her company Cherrysauce is one of the pioneers of Adult Entertainment (aka porn) in the mobile space, so it’s great that she found time to give us an exclusive interview here at MobHappy, which will run today and tomorrow.

Adult services have proved incredibly important on the “old” internet, both in generating billions of dollars of profit, but in pioneering many new techniques that cross over to the mainstream.

Will the same thing happen with mobile? Julia clearly thinks so, even though the market seems to be slow to emerge. Anyway, let’s get started with a little background.

Russell: How did you get into the adult industry? Is it unusual for a woman to be involved on the management side of things?

Interesting tale that demonstrates just how strange life’s twists and turns are. I was working in NY as a director for digital design company when the 11th September happened. As a result I obviously wanted to head back to Europe. My parents had recently retired to Barcelona and I asked if I could hang out with them for a while before deciding what I wanted to do (much better place for making life decisions than London!).

I sent out my CV on the off-chance and the first company to come back to me was Private Media Group looking for an Internet manager. I got the job and a year later helped launch their wireless division with a wonderful guy called David Jarvis. He was way ahead of his time with regards to mobile adult content and I am talking 2003 here when Vodafone UK wouldn’t even take our calls!. He basically showed me what an amazingly interesting and controversial industry sector adult mobile could be and as I always had aspirations to be my own boss I set up Cherrysauce later in 2003 and signed Private as my first licensed content provider.

Russell: Does the industry have a problem attracting good people (present company excepted!)

Haha, I laughed out loud when I read this. I don’t think so, because on the whole from my personal experience, I have really only met extremely clever, dynamic and commercial people in the adult industry.

I only had one bad experience when I first started Cherrysauce! It was with someone who basically promised all kinds of wonderful things in exchange for me helping him to set up a ‘complimentary’ company using my contacts and knowledge. I got my fingers severely burnt as a result (I was a bit wet behind the ears still in those days!) The good thing is I learnt a hard lesson early on and it really taught me to protect my company’s interests.

The great thing about the adult industry (both traditional and mobile) is that they don’t beat about the bush. They want clear and simple commercial models and their whole mentality is focused on making money and immediate returns.

‘Taking a view’ or ‘investing now for ROI in 2 years’ just isn’t part of their business language. You’ll be shown the door with that approach.

That way of working just makes so much sense to me. It is all about “ What works?” “What do my customers need right now?” and “how do I get it to them as quickly and easily as possible?” and that’s why I set up Cherrysauce to be 100% privately owned and self-funding. Even today, by working on the ‘immediate return’ model, we have still not needed to take any investment and don’t owe anyone a penny. We don’t even have an overdraft. In turn, this is now allowing us to invest in bigger projects such as the development of our new mobile WAP platform and D2C marketing.

Russell: Sceptics say that adult services won’t take off on mobile as the screen size is too small and it’s going to be expensive to consume - certainly in comparison to the web, even if you ignore the ready availability of lots of free services. What’s the case for mobile?

Glad you brought this up. It’s a very good point and a much talked about issue. To date, it certainly hasn’t lived up to volume and commercial expectations. In 2004 as an example, the quality of the content offered was nothing short of rubbish and I mean really ropey stuff. It mostly consisted of image based products and based on some of the examples I saw being advertised during this time, it wasn’t just the small screen that was affecting the experience – the compression meant images were pixelated or stretched to fit the screen, giving an awful end result. Those poor customers!

The majority of the content was simply copied from other media like the internet and compressed even further to fit mobile. A result ripe for the sceptics to sink their teeth into!

However, we are now seeing the emergence of a new breed of erotic and adult production companies. Their focus is on producing image and video based products that are shot ONLY for the mobile environment. And you can really see the difference, not only in the quality, but also in value to the customer.

With videos for example, if a clip can only be 30 seconds, it needs to offer value for money by arousing the end-consumer, can’t show anything explicit AND at the same time needs to be under 250k (i.e. a typical impossible mobile request!). These guys will be much more capable of achieving all these factors whilst retaining quality and customer experience. As a result, more compelling mobile-optimised products will be created, based on planning, pre-production and shooting with an in-depth understanding of the mobile space.

For this reason, Cherrysauce is actually working closer with these types of production companies. Big brand licensing is a completely different business model and is effectively covered by the likes of Waat Media and Minick who make a very good job of it. I honestly feel there is much more scope and potential in working with these specialist producers and sharing our own results with them to constantly raise product quality and optimise conversion, ARPU and sales.

A simple example of this is if we see Angel Dark (top porn star for those of you who are more innocent) pole dancing, which is selling like hot cakes in Russia for example, we are able to phone our producer and get him to do a range of Angel videos along a similar theme, or follow up with specially produced Angel screensavers or wallpapers.

To summarise, If mobile adult entertainment continues to be based on ‘shop-fronts’ for image and video downloads or focused on ensuring products are listed in operator decks, then the sceptics will be right and I doubt that it will ever reach the hype and speculation that everyone has been talking about over the last few years.

However, I don’t think this will be the case. Adult entertainment by its very nature is extremely adaptive and responsive to any opportunity of making money. All we need is the channel and you can bet your buck that it will be adult providers who create the best commercial models for mobile. Just look at e-commerce. Who set the way for everyone else?

The consumer demand is there and proven. If, in 2004, rubbish quality and adapted adult images and videos, with no marketing and minimal placement on the operator decks could earn the industry $400 million, then I think our focus should be on how we deliver to consumer expectations as opposed to industry expectations.

Get that right and the rest is a walk in the park. For my part and in Cherrysauce’s experience I believe it to be in the D2C market where erotic and adult mobile entertainment will realise the dream (especially mine and as a result, that’s where much of my focus will be in 2006).

Tomorrow, I’ll ask Julia to talk about products best suited to mobile, to tell us about the controversial adult controls we’re seeing introduced and Julia’s top 2006 predictions for mobile erotica and the business generally. Don’t forget to come back!

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