In 2013, verteran Internet executive Bob Kernen joined jacAPPS, the mobile app developer division of Jacobs Media, as its new COO. Launched approximately five years ago, jacAPPS has continued to grow in recent years and earlier this year expanded into building mobile games for radio as well. In this week’s eQB Cover Story, Kernen discusses how his previous experiences in other industries have informed his time at jacAPPS, the latest Jacobs Media TechSurvey, the growth of apps for radio and much more.
Bob Kernen
By Joey Odorisio
Last summer, Internet business veteran Bob Kernen joined jacAPPS, the mobile app developer division of Jacobs Media, as its new COO. Launched approximately five years ago, jacAPPS has continued to grow in recent years and earlier this year expanded into building mobile games for radio. Kernen brings a unique background in a variety of industries to jacAPPS. In a new Q&A with FMQB, Kernen discusses how his previous experiences have informed his time at jacAPPS, the recent Jacobs Media TechSurvey, the growth of apps for radio and much more.
You have a diverse background in multiple telecommunications industries. Can you elaborate a little about your history and how it has informed your work at jacAPPS so far?
I’ve been really lucky to work with excellent major brands like A&E, History Channel,Martha Stewart and Sharecare (an online health site started by Dr. Oz), and in those environments I was charged with translating those brands, which had reputations and products in other media, onto the Web and into mobile. That experience really prepared me well to work with our hundreds of radio stations, which are great, well-established brands that just need our expertise transitioning to the mobile world. I have a good sense for how to translate and help the various expressions of the brand – on-air, online and mobile – synchronize and harmonize. I really do love finding new ways to take a brand that has real resonance with its audience and extend it into other areas.
I’ve also had some really outstanding entrepreneurial opportunities, working for and even running my own start-up company. The experience really prepared me well for what I deal with every day at jacAPPS where the environment is very much a start-up, even though the company is five years old. We have a young, very dynamic staff and we are a small group that is really committed to innovation. Our work requires that we be very nimble, and that we maintain a very steep learning curve. Mobile (as the name suggests) doesn’t stand still, our products and processes are in an almost constant state of evolution.
You joined jacAPPS last summer, what have you learned in your first nine months on the job?
As I said, flexibility is crucial. I tell my team all the time that the key requirement for working at this company is a high tolerance for ambiguity. There just aren’t any hard, fast solutions or ways of doing things, so we really have to be prepared to adjust to new opportunities or new obstacles as they present themselves.
But probably the biggest thing I’ve learned is the amazing reputation of the Jacobs name. What Fred and Paul [Jacobs] have done over the past 30 years is extraordinary. They are held in such high esteem throughout the industry, and really looked at as gurus. And when they talk, people listen. To be able to work in that wake is such a huge advantage for jacAPPS. What we do every day would just be orders of magnitude harder if it weren’t for the platinum reputation of Jacobs Media.
At the same time, I’ve come to respect very deeply what the team at jacAPPS had accomplished before I ever arrived. I’m so proud of the fact that they’ve all stayed on, and deepened their commitment to the company. They are a special group who never ceases to amaze me with their creativity and skill.
We did an app called Food Tripping for the non-profit SHFT. The app is a directory of healthy, sustainable eating choices and involves bringing together multiple databases and mapping them in the app. In my first days on the job, I asked Paul who at jacAPPS did the back-end data work and he said, “Ben and Kate.” Kate Levy is our head of development and her brother Ben Levyis our lead Android developer. The two of them worked it out and built the entire app and back-end in just three weeks. They’re amazing, and I’m pretty sure we’re the only tech company with a sister-brother development team.
What have been the more surprising mobile-related findings from the latest Jacobs TechSurvey?
There were a few things that I thought were both remarkable and exciting. First, there is the growing importance of technology in the car. There is a real desire on the part of consumers to have their smartphones integrate with their cars. The whole “connected car” phenomenon is tremendous. We are the House Developer for Ford and have seen an uptick in clients asking us to enable their apps for Ford’s AppLink system. This is a growing part of our business and we are doing several other projects in the automotive space. Of course, we’ll be working closely with the Jacobs Media team on the second DASH Conference in October. I’ve talked to a couple of people recently who I am certain cared less about the exterior styling of their cars than the “center stack.” They want touch screen and apps, beyond Bluetooth and GPS, all the latest technology
Another interesting finding was the continuing evolution of social media’s role in people’s lives and how that impacts what we’re doing in mobile. When you consider that Facebook, with 1.3 billion users, seems to be becoming passé with younger people, it really tells you something about the pace of change in our technology and media landscapes. We also found out that about a third of mobile phone users are addicted to these gadgets – another reason why jacAPPS has a bright future.
Finally, I was fascinated by how willing audiences were to turn over some basic personal data via registration for a deeper relationship with brands. I think it shows that people are really looking to connect with things they love, and be acknowledged for that connection. They want to be treated as special. It is a tremendous opportunity for media brands to learn more about their audience, and do a better job of serving them. Obviously, there is tremendous value in knowing more about your audience, and everyone is eager to use that knowledge to get better rates from advertisers, but we really need to be careful about how we do that. It is more crucial than ever that we help our clients understand that relationship, so it isn’t abused.
How does Jacobs Media’s research help guide the jacAPPS division, and can you address the synergy between them?
As I said before, Fred’s and Paul’s reputation in the industry is so strong that it really gives us some tremendous advantages. Just being, on some level, a known quantity really makes a difference. And of course, the work that Jacobs Media does creates such reach through their client interactions with so many stations that it is very easy for us to see new challenges arising and new opportunities developing almost in real time. It helps us to stay ahead of the curve on new features for our platform. I don’t think most of our competitors have that access to such a large sampling of stations.
The company’s very existence is the result of Jacobs Media seeing the whole mobile revolution coming way before most people.
jacAPPS recently started creating mobile games for radio stations, tell us more about this new endeavor. What sort of games have stations been signing up for?
We felt that games could be a real revenue opportunity for radio, which needs new products to sell to their advertisers. For game developers, the challenge is cutting through the several hundred thousand games in the App Store to get anyone to find their games. Radio has the cume to easily solve that problem. So we just figured the two could work great together.
Then we were lucky enough to be pitching this idea to Tom Bender at Greater Media on the same day that the WCSX team talked to him about doing some sort of game around Michigan’s deer hunting season. The result was a perfect proof-of-concept with what came to be called Buck Master. We built a simple hunting game and then the WCSX team really ran with it, bringing in a sponsor and promoting it well on the air. The result was over 55,000 downloads. It was great for the brand, an outdoor clothing maker, and for the station.
So now we want to offer these kinds of games to other stations. We think the key to making this work is having a new game every quarter or so, to keep the games and the promotional opportunities fresh, and also to help the sales team have a predictable product to sell. We’ve created packages of games that we think fit well with various station formats, including sports games, action games and casual games. We also have some casino games for stations that have casino advertisers.
What are the newest trends in mobile apps for radio?
Everything seems to be about “place” right now. Between geo-location that allows the app to identify where a user is, and iBeacons that allow a location (say a store or a venue) to communicate with interested people nearby, there is a real move to zoom in on interactions with the user at a specific place. We also use “geo-fencing” with some of our clients who have regional sensitivity around things like sports rights. So I think the next year is going to be spent figuring out what these technologies mean and what kind of content and business opportunities they can enable. We’d love to do something where the users of a station app can connect to beacons at a concert venue to get content, or deals or trivia related directly to the event they are attending.
It is also time to focus on mobile revenue. We’re past the point where having an app is a neat trick or box to check. We are working with a number of companies to develop revenue opportunities around sponsorships, registration and new ad models. Some of this is leading us to what we call a multi-app strategy, where we are developing additional apps for the station around things like entertainment guides and station personalities. As Fred pointed out on his blog recently, when NBA players and the band KISShave their own apps, it makes sense that maybe your morning show should have its own app.
There are also a growing number of challenges in the mobile space that affect radio. For instance, OS fragmentation is becoming a real challenge on Android devices. There are a huge number of devices running multiple flavors of operating systems on a half-dozen networks and the result is that it isn’t always easy to keep an app performing perfectly on a wide array of devices. We’ve also seen carrier issues with bandwidth, especially for our sports stations that carry pro sports. Sometimes the listening on mobile is so big that the carriers “pinch” the bandwidth causing streaming issues.
Do you have any examples of unique or extra special apps the company has built for stations?
We are big fans of the app we did in collaboration with the Entercom team for WEEI in Boston. It was conceived and developed as a way to super-serve the Boston sports fan (and that’s a high bar!), and the result is an app that brings together everything that a fan could want: scores, headlines, live streaming and on-demand content.
We also really like the app we did for Bonneville’s KSWD (The Sound)/Los Angeles. Again, this app was really designed to super-serve a very specific audience – Southern California Classic Rock fans. They wanted to integrate the app with TuneGenie, and that gives the app access to great content, album art, lyrics, etc. And then they added their own elements like wallpapers and concert info, everything for the music fan.
jacAPPS also built the SXSW Radio app this year. What other notable apps has the company built beyond radio station apps?
We’ve done a couple of apps for McLaren Hospitals that we really like. The Family Birthplace app is designed to guide women through their pregnancy and the first months after their baby is born. It has a ton of customization for the new mom and really supports the hospital’s objective of keeping that patient within their network.
The app I mentioned earlier for the non-profit SHFT (which was co-founded by Entourage star Adrian Grenier) called Food Tripping is another. It aggregates healthy eating options, restaurants, groceries, specialty stores and farmers’ markets and maps them for the user, so no matter where they are they can find those options easily. It is a great example of a guide targeted at a particular vertical. I think similar apps for skiing, bars and restaurants could be great for stations, and a real opportunity to create new revenue generators.
We did a really nice podcasting app for the public radio show On Being that has a great look and feel to it. Also, the app we did for the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Detroit Film Theatre is another example of a design that really supports the brand and gives the user some great utility.
What lies ahead in the immediate future for jacAPPS?
The state of the art for apps is always changing, so keeping up and staying ahead is crucial to our business, but we also want to begin to do more to the systems that support those apps, like content management and databases. All of that delivers rather nicely to some of the location-based services I mentioned earlier.
I think we’ll also begin to move more into other verticals that can leverage what we do in radio, especially automotive, but also healthcare. And just the challenges of growing our company will certainly keep us all occupied.
[eQB Content By Joey Odorisio ]
