Jamarlin Martin on Building Moguldom Media and Breaking New Ground With Docutainment

Brave the comments section on a blog or website and, amidst the opinions, trolling and fire-and-brimstone judgments, there may be a business idea. It’s where Jamarlin Martin, reigning CEO of Moguldom Media, gleaned inspiration for his most recent venture. For the past seven years, he’s translated his expertise in African-American media consumption into a successful group of pop culture websites — including MadameNoire and Bossip — culminating into $15 million in ad sales this year alone and affixing Moguldom to Inc.’s list of top media companies in 2013.

Now he’s broadening his scope, so to speak, with the creation of Moguldom Films, a burgeoning brand that will take topics that have gotten heavy traction on his suite of sites and turn them into documentary films. A former currency trader, Martin remains a numbers guy when it comes to using research and data to support the trajectory of his now two-pronged empire. Gunland, the first film in the 15-documentary series Martin plans to spearhead over the next two years, will examine the impact of gun violence on the black community in Chicago. The man clearly knows his way around online media. Here, he talks how he plans to saunter into movie-making.

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How has your experience serving multicultural audiences through online properties like Hip-Hop Wired and MommyNoire helped you better understand the stories you want to tell and the people you want to tell them to?
African-Americans have a trillion dollars in buying power. However, bigger media companies are not providing quality content that multicultural audiences are interested in. We have seven years of robust data on what our users are looking for. The stories we want to tell have a heavy data component. For example, in 2012 one of our top-performing articles was around celebrities who have gone broke, particularly African-American celebrities. That article generated more than 30 million page views. We marketed that content on Facebook to test it in more of a hyper-targeted audience, and that article also outperformed 100 other articles there. We’re listening to our users in terms of what they’re commenting on and how they’re engaging with the content. We’re essentially building rationale for the topics that we invest in on the documentary side around data and our editors’ understanding of what their audience is looking for. That’s where I think we have a really solid advantage in terms of our approach.

Strategizing content for websites is one thing, but films are a completely different animal. How will you build audience engagement, particularly since you plan to avail these films on iTunes and fee-based streaming sites like Netflix?
Target Market News conducted a study last year and asked African-Americans what type of topics they would be interested in seeing more of. The number one answer was documentaries. So we’ve heavily surveyed our own audience in terms of capturing the appetite for documentaries and the willingness to buy or rent documentaries. When you look at it in a broader context, Netflix, who has the most data, has said that [it’s] investing in two areas specifically: comedy and documentaries. So from a first-party data perspective and a third-party research perspective, everything is pointing to this genre. Yet you won’t even have one production company probably doing two a year. Next year, we’ll do 15. There’s zero competition. We like our chances of winning because essentially, no one is producing content targeted at this audience within this genre. Not doing it at the scale we’re looking to do it.

One big advantage that we have with the documentary initiative is we’re going to put over a half million dollars’ worth of marketing into the films across our platform. We’re a preferred partner with most Hollywood studios and we’re turning that into more of a content commerce company, where essentially we start marketing our own films. So we are the preferred partner for urban African-American films when they come out. Now we’re producing our own product, and you’ll see heavy marketing across our platform on social media. So that would be a huge advantage for us as well. The data insights, the built-in audience and the ability to create customized campaigns across our platform make us different than Netflix and a production company. We have a lot of advantages with our documentary initiative.

You launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $25,000 to help finance production of the first film in the series. Why seek out community investors instead of corporate investors?
Essentially, we’re looking to produce content at low costs and a risk level that we’re comfortable with. We wanted to allow our audience to be engaged in the stories that we tell, to be a part of the process. So the first Kickstarter campaign is kind of like a beta test, but more aggressive campaigns will be launched next year. Traditionally, we would go to third parties to finance the film. We’ve just chosen a different model. [Editor’s note: The funding campaign was closed on Nov. 21 with a total of $639 in pledges. ]

Fifteen documentaries in one year is a whole lot of filmmaking. How did you arrive at that set number?
It starts with a vision. Our vision is to quickly build a film library of 50 titles over three years. We would pair that with original programming and essentially, that content would anchor a 24/7 smart TV channel. We see ourselves being the next-generation BET or the next-generation Telemundo, where you’re going to be downloading an app and accessing our content through smart TVs. We would be competing with TV One and BET, but from a purely digital standpoint. The long-term goal for us is to quickly develop a quality content library, and that’s going to anchor a television experience. You’ll see the beta version of that in 2015.

What are some of the documentaries you’ll be working on next? Why do these stories need to be told and why are you the one telling them?
I can’t tip our hats too much, but I can tell you our first documentary will be around the life of Jay-Z. That title is called A Genius Leaves the ‘Hood. We also have another that focuses on interracial relationships and we’ll finish a title called Black Church, Inc. around financial corruption within the black church. So those are some of the titles we’ll finish this year.

Soledad O’Brien and other notable media personalities are delving more deeply into documentary-making. How will your films differ from the ones being produced and aired now on CNN and PBS, for example?
Actually, we’re not calling our content a “documentary,” at least not internally. We call them “docutainment.” We believe we’re pioneering a new genre within film. Essentially, just as we’ve done online, we’re looking to develop an original, edgier, more Millennial flavor and bring a younger demographic into the documentary genre, at the same time serving a documentary core audience. You kind of see that in the marketplace with some of the stuff Vice Media is doing, putting a little bit more edge on the documentary genre. We’re making docutainment for our website audience. That’s the audience we have data on. Our content reaches over 10 million unique visitors a month. The way we see it, if we make good content for our core users — who are influencers — it’s going to work in a broader context.

Do you plan to expand into theaters?
Yes. That’s not announced yet but we will do two narrative films in 2015 and then maybe one or two of the documentary topics may be in the theater next year. We haven’t decided which ones yet.

Jarmarlin Martin’s tips for digging into documentaries:

1. Make money, but don’t let money make you. “You need a data strategy similar to Netflix and how they think about data to improve your success rate. That being said, if there’s a topic that’s not really consistent with our corporate brand and our specific site brands, we would definitely pass on it, even if the data suggested that we put it out.”

2. Act like an artist, think like a business person. “Most documentaries are shot because a filmmaker is passionate about a topic. But that’s not really looked at as a commercially viable investment. You need some sort of business or commercial advantage to at least break even or become profitable, particularly a tax-efficient strategy. I think that’s important. Georgia has a great tax incentive program where you can get up to a 30 percent tax credit that you could possibly sell off. So most of our films will be produced there next year.”

3. Work your social networks. “You really need digital marketing and social media in terms of building awareness around your product. In this competitive environment, you really need those things out the gate — they’re just as important as the content or the producer that you select.”

Janelle Harris resides in Washington, D.C., frequents Twitter and lives on Facebook.