When Eric Hoffert was a teenager, he was in a power-pop, punk-rock band called The Speedies. They put out two records. They had thousands of screaming young groupies. They played at all the big clubs in New York City.


What made The Speedies special was that they toyed with whole notion of American consumerism and big brand marketing. "We were supposed to be this mythical band that comes out of a cereal box -- like Wheaties," Eric explains. "At our shows we would throw sugar-coated cereal at the audience and they would throw cereal back at us," adding, with a slightly suppressed laugh: "I think we generated a lot of sales for General Mills."

So maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that Eric Hoffert still celebrates big brand advertising. Except now he's doing so as a founder of Magnifi, Inc., a Cupertino, California, company that's leading big brand-management into the digital age by putting it on-line, where it belongs -- at least for brand-owners and agencies that expect to compete in the new, global economy.

As Eric himself articulates it: "Magnifi.net uses the power of the Internet to drive the whole community of marketing and advertising. It's a community that heretofore has been very much un-automated and un-enhanced by the power of the Internet in terms of running operations on a day-to-day basis. When we achieve our objective, marketing and advertising people will spend their full days on their browsers, where they will conduct business around the world, within their companies and with their external business partners. They'll get to market faster, collaborate better and have more time to be creative."

Eric's journey from teen pop idol to new economy notable actually is not quite so tortured as you might think. The Speedies broke up simply because it was time for Eric to go to college. In Eric's case, it was plural; he simultaneously earned degrees in mechanical aerospace engineering from Cooper Union and computer science from New York University.

Post-universities, Eric's first job was with AT&T Bell Laboratories. "Bell Labs was an incredible place to be because it was almost like a great university or academic institution for cutting-edge research," Eric recalls. "Every day there would be 10 or 20 seminars on different topics in software, biology and physics. They'd invite lecturers from around the world. It was a very free and open environment in which to pursue new ideas and technologies."

After Bell Labs, it was not a job but a seven year "adventure" at Apple Computer, where Eric helped bring digital video to the masses as a developer of the first release of QuickTime -- internally code-named "Warhol," after Andy Warhol. The idea was to give people the ability to be very creative with computers across rich content in a way they never could before.

Then, about three years ago, the same day Gil Amelio and his suit took up residence at Apple Computer, Eric ended his seven-year career there and started up Magnifi. "I had gone to Apple as a place to create great technology for lots of people, really focused on the consumer experience, making it more engaging and powerful," says Eric. But now the Internet was exploding with all kinds of new content types and information types. So he quit Apple. He pretty much just walked out the door with a nothing but a desire to go out and build a company.

The company he founded originally was called AtOnce Networks. In its first year and a half, he and a group of about eight others worked without salaries out of a single, 150 square-foot office in Mountain View. There was no name of the company on the door because they wanted to stay secretive. They had one phone to share, and three chairs between them.

That's how Magnifi got its start. Today, the company has just completed a $15.5 million round in equity financing from new and existing investors, led by new investor TMCT Ventures. They've got clients including E*Trade, Visa, Americast, McKessonHBOC, BBDO and TBWA/Chiat/Day.



In the age of the Internet, the great brands are those that run consistently through people's minds. The great brands are those with messaging that's touching consumers globally, across a whole variety of different media -- print, broadcast, direct mail, Internet. The great brands create a seamless, powerful, messaging about the power of a product or service that is able to reach consumers on any device, on any platform. It doesn't matter whether you're connected to the Internet or not. The great brands reach you wherever you may be.

We want to help brand owners focus on what they do great, their core business. We want to allow the creative people to focus on what they do great -- which is being creative, and leveraging the Internet to help them develop their brands more quickly, more powerfully, at lower cost.
We want to give brand owners and their agencies access to a tremendously powerful database of information about their brand and their consumers, so they can re-purpose the information quickly and respond to competitive situations.

That way, they can communicate a consistent, global message by providing the entire brand team with universal access to a central library that has the latest version of every brand element you might need across all these different media.

We also empower the whole brand team with access to competitive information, competitive monitoring, market research -- all of the key tools they need to be as informed as possible to the instant on what's happening for their brands, in their industry. That, again, enables the brand to be consistent, to be global, to be fast, to be responsive, and to understand the consumer.

We see within this whole opportunity two pieces. One is providing a very powerful productivity tool and platform on which to do your work. The other is providing access to an incredibly rich array of services, information resources -- all integrated into one place. Then we blend those two things together.

So if you look at the two ends of the spectrum, one is an application. Think of it almost as a Microsoft Office for the marketing community that will allow them to do what they need to do quickly and powerfully, efficiently. But it's very much of an application that allows you to complete projects, monitor tasks, post creative, organize creative, update and edit creative, prepare a whole marketing campaign on-line. That's one element.

And then there's the other element, which is more editorial content -- information resources, news feeds, etc. -- providing the brand team with access to an incredibly rich variety of content. It could be stock photos. It could be other imagery you would want to use in a campaign. It could be access to a whole set of news feeds for a vertical market that an advertising agency is looking at in terms of serving its client base, or particular client so they know exactly what's going on in that industry, to best come up with the messaging.

It could be providing access to competitive data for competitive monitoring across all media. It could be all of the above. And that is a set of Web information services which we see combining with applications and productivity tools. It all comes together in one place, in the service that we developed, which is called Magnifi.net. That's where we're headed, and that's what we want to achieve.

Magnifi.net has subscribers in three different camps. We have subscribers who are in the brand marketing community -- the traditional brick-and-mortar brand marketing community. We have subscribers who are dot-com businesses. Then we have subscribers who are on the agency side.
In all three camps of subscribers, at the core there's a strong need for content management.

That means being able to upload and post your marketing materials -- marketing meaning brochures, collateral materials, logos, white papers, presentations. And then there's your advertising creative, which includes commercials, billboards, Internet banner ads, print ads, etc. You have all that organized and accessible to everyone with the latest versions viewable, around the clock, 24x7.

BBDO is using our service to empower their side of the agency team that's working with one of their primary clients to give them access to the full range of all the elements that they use when they're launching a campaign. So, the media plans, the strategy documents, the current commercials that they're working on -- all of that is accessible across the brand team at that client. BBDO's client, Visa International, is located in Foster City, California and BBDO is in New York. So there's a lot of collaboration taking place across the country and across time zones.

Another one of our subscribers wants to have a brand-management system in place that will allow them to get the latest version of every piece of creative and every asset and every marketing element that they are using at any time around the world. They are starting to do a lot of work that's global and they're looking at Magnifi.net as a way to help them very rapidly get on top of that. They're working with new companies, new business partners, new divisions all around the world on a 24 x 7 basis. They're looking for a solution that will help them manage all of their creative, their marketing materials, regardless of the boundaries of time zone and location.

One of the objections, especially in larger companies, is that there's a camp that will say, "let's try to do this ourselves." So there's a build vs. buy process that people go through. Those who expect to do it themselves are fighting a losing battle. Our mission is to make our service so comprehensive and so powerful that it will become increasingly un-economical for brand owners and their agencies to do it themselves.

Because we're a service, there's sometimes the objection that companies want to own the software and manage it in-house. Our primary business model is delivering Magnifi.net as a service. But if a customer wants it and it's an absolute requirement -- they can't make use of our offering as a service otherwise -- we will support them to let them use it in-house.

A third concern is whether Magnifi.net is sufficiently easy-to-use and seamless. Marketing is a creative community. Marketing people are not always amenable to any kind of tool or process. Some people gravitate toward it more easily than others. It depends on who the user base is. Some people think they don't have the ability to put their workflow into a web-based application service.

We will continue to focus on ease-of-use on a rich array of both application capabilities and content. It's really a blend. Magnifi.net is not really an application tool and it's not just a Web site with information. It's the best of both. That will become a compelling reason for marketing and advertising people to get on the network. They'll also get on the network when they see the benefits and the power of being on the network.

We have a culture and spirit to build great products and deliver great service to our customers. We practice what we preach. We're using the service ourselves, to work with our business partners for posting content and creative and managing it. And we're actually going to be an advertiser ourselves in the year 2000. We have, as a company, made a commitment to marketing and advertising. We believe we should have a lot of domain expertise about the space we're going into and we're going to continue to build that. So being an advertiser ourselves gives us insights into the process and what needs to be done to become a brand.

We also have a culture and spirit of trying to offer as service that's fast, that's powerful, that's graphically pleasing and aesthetically pleasing -- more than a typical piece of enterprise software might be because of the group we're going into and working with. We've done a lot of work to make it visually rich.

At a higher level, there's a culture and a spirit to accomplish something. We're here together to accomplish something exciting and be impactful and to effect a big change in the marketing industry.