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Henry Ford said you could have a Model T "in any color, so long as it's black," and the same is true of mobile phones today: You can have any phone you want, so long as it's a silver flip.
O.K. -- the pickings aren't that slim, but the mobile-phone market remains astonishingly unsegmented. Motorola's (MOT) Razr was the big success story of 2005, but already you're as likely to find it in the hands of a middle-schooler as a middle manager. Carriers have begun pushing handsets for kids -- like the Firefly, operating on Cingular's network -- and, a few years back, Nokia (NOK) livened up the market by offering detachable faceplates. But for all the competition among the major cell-phone carriers, their brand identities are as bland as baby food.
Enter Amp'd Mobile, the service launching at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. With $300 million in capital and an edgy marketing campaign, Amp'd aims to sell phones like they're energy drinks.
TOTAL RETHINK. Targeted squarely at 18- to 25-year-old men, Amp'd is offering sleek, inexpensive handsets ready to receive streaming video, music downloads, and pictures of pin-up girls, over rented spectrum on Verizon Wireless' high-speed EV-DO network. As a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) -- the industry term for a branded service piggybacking on a major carrier's network -- Amp'd isn't saddled with the cost of building and operating its own network.
But it isn't just "slapping a sticker on and getting a hip-hop artist to promote it," says Amp'd Chief Executive Peter Adderton, who previously headed Boost Mobile, an MVNO running on Nextel's (S) network. Instead, taking a page from Apple Computer's (AAPL) playbook, it has attempted to rethink every aspect of the brand experience -- from the phone's proprietary user interface, to the high-attitude Web site, to the original media content produced for its phones' 2-inch-by-1-inch screens.
"Verizon needs to serve everybody from ages 7 to 70, so they have to be pretty vanilla," explains Marina Amoroso, wireless analyst at Yankee Group. "But [a company] like Amp'd is only trying to get 2 million or 3 million customers, instead of 50 million, which enables [it] to focus on just those people. To capture any market share, [Amp'd needs] to make it a more personalized lifestyle service and offer more than just voice." And the field is growing crowded, with ESPN and Disney (DIS) both launching MVNOs in 2006.
HOW TO MAKE IT EASY? Billing itself as "the first fully integrated mobile-entertainment company," Amp'd has also partnered with independent production companies, such as Bunim/Murray Productions (originators of MTV's The Real World) and LivePlanet (co-founded by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), to produce original content -- rounding out more familiar offerings, like clips from the Late Show With David Letterman and highlights from America's Next Top Model.
From the beginning, Amp'd focused on its target demographic. Inherently comfortable with new technology and primed by the Web to be ready for the small bits of video suited for phone viewing, 18- to 25-year-old men are the low-hanging fruit of the cellular world. The Amp'd design team knew the possibilities the 3G network offered: music downloads, video streaming, video blogging, online gaming, instant messaging, and Internet searching. "Everyone knows about the pipe," Adderton says. "The carriers were really good about going out there and getting the spectrum. But nobody really said, 'How do we make that easy for the consumer to use?'"
For help, Amp'd went to Ninja Mobile, a Japanese software-development company that specializes in BREW, a cell-phone operating system created by Qualcomm (QCOM). Ninja's biggest success had been Surfline, an application that brought surfing conditions, including live video, to users' mobile phones. The Amp'd interface is broader-based, combining music downloads, video clips, ringtones, games, and wallpaper into a single application, called Amp'd Live.
HANDSET MAKEOVER. Instead of organizing the content the way it's stored on the cell-phone carrier's network, with music, videos, and games as separate categories, Amp'd Live organizes its content into four main channels: music, sports, entertainment, and live events. The ESPN section of Amp'd Live, for example, offers scores and videos, while the music section offers more videos, ring tones, and full music downloads -- all accessed through a series of scrolling menus. The result of Ninja's work is a more Web-like experience that encourages browsing based on subject, rather than medium.
Recognizing the importance of the handset itself, Amp'd spent two years with Kyocera (KYO) and Motorola developing new models, tweaking the insides of an existing form factor to Amp'd's specifications. Video -- even at 2 in. by 1 in. -- required a high-resolution screen, while music and video downloads demanded expandable memory. But, crucially, Amp'd's young demographic meant no handset could succeed priced at $400, leading some features to be scaled back from the cutting edge of the available technology -- such as deploying a lower-resolution VGA camera, rather than a 2.4-megapixel device.
In the end, Amp'd is able to offer the Kyocera Jet with 128 megabytes of memory for $129. Pride of place at the center of the phone's keypad is occupied by Amp'd's stylized zigzag logo -- an "evil eye" that eagerly implies that the content to come might be more naughty than nice.
ALL IN BAD TASTE. Just as Amp'd pushed the envelope of technology, it has tested the line of good taste in its advertising and content. Developed with red-hot New York ad agency TAXI, one commercial in Amp'd's teaser campaign features a prostitute in a compromising position in a hotel room with a senator, who is having a heart attack. She bangs on his chest, desperately listing Amp'd's features, followed by the tag line, "Try not to die. Amp'd Mobile is coming." As Paul Lavoie, president and creative director of TAXI, put it, "If the content is going to be crazy, so should the advertising."
Indeed, during beta testing, Amp'd's most popular content proved to be some of its raunchiest -- like videos of college students snorting vodka. Adderton makes no apologies for the demographic's tastes. "We're putting content on that's a little more edgy than other big networks that are trying to protect the family brand. And I don't know any 35-year-old who doesn't want to be 21 again."
Blum is a contributing editor to BusinessWeek Online in New York
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