INTERVIEW: Jai Al-Attas | One Meaning Communicated Differently

Jai Al-Attas is the 27 year old founder of Sydney based creative agency One Meaning Communicated Differently. Although he's relatively young, Jai has been in the music industry for over 10 years now - he started indie label Below Par Records at 16 where he signed Kisschasy, Something With Numbers and The Scare among others then sold the label off to EMI in 2009. Jai then moved to LA where he directed a documentary on 90's punk rock called One Nine Nine Four that was narrated by professional skateboarder Tony Hawk but unfortunately has been limited to screening for friends only as they can't clear the music.  What Jai does is simple; he solves problems.

Tell us what ONE is and how it started?

I started ONE last year when I was going through all the grief over my documentary, a friends band that had just signed with a major label didn't want the label to market them and wanted a more organic approach - similar to what we used to do with the Below Par bands. Basically major record companies are cutting staff every other week, but the amount of records they're releasing are still growing so it became a thing of more work with less people to do it and the bands it really affected were the developing artists.

How has ONE evolved since then?

Well after that first job, I ended up teaming up with Ben and Jaddan from The Staple Group to grow the company offering and utilising assets they had with a bunch of their other businesses. What we noticed straight away with dealing with Clients was the current "agency" model was becoming stale and irrelevant, to provide real solutions we needed to create new products that we knew would solve new problems. So the two spaces that we focused on were mobile and content sharing.

Do these products have names?

Zappp and Small World.

OK lets start with what ZAPPP is?

Zappp is our mobile app development company, basically mobile is blowing up and we're only still in it's infancy. What we're trying to do here is democratise mobile apps for bands, when we were getting a quote on an app for a Client last year we kept getting quoted between $8k and $10k which is ridiculous, so we teamed up with some awesome developers to build a platform that allows bands with no technical experience to create beautiful and functional mobile apps that add real value to their fans. We're only a couple of weeks away from launching but are building apps for some of the best bands in Australia such as The Living End, Josh Pyke, Grinspoon, Angus & Julia Stone, Illy, The Getaway Plan and Phrase. I believe that having an app will be more important than having a website and that having 1000 fans that have downloaded your app is worth more than having 20,000 casual fans on Facebook.

Is it just for bands?

No - We're launching with bands because at the root of it all we're a music company that thinks like a technology company, but we'll definitely be expanding into other areas as we progress.

And what is Small World?

Small World is an invite only community for sharing content. It's actually been around for a few years and used to basically be a street team for hire but we eradicated the term street team because it's kind of lame. We decided to turn the whole platform on its head and create a community that creates conversations around content.

What do you mean?

I used to travel overseas quite a lot and one thing I got addicted to was frequent flyer programs, their point system is amazing so we thought what if we took that and combined it with a platform to discover and share content. We came at it from a users perspective and what they would want to be involved in and how could they could be incentivsed to share content.

So it's not a street team?

No not at all. People don't join individual teams, they simply find a piece of content that resonates with them and then share it within their social networks. We're not asking them to sell anything to their friends and we're not asking them to spam their friends. Like I said it's something I'd want to use, I'm 27 years old and I don't want to be on a street team and I don't think my friends do either.

What is the main problem that Small World solves?

The problem that this solves is quite simple, traditional advertising doesn't work. I'm not just talking about print media or television commercials, even banner ads, people hate just them, we have no interest in engaging with them and they're not really measurable. Word of mouth and trusted recommendations have always been the best form of marketing and now technology has advanced to a point where we can filter out the shit from our lives. So our solution is sponsored content, reward people for sharing content that they would anyway and both parties benefit - the band or brand gets spoken about by real people within real trusted circles and the sharers get rewarded with real world stuff.

But couldn't people spam on Small World just to get points?

No, we've built in mechanisms that prevent people from just bombarding their social networks with content. You're only allowed to share one piece of content a day but as we curate it ourselves we make sure that the content is actually relevant to our community, you won't find us putting in any type of content for a nappy brand.

What kind of stuff would we find then?

Music videos, surf and skate video parts, film trailers, video game trailers and basically anything that we think is cool and isn't a banner ad or television commercial. We also offer money can't buy experiences that we think are awesome, for example last week we gave away 2 meet and greet tickets to a Josh Pyke show on his upcoming tour just by having members share one of his videos and see what conversations unfolded. Josh is a really good friend of ours so it's cool that we can get our friends involved in the community. However in the reward store we also have things that money can buy from iPads to headphones to video games and skateboards. But why buy it when you can get it for sharing?

This all sounds interesting - Who are some Clients that ONE has worked with?

We basically work in the youth and young adult subcultures such as music and action sports - we've worked with brands such as Fox Interactive, KR3W, BlackBerry, Element, V8 Supercars aswell most of the record labels in Australia like Sony, Universal, Warner, Ivy League and Modular to name a few. We also have some Clients that we have ongoing working relationships with such as pro skater Corbin Harris, House Of Marley Headphones and Icehouse.

Any last words?

Yes, I'd like to invite your readers to sign up for Small World and see what I'm talking about.

Sign up to Small World HERE

Also if you're in a band and want a mobile app we have an early adopter discount happening at our website HERE