Is Moshi Monsters’ Mind Candy preparing an IPO?

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Moshi Monsters is on a roll. Over 34 million registered users, its CEO Michael Acton Smith in demand at investor conferences around the world and a product that is a must-have amongst all 6-10 year olds.

So it is it surprising that they are considering an IPO?

I confess that my evidence is shaky. It is contained in a tweet from Chief Marketing Office Ed Relf last week:

Just approved the Moshi taxi livery at Moshi HQ. Moshi taxis coming to London streets soon 🙂

To explain why I think this means Moshi is about an IPO, I’d like to take you back to the dot com boom. In the year 2000, I was Chief Financial Officer of Shopsmart, a comparison shopping website that made comparing the prices of music, games, books and electronic products easy.

The market was hot and we’d raised double digit millions to grow our business. Much of this would be spent on marketing.

We were on a fast track to IPO (one of the reasons I got the job was because I was an former investment banker and equity analyst who knew many of the public market investors). We knew that it was important to get out of the door as soon as possible, before investor enthusiasm dimmed. (The more honest amongst us might have said “before the bubble burst”)

One of the things that we needed to do was to make sure that investors had heard of us. We needed the brand to be well-known. We bought banners and buttons. We did a lot of PR. We took out a 12 month sponsorship of movies on the newly launched Channel 5.

But we really needed to talk to investors. Besuited types who hung out in the Square Mile. They weren’t exactly Five’s core audience. Then we had a brain wave.

Bankers use taxis. They travel on London’s streets where taxis drive. So we started a marketing campaign aimed not at our customers, but at prospective investors.

We bought half a dozen taxis, liveried in full ShopSmart colours. We bought the side of the number 11 bus (which runs from Liverpool Street to Chelsea). We bought bus stop hoardings in the Square Mile.

We weren’t trying to attract customers to come to our site for comparison shopping. We wanted investors to think that we were a successful company with marketing campaigns *everywhere*.

It’s like being the marketing manager who buys billboards on the side of the road on the CEO’s route to work. That way, the boss thinks the ads are everywhere, when instead they are just targeted at the person who is in charge of the marketing manager’s bonus, not at revenue-generating customers.

So as I think of Moshi, I think of a business that has had great success trying different marketing channels. CEO Michael Acton Smith has been open about his scepticism of television advertising, for example, but a test budget with a unique URL that could be tracked proved to him that it paid back in revenues within a single weekend. He was very happy with the result.

I know Moshi is inventive about customer acquisition, but I struggle to believe that a taxi is a good customer acquisition tool for a 6-10 year old child.

It’s a great acquisition tool for a City-based public market investor, though.

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