business model "NERD"

The story of Jung von Matt NERD is firstly the story of founder Toan Nguyen: the youngest partner in the agency group is something of a wunderkind in the advertising industry. He came to Jung von Matt for a 6-month internship after his business studies, which the now 37-year-old completed at universities in Maastricht, Rotterdam and Singapore.

The rise of pop culture

But the story of Jung von Matt NERD is also the story of pop and nerd culture in recent decades - niche interests such as manga, anime, comic books and video games, whose fans have proven to be far more numerous over time than was ever assumed. Today, the video game industry is by far the world's highest-grossing sector of the entertainment industry, ahead of the film industry, whose most successful brands today are, tellingly, nerd icons such as Batman, Superman, the Avengers and Spider-Man.

But before they attracted millions of people to movie theaters worldwide, these subcultures were the secret passions of nerds like Toan. The founder and Managing Director of Jung von Matt NERD has his nerd roots in the pop culture of the 80s and 90s: the miniature strategy game Warhammer Fantasy Battles, video games, trading card games and anime.

How the nerd world conquered the mainstream

"When I was told in 2019: So Toan, it's time to start your own company, I wanted to do M&A first," says Toan in the interview. M&A stands for mergers and acquisitions, i.e. the takeover of one company by another. When it became clear that this was not an option, Toan reoriented himself. "I noticed at the time that everything that had been big in recent years - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and, of course, the Avengers - had something to do with nerdy stuff, dragons, spaceships or magic." Toan then conducted a market research study to find out exactly what the market for nerd themes was like - with surprising results.

"This subculture is much, much bigger than what's happening in the mainstream. Just one example: the soccer market is worth around 55 billion euros. But the market for all the different nerd topics is worth a combined 250 billion dollars.

In the agency world, everyone always wants Real Madrid or Messi, but there was no agency for this huge nerd world. So I said to myself, I'll just set up this agency myself."

Toan can easily understand the reason for the rapid - and until recently seemingly invisible - growth of nerd topics into the global mainstream because he lives it himself: "These are all the people who played with action figures as children and later video games, who read comics and watched cartoons. They started going on dates a little later than the others, studied business administration and are now slowly finding well-paid jobs that they can use to finance their hobbies," says the father of two daughters with a twinkle in his eye.

Why nerd experts also need to be generalists

Just like the subculture that the agency targets, the Jung von Matt NERD team has only grown to date: Jung von Matt NERD now has 18 employees and, as Toan explains, it is primarily made up of generalists for good reason. "You can't do an MBA in nerdism," says Toan in the interview. The Jung von Matt NERD team brings more to the agency than just their individual CVs - their passions and hobbies, from video games and comic books to blockchain, metaverse and coding.

"This sets us apart from other agencies in the Jung von Matt Group, which primarily come from supply - Jung von Matt Craft offers productions, while Jung von Matt Tech offers tech solutions - we come from demand, or rather, from the style group."

Style group is a term that Toan uses for Jung von Matt NERD instead of the classic advertising and marketing term target group. For the work of his agency, it is important to meet the audience it addresses at eye level and to understand their aesthetics, their style. "That's the paradox about us," explains Toan. "As an agency, we are highly specialized in science fiction, superheroes, fantasy and so on, but at the same time we have to be generalists in this field."

With this expertise, the Jung von Matt NERD team has implemented a wide variety of projects: from Super Mario Haribos to a space jam fashion collection for sneaker brand Snipes and Pikachu BMWs, the agency moves fluidly between different fan communities, brands and different service and product categories.

Content & Tech at Jung von Matt NERD

It is the versatility of content that makes it so important for Jung von Matt NERD's work: "On the one hand, of course, you need classic advertising media to generate recognition value and build a brand," says Toan. "But our topics, even more than perhaps the topics of many other agencies, thrive on love, and that only comes from good content."

Toan knows the importance of good content as a success factor for a company from his own experience: "Of course, we work with various forms of content, but one of the most important growth factors for a company is content marketing. 80 percent of our inbound business, i.e. the customers who contact us, is stimulated by content. At the very beginning, for example, we published the market research study that I commissioned under the title "How nerdy is Germany?" in cooperation with SPIEGEL and Horizont and then repeatedly republished relevant snippets with nice graphics: What percentage of Germans watch anime? Which Marvel characters would Germans most like to have a beer with?"

Perhaps the best example of Jung von Matt NERD's approach is the Phoenix Program fan film by German production company T7Production in the run-up to the release of the gaming blockbuster Cyberpunk 2077. Jung von Matt NERD was able to broker brand deals for the project - and so a fan project became a half-hour YouTube success.

In no other community is self-creation as pronounced as in gaming. Video game platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox regularly make headlines with big brand deals and innovative fan events, which Toan describes as the "holy grail" of activating fan communities for brands: "When it comes to content, of course, and I certainly don't have to tell anyone here, a coherent social content strategy is extremely important for brands. But we believe that gaming is a factor that many still underestimate. On the one hand, there is gamified content for brands within existing ecosystems or - and this is where we want to go, this is content at its best - a completely unique video game."

The importance that technologies such as video games, VR & AR now have for the content industry, even beyond gaming, could hardly have been predicted ten years ago - and Jung von Matt places a correspondingly high value on preparing the agency for technological innovations. The agency has its own tech unit that monitors technological developments, examines their impact on the market and provides agile advice to clients - and of course artificial intelligence has therefore been a topic for Jung von Matt and Toan Nguyen for a while - but not top-down, as Toan emphasizes.

Rather, Jung von Matt NERD promotes its employees' existing interest in advanced technologies such as AI.
"AI is the most important technological development in the content industry in the last 30 years - especially for the content industry, that cannot be emphasized enough," Toan states with conviction. "AI will not only increase productivity, but above all help to scale good content. The best example is: I could now record a German podcast and have an AI translate it into 40 other languages - with my voice, my intonation, my style."

A home for global pop culture

As decentralized and international as Jung von Matt may be - the agency group has clients and office locations all over the world, from Hamburg and Berlin to London, Los Angeles, Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul - the home of the agency group in Hamburg is paradoxically still important: "There is GameCity here, the Gaming Hotel in Bergedorf or the thing on the Reeperbahn, where you can always find connections," says Toan about the Hamburg network.

"One of the biggest gaming hardware manufacturers, Razer, has its European location in Hamburg and one of the most successful European e-sports teams, mousesports, comes here. We don't do business with them on a daily basis, but it's always good to be able to exchange ideas and spend time together. As an originally German company, Hamburg is one of the best locations you can have for gaming and related topics."