Transmedia as a Tool for Audience Building

22 Jan
2010
by Robert Pratten

I’m very grateful to the producers of Vauxhall Crossed for allowing me to publish the work I did at the end of last year and to be able to show where we are now.

Let me say at the outset that I do appreciate that in an ideal world of transmedia storytelling, no media is of lesser importance than the other. However, right now I’m working with people who have an existing property – usually a movie script – and want to make that their priority. Hence you’ll often find me referring to comic books and games as though they’re subservient to the feature film. I know that they needn’t be but that’s the situation I’m dealing with most often.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog posting is to show how I’ve been using transmedia for audience building and to welcome comments from others who can suggest points for improvement. You might also like to check-out what’s been implemented and give it a whirl!

I’ve also mentioned a few cool sites that you might use to implement your own projects.

Digging for Oil

The diagram below illustrates my usual analogy for growing a fan base. The principle is that you have to start by reaching out to people who are most receptive to your idea. Others might say to go fishing where the fish are.

"Striking oil" analogy for growing fan base

The oil analogy is a good one because the early stages are quite tough. It takes a concerted effort to get that initial traction. It’s a bit like developing your feature film: it feels like an uphill struggle in the beginning – you’re trying to get either finance or cast to fall into line when they’re both dependent on each other. But then when finally someone gives you a break everything starts to fall into place and all the barriers start to melt away.

So it is with audience building, it takes time and hard work to get those early followers but once you do the project starts to get traction and everything gets easier little by little.

Background

Vauxhall Crossed is a family, action-adventure feature film about an MI6 agent called Daisy Scarlett (think female James Bond).

If you pop over to my site at http://zenfilms.typepad.com you’ll find the full report that was presented to the producers. It describes the state of play as of December 2009 and details my advice.

What I’d like to focus on here is the transmedia extension I suggested and then later implemented.

Implementation

Working from the Vauxhall Crossed script, I proposed the idea of establishing a fake Chinese take-away (take-out restaurant) and using this as an “unofficial” or rather secret home of Daisy Scarlett fans.  Given that our target audience is fans of spy movies I thought the opportunity to become involved in some subterfuge would appeal to them. It also creates audience “insiders” and “outsiders” which would reward early adopters and strengthen the bond among the most enthusiastic fans.

I reasoned that the audience would fall into three camps:

  • Those who really like to play spy games (hardcores)
  • Those who just think it’s fun to fool their friends
  • Those who think this is all a cute idea but don’t have the time or can’t be bothered to play along (casuals).

I also wanted to allow the hardcore spy enthusiasts to directly contribute to the experience. This would be fun for them and alleviate some of the work from the producers.

Hence there will effectively be two-types of game. The first is based on the premise is that it’s fun to trick your friends. In this case, it’s fun to trick them into believing that this is the best Chinese food ever and they really must place an order. Of course, the food never arrives.

The second game will be more involved and based on a stronger role-play of pretending to be a spy. This has yet to worked through fully because it’s more demanding on the producers’ resources.

The diagram below shows a four-tier website trail:

  • The main movie webpage promotes the movie in the usual way, providing information about cast and crew etc. But there’s also a small advert for our Chinese take-away.
  • The Chinese take-away looks like a real restaurant website except for a few tell-tale clues that this can’t really be real. For example, I made the service delivery times and the concept rather eccentric!
  • If someone is brave or mad enough to become a fan of the take-away then they’re rewarded with a secret page! This members-only area reveals the secrets of the scam and tells people how to take part in the fun. Part of that fun is keeping the Facebook page alive – writing fake reviews and uploading photos of friends eating the take-away food.
  • For those that really want to dig deep, there’s a hardcore site at Ning where the members can create their own spy games for the others to play.

Daisy Scarlett Webpages

Facebook is also important because that’s where everyone’s friends are: It’s easy to upload reviews, video and photos and of course everything is visible to your social network.

A Twitter channel is used to convey game updates, missions and clues to members.

Both Facebook and Twitter are explained further in the report at my site.

The Story So Far

At the time of writing the basic building blocks are in place so it’s easy to see how the concept should work.

I implemented the restaurant using www.moonfruit.com because it’s very quick and easy, it’s free and allows members-only pages. It’s especially cool because it’s possible to use Facebook Connect. The screenshot below shows the website but I encourage you to check it out at http://wingtip.moonfruit.com

Our Chinese Take-Away Restaurant

You’ll notice that there are five tabs on the website. If you become a member then a sixth tab becomes visible, marked “Confidential”! The image below shows the message you receive.

The "Confidential" Pages

And finally, this last image shows the Ning hardcore members page.

The Ning Membership Site

At this time there’s no mention of the Vauxhall Crossed movie but we hope to add that at a later date.

I should also mention that to manage all the Twitter streams, we’re using HootSuite – a great application that allows us to track spy news, see who’s into James Bond and Jason Bourne etc. as well as message and retweet information we think might be interesting to our audience. In this way we hope that the movie communications form a valuable, useful part of the target audience conversation: we’re not constantly tweeting about how the movie is progressing (which would be tantamount to spam).

Next Steps

The most difficult next step will be trying to get traction among the potential fan base. Without encouragement I suspect that the sites will stay dormant – a potentially good idea drowned in a sea of web sites. It might also be likely that we’ll need to better structure the fun so that there’s a clearer link between participation and reward. Right now the reward is just “fun” but it’s likely that we’ll have to offer some kind of prize which would mean determining the basis for measuring and awarding the prize.

We also need to make available for download the restaurant graphics so that members can download, print locally and use to fake the take-out boxes. Right now we only have the menu available for download.

For further details, please check out the full report and please do leave questions and comments below.

Moving Filmmakers to a Transmedia Business Model

18 Dec
2009
by Robert Pratten

I’ve been working with two entertainment properties and a media start-up the past couple of months and I wanted to share the business models I developed to explain where we’re heading.

Here’s what we already know:  pulling in an audience is tough but pulling in finance is tougher.

The Old Days

In the “old days” – as shown in Figure 1 – raising finance was what you did first. You needed that money to make the movie and then you’d sell the movie to a distributor whose job it was to sell it to the audience. Hell, you might even get presales in which case you’d killed two birds with one stone.

The important point from this is that as the filmmaker you only had to convince a limited number of people (investors) that you had a movie worth making (because it would make money). You didn’t have to convince them it was worth watching.

One reason you didn’t have to prove you had an audience waiting to see your movie was because it couldn’t be proven. Instead, one might use (often bogus) comparisons with other movies and of course, whenever possible, outliers like The Blair Witch Project or Fahrenheit 911 or Sideways etc.

When the finished movie failed to find an audience it was the distributor’s fault. They didn’t know how to position the movie correctly. They didn’t spend enough money on P&A. The box art was crap.

Figure 1

"Old" Filmmaking Model

"Old" Filmmaking Model

Having worked with our distributors in some markets and selling directly at some horror conventions, it’s very sobering to get a firsthand experience of audience expectations.

Me: It’s about love and sacrifice and how you don’t notice you’re onto something good until it’s gone.

Horror fan: Great. How much T&A is there?

The New Model

When MySpace, Facebook, YouTube etc. arrived it became possible to raise awareness of the movie and start building an audience before the movie was released. But still it felt like something peripheral to the marketing of the movie. The audience building was an industry-side activity that you could take to the distributor with your one-sheet and your reviews: look we have several thousand fans. Most of whom in all likelihood were other independents flogging a movie or a book.

Today, most filmmakers – maybe not Culture Hacker readers – but most filmmakers still have the mindset towards social media that it’s a new spam tool. Look, now I can pester people to be my “fan” and I can get them to pester their friends to be my “fan”. Please Digg me up. Please Stumble on me. It’s the worst kind of networking: “please help me” they bleat.

Worst still are the crowdfunders: “please give me money”.  I’m not against audiences paying upfront – as with the Kickstarter model – so it’s not the principle, it’s typically execution I have a problem with. And I totally believe in the power of social media but I don’t like it when it’s so often used in an unproductive, disappointing way.

So enter the new model of filmmaking as shown in Figure 2:

  • there’s a genuine affection… nay, anticipation… between the audience and the movie
  • the affection is leveraged to pre-sell to the audience while still raising finance in the traditional way
  • when the movie is available for viewing, it might be that only a subset of the audience will pay for it. So they’ll be simultaneous free exhibition and sales.

At this time it’s hard to believe that serious money is going to be raised to finance a movie through crowdsourcing. Some money? Maybe. Millions? I doubt it. And so for expensive feature films there’s still a place for large-ticket or savvy investors.  Please forget about Obama’s fundraising blah blah blah. It’s an outlier. And where’s his socially networked audience when he needs them to fight for healthcare? They’ve gone missing. Maybe Obama’s massive email list isn’t really his personal fan base? Maybe the people on that email database were fans of his first movie but don’t like his second?

What this says as to us as filmmakers is that we’re going to be only as good as our next movie. Don’t expect your 1000 mythical spending fans to follow you from movie to movie regardless of what you propose to make.

Figure 2

"New" Filmmaking Model

"New" Filmmaking Model

My point is that independents are going to have to start audience building early and prove that there’s an appetite for their movie. And so this brings me to my final model.

The Transmedia Model

Raising awareness and audience building is tough. It’s tough enough when you have a finished movie but try doing it for a movie that’s yet to be made.

And that’s why I think we’ll move to a transmedia model for filmmaking in which the filmmaker uses his own money to make some (low-cost) content to build an audience ahead of doing anything else.

There’s long been a school of thought that says to get finance for your feature you should shoot the trailer or shoot a short film based on the feature. I know this can work but I’ve never been a fan of this approach if only because I know finance is most often raised without it. Amazingly though this week, as I write, this short film Panic Attack secured a movie deal.

What transmedia storytelling offers however is not the  Cinderella story of “big investor swoops to finance movie” but a genuine, low-cost, grass-roots audience building.

Right now, (online) comic books seem to be the order of the day – offering an excellent way to engage audiences in the story and show some visual flare or at worst nice eye candy to grab attention. But there’s lots of untapped potential for simple social games utilizing Twitter and social networks without the need for coding:  we just don’t have enough reference cases to illustrate all the possibilities yet.

A small word of warning: the content has to have value. It can’t be a trailer or marketing fluff – you have to produce the real McCoy if you’re going to capture audiences.

Transmedia Filmmaking Business Model

Transmedia Filmmaking Business Model

In the transmedia filmmaking model, the financing, exhibition and fundraising work together in tandem with the potential for the feature film to become self-funding. Remember that it’s not all for free! Free is your loss-leader to generate the money. Even if it’s “real content” you might still effectively look at it as a marketing cost – it can help to position it in this way to investors. And note that what’s free and what’s paid will be in flux – maybe changing over time and from media to media.

So in the ideal scenario the filmmaker bootstraps the movie with the low-cost media, the website, presumably some merchandise but then it’s up to the audience to decide what happens next.  The filmmaker will use a basket of financing initiatives: free, pre-paid, paid, paid+, investment and sponsorship (including brand integration/product placement) to finance the movie.  [Paid+ is where buyers can opt to pay more than the base price – usually via a drop-down menu of price points.]

This model has several implications:

  • If you do it right they’ll be demand for more content… which maybe you can’t afford to make in the early days. Or at least can’t afford to make alone. And that’s why collaboration of all kinds is important to the indie – with audiences and with other filmmakers.  Collaboration platforms like Wreakamovie are going to save the indie.
  • Sponsorship in the form of cash (rather than products for free) from brands won’t solely go to properties with big audiences. If your story reaches the audiences that other marketing finds hard to reach then that’s going to work too. The one significant problem I can see is that few brands want to be associated with edgy content… unless it’s “edgy” in the Green Day plastic-punk, manufactured sense rather than the raw, authentic Poison Girls/Flux of Pink Indians edgy. Counterbalancing this is fans who may appreciate that you’ve rejected the brands… maybe
  • Filmmakers are going to become familiar with audience needs and they’ll learn how to captivate them. It won’t be anyone else’s fault that you don’t have an audience. There’s no opportunity to finish the movie and then throw it over the wall to someone else to find the audience for it
  • Free media is a feeler gauge: collect comments, listen to feedback, evolve the feature to meet the audience expectations
  • It’s going to be a long commitment to the audience so be sure you pick a story you really want to tell.  Indies that follow this transmedia model will be offering an evolving service rather than a one-off product and that means audiences become customers that need to be listened to, responded to, cared for and managed
  • If you perfect this evolving transmedia ecosystem you may ask yourself if you still want to make a feature after all.

A final sobering thought: I know we’d all like to believe that story is king but audiences will only discover the story if you hook them in. Don’t expect anyone to delve deeply into your storyworld looking for brilliance. You have to provide “satellite media” that orbits the core: it’s easy to digest and looks cool or fun. Celebrity cast or crew and genre are going to get attention and convey credibility – just as they always have.

I’ve illustrated this in the figure below where I’ve taken the sales funnel model and used it to illustrate how you want to pull in audiences, turning casual interest to hardcore repeat purchases.

Matching Content to Audience Commitment

Matching Content to Audience Commitment

To summarize then, filmmakers will move to transmedia storytelling because it’s going to be the way you build audiences. And building an audience will unlock the financing – either from fans, sponsors or investors. But it’s going to demand new skills.

Rob

The Fight for Exlusive Content

17 Dec
2009
by Peter Katz

When there are too many platforms competing with each other content will become king.Boxing_Cat copy

Right now entertainment has been devalued when you can rent a new film or TV show for 99 cents at a Red Box kiosk at 19,000 different locations, can download unlimited films through Netflix, and a rent/buy a film through iTtunes. I didn’t forget about Amazon’s unBox that is connected through TiVo, Vudu, Real.com, Hulu.com, Cinemanow.com, Youtube.com, and a plethora of different ways to consume content. At a certain point all these different companies’ services will be offering relatively similar services at distributing content to your phone/TV/computer.

Then there will become an arms race for these companies acquire exclusive content to have a competitive advantage against the countless rivals in this space-to attract new customers and keep them. Also, when we get out of this recession advertising revenue will grow dramatically to further increase the demand for high quality content. Small to mid sized distributors who just focused on DVDs will go out business; these platforms will now be at the film festival having bidding wars for the best projects. This source of revenue will drive the production of new movies.

A battle for exclusive content will also apply to digital book readers, since there are plenty of different devices on the market.

Doing the Wave

16 Dec
2009
by Dee Cook

google_wave_logoNow that Google Wave has been out for a while, have you joined up? Is it living up to all your expectations, plus some? Or is it just something that you slobbered over because invitations were rare, but now you just keep forgetting to check in because you can’t figure out what to do with it?

To be honest, I’m in the latter group, but have been making a concerted effort to suss out the service and figure out what it’s good for. Recently there was an article on Ars Technica about people who are using Wave to play role-playing games and that, my friends, is something that’s totally feasible.

Ever since Online was invented, there have been gamers taking advantage of it to play RPGs with geographically-dispersed groups, from BBS door games in the mid 80s and the rise of MUDs in the 90s to dedicated IRC channels for the purpose. But what’s lacking in these various media is a sense of organization – they can be very good for living in the now, but trying to go back and make sense of what happened in the past can be quite a task. Wave’s automatic threading is excellent for that, providing both instant communication as well as ways to format it and keep it sane and pretty. Not only that, but new players can look back on what’s already happened and catch up easily just by reading the existing Wave, something that’s impossible to do in a MUD or IRC.

Of course this is a new technology and has drawbacks – the article mentions a lack of moderation capabilities and dice rolling widgets, to name two – but it certainly seems like the potential is there and has gamers quite excited for the future.

Have you tried Wave and put it to good use? Still trying to score an invitation? Drop a line in the comments and let us know.

The First Ever Culture Hacker Gift Guide

16 Dec
2009
by Haley Moore

Deck the hall with boughs of holly! Tis the season to redefine storytelling as it evolves through collisions with new forms of media! Fa la la la la la la la la! Oh dang…that isn’t catchy at all.

Here are some particularly culture hackerly gifts, old and new, hand picked by the culture hacker elf. (Yes, they call me that because I’m short. Thanks a lot, guys.)

games

Missing: Since January and Evidence: The Last Ritual
Dreamcatcher Interactive, $19.99 and $29.99
These two games are actually on my Christmas list this year, because in spite of a ringing endorsement from Penny Arcade, I never got around to playing them. Released in 2004 and 2006, respectively, these games come as close as you can get to being an Alternate Reality Game in a box. Characters contact you through e-mail and solicit your help to catch a serial killer. (I haven’t played yet, but I hear serial killers have email, too! Eep!)

Uplink
Introversion Software, £10.00 – £5.00
When talking to friends about Rushkoff’s Exoriare ARG, I made plenty of mention of how much it reminds me of Uplink, only to find very few people have played this cyberpunk indie classic. If you love feeling 1337 and jamming out to fantastic electronic music, this is a must-play.

The Hidden Park
James Kane, $7.99
Granted, Bulpadok’s geocaching/augmented reality mashup game isn’t everywhere…yet. But if you have an iPhone and live near one of these parks, the game should not be missed. Unfortunately, there’s no way to gift a single iPhone app, so I suggest wrapping an iTunes gift card in a printout of one of these sweet wallpapers.

books to play

Cathy’s Book, Cathy’s Ring and Cathy’s Key
by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, $17.95
Cathy’s Book has been listed in the ARGNet gift guide, and covered by just about every extended storytelling outlet in existence, but if you haven’t actually read it, or it’s sequels, then you’re missing something special. These three young adult novels, written by veterans of 42 Entertainment, follow the amateur sleuthing and increasingly preposterous intrigues of one Cathy Vickers – a girl who has a habit of meticulously compiling all the evidence on a case, and then leaving her entire notebook, full of notes, mementos and personal phone numbers, behind in book stores.

Personal Effects: Dark Art
by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman, $24.95
Personal Effects is the adult fiction answer to the overwhelmingly teenage setting of Cathy’s Book. Set in a mental asylum improbably buried beneath New York, Dark Art takes a much darker and more sinister tone and has been known to deeply creep even seasoned CF players out.

Masquerade
by Kit Williams, $8.99 – $230, depending on condition
The original armchair adventure, and arguably the origin of interactive publishing. Masquerade contained a puzzle distributed through 15 paintings, intended to lead the solver to a buried cache containing a jeweled gold hare. Though the contest was hijacked by a small group of people close to the author, leaving the treasure hunt mired in scandal and the treasure gone, the book still presents a challenge, and is a valuable piece of history for puzzle lovers. (For a Williams book that presents an even bigger challenge – both to solve, and to find a copy of, see Untitled, a.k.a. “The Bee Book”)

Fandango – The Key to the Wind
by Pel and Jeff Stockwell, $22.50
Fandango takes many of its cues from Masquerade, down to the book’s plot, but it’s treasure, hidden in 2007, has yet to be found. Some reviewers describe the hunt as “impossible,” but there is still a community devoted to the solve at Tweleve.org.

books to read

This is Not a Game
by Dave Szulborski, $24.99
Used as a go-to instructional text, and credited as the inspiration for this year’s viral video comedy Must Love Robots, this is the biggest and most in-depth guide to Alternate Reality Gaming as an art form, and as a business model.

How to Cheat at Everything
by Simon Lovell, $18.95
In the transmedia world, we try our best to keep a wall between enabling the audience’s own escapist tendencies and out-and-out deception; but sometimes the best way to do that, is to cheat anyway. This book will exercise your cheating muscles, as well as inspire ways to interact with your audience – because cheats are good at that, too.

So Yesterday
by Scott Westerfeld, $8.99
Any book that begins, “Can I take a picture of your shoe?” is bound to be interesting, right? So Yesterday is a kabuki battle between big media and culture jamming, as told through the eyes of the teenage son of an epidemiologist. A great introduction to the interplay between media and culture for teens and up.

House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski, $19.95
Often referred to as “an ARG in a book” even though it lacks interaction, House of Leaves is a classic of dead-tree chaotic fiction, full of realities within realities that will leave your head spinning.

The Big Book of Hoaxes
by Carl Sifakis
If Lovell will teach you how to cheat, Sifakis, with the help of 75 other award winning comic artists, will teach you how to lie. With stories as diverse as the pranks of Joey Skaggs, the plan to saw Manhattan in half, and the hoax of Hitler’s diary, this will acquaint you with some of the greatest hoaxsters of the modern era and their methods.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, $6.95 – $39.99
With the upcoming movie and its ongoing two-person CF campaign, Holmes is about to be the order of the day. Doyle’s stories represent the origin of the modern mystery genre, and good reading to boot. There are many editions out there, which vary in price, age, and fancy-pantsedness.

tech
Handheld GPS
Garmin, Magellan, Pioneer, and others, $69 – $499
Whether you’re seeking out a piece of a larger puzzle, or just plain geocaching, a good GPS is essential for the well-equipped alternate reality explorer. While I use the GPS on my phone for these kind of things, and thus can’t give a top recommendation, this page looks like the place to start your search. Remember: If you can’t search by coordinates, it’s not worth it.

Smartphone
$99 – $599
Of course, a good smartphone obviates the need for a GPS completely. There are robust GPS-enabled applications on the iPhone, Palm, Windows OS and Android, but there are also applications like Layar, Scanlife, Shazam, and the newly-revealed Google Goggles that take your phone one step closer to the corneally-implanted HUDs we all dream about having someday. As these technologies spread, new types of storytelling are bound to emerge that take advantage of them.

swag

Radio Nonchalance Broadcast Transcript
Elsewhere Public Works Agency, $6.99
The “transcript” of Nonchalance’s localized radio broadcast that can be heard at Dolores Park in San Francisco as part of the Jejune Institute’s urban adventure, is actually a beautifully illustrated map of the story world, with puzzle elements woven into the design. The map can be purchased here by typing “&_support”. (They also have CDs of vintage cult recordings, and stylish t-shirts.)

InactiveWare
Awkward Hug, $16.99 – $17.99
The clever t-shirt company started by the main characters in Must Love Robots is still around, which means you can still get a Mac and Cheese shirt. What were you waiting for? All proceeds go to One Laptop Per Child.

experience

A Day in the Elsewhere, An Evening at Alcatraz
The Jejune Institute and Alcatraz, $34.10
I’m not the only transmedia fan planning a trip to San Francisco just to visit The Jejune Institute. Spend a day traversing a bizarre and rich game world interwoven with the streets of the city. Top the day off with the Alcatraz Island Night Tour, which Nick Braccia reviewed for CH as “informative and, at night, quite scary.”

A Part in a Zombie Movie
you and your friends, free (ish)
Lost Zombies is a community-generated zombie mockumentary that’s being put together online as we speak. Film a short with your lucky loved one as the star (breather or shambler – their choice) and add it to the mix.

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