by Peter Katz – Here’s my interview on branded content with Creative Director Tim Roper from award winning advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We met at UCLA Media & Entertainment Week.

What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about branded content?
The biggest misconception is how easy it is to conceive it in a fresh way and then how willing people are to consume it when it’s not fresh. Even though great branded content is a great thing, it’s extremely rare and certainly not something consumers are actively demanding.

How do you effectively balance the responsibilities of creating content that competes with the entertainment quality of popular culture, while at the same getting consumers to buy more stuff?
That’s the key: If you think about the bar for ad content as being all the funniest, most poignant, most compelling and entertaining stuff that the rest of pop culture is cranking out, then you’re going to inevitably shoot higher. Few companies are doing that. As for consumers, it’s all about truth, really. Whether they realize it or not, audiences look for truth in things. In music, film, television….They want to relate to things. So when they can recognize a kernel of truth in ANY content with an entertaining wrapper, they embrace it. So, start with the truth, set the bar high and you’ll achieve that balance you’re talking about. Hopefully.

You don’t need to name names, but what are your thoughts on mistakes people make as they try to create branded content?
You need to know going in that branded content projects involve a longer, more arduous road between conception and distribution. The brand’s commitment is so disproportionately immense that you just can’t expect to churn out these kinds of projects with great regularity. The rise and collapse of a lot of exclusively Branded Entertainment shops in the last few years is proof of that. Personally, I think that branded entertainment projects aren’t worth the time unless it’s a very natural fit for the brand and the content is just as irresistible as my favorite non-branded content out there right now. Honestly, I only have so many hours in the day and personal bandwidth. I don’t have the time or energy to consume a Coke Movie or a Walmart Music video a McDonald’s webgame unless it’s able to go toe-to-toe with all my other favorite stuff out there. And I’m IN the business.

What is your favorite example of using transmedia marketing?
The “Why so serious?” campaign for The Dark Knight recently was pretty cool.

Once most homes have Internet enabled TVs how will this convergence be worked into your strategy?
It already is..in the sense that we think that video is video. No matter where it originates from, you go at it with the same objective in mind: make everything as interactive as possible, even television-in the very basic sense that content should work hard to compel people to do, say, think or feel something. When a piece of content does that, it is, in effect, “interactive”. Now, obviously with internet-enabled TV you’ll be doing a lot more than passively watching the big box. So, you can start considering a much more rich interactive experience there, I guess. Maybe now we’ll bring back some of the crazy ideas we had 2-3 years ago that our developers told us were nuts for the average laptop, who knows?

In a couple years will more entertainment be branded content?
I imagine so. But, if it is, I sure hope people push as hard on making the content actually entertaining as they do on dreaming up the vehicles or pitching the increased spend. Because for every BMW films or overtly “green” 30 Rock episode, there’s a dozen silly, contrived videos about mayonnaise or BBQ sauce or head-scratching web labyrinths for some car company that just aren’t begging to be engaged with.

What is your favorite viral video, TV show, and movie of 2010?
Ha..well, it’s pretty early in the year, actually. Sort of reminds me of those movie ads where they flash those critic blurbs saying “Best movie of the year!” for a movie that comes out in January or February. I think I gotta get back to you on this one.

Peter Katz is an award winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Peter has produced genre films that have screened all over the world from the AFI Fest to the Rome Film Festival. His first picture, Home Sick, starred Bill Moseley from The Devil’s Rejects and Tom Towles from Henry Portrait Of A Serial Killer. Next Peter worked with Tobe Hooper (director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist) on Mortuary, which premiered on the Sci Fi Channel. Most recently he was a producer on Pop Skull, a psychological ghost film, that has received great reviews in Variety and numerous film web sites. Currently, Peter is developing projects across various mediums including film, comics, and the web.

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

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

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

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

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.

For more visit Culture Hacker

Robert Pratten is an award-winning feature film director, writer & producer that has been fighting the need to return to his marketing consultancy roots since Internet piracy stole his livelihood. Robert has advised international telecoms operators and vendors such as Nokia, Ericsson, Lucent, Telia and Telmex and now divides his time between filmmaking and advising media tech start-ups and producers. Fortunately, he enjoys both. He writes a popular blog on movie production, marketing and distribution at www.zenfilms.com

The WBP network will be growing in the coming months as we bring on additional contributors and finalize a new site design. The following are some recent posts by contributors.

Over at the New Breed

The SABI Festival Strategy

by Zak Forsman

STEP ZERO: ASK YOURSELF WHY

Be honest with yourself and ask why you want to do this. It will be a financial, emotional and physical drain to be sure. So you must define your goals and the reason why they are goals. For us, we have solidified our plans to release HEART OF NOW and WHITE KNUCKLES through our own distribution company, CINEFIST. So we are not seeking traditional distribution. And by “traditional” I mean selling the domestic rights for 25 years, for less than $100,000 in advance and a tiny cut of the profit. Instead, we ARE seeking some rather important things to support a direct-to-audience distribution effort:

* To meet new friends, filmmakers, fans and partners
* To garner laurels, prestige, press and reviews
* To announce a platform release to a larger audience
* To make a little $$$ on DVD, soundtrack and merch sales at each screening
* To get additional feedback from audiences

So, what does a modern, forward-thinking festival strategy look like? From the outside, it looks like the picture above – a bucket full of submission packets amounting to $1500 in fees for 40 festivals. I’ve come to define our festival strategy by working backwards from our direct-to-audience distribution plan. We know we want to begin the latter in July 2010 so the focus had to go toward festivals that would play between now and the end of June. The intent being that if we are accepted, we can incorporate that opportunity into the distribution road map, without relying on it “for direction”.

So how did I decide which festivals to submit to?

Read More

Over at Culture Hacker

Doing the Wave

Dee Cook tries to make sense of Google Wave. Now 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? Read More

The First Ever Culture Hacker Gift Guide

- games, books, interactive experiences and tech are presented in a nice roundup by Haley Moore.

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.

After Jump – books, experiences, swag

By Haley Moore – Smoking Gun Interactive is taking its new ARG Exoriare very seriously.

Just because the game is intimately tied to the release of a new graphic novel and a planned console game, they aren’t about to treat it like an advertising campaign. In fact, they’ve been sending out press releases, writing stories for BoingBoing, and talking to The Guardian in anticipation of the ARG, rather than waiting to cover it in triumphant retrospect.

Just from looking at Exoriare, you can tell that this game is meant to be the center of an experience.

Your first interaction with the game is breaking your personal computer out of the conventional network (through an adventure game that takes its first line from Zork) and into the Darknet, a staging ground for the game’s rebel alliance of hackers. As in portions of other ARGs – recent examples include Jejune and Project Abraham – the flash components of the game represent a computer terminal in an alternate world, with an alternate set of rules.

If you manage to break into the Darknet, you’ll be given a universal username for the Exoriare forums that will also track your progress in the game, and grant you access to a slew of programs for working through the story. There’s a space-age radio tuner that delivers audio snippets, a remote server hacking widget reminiscent of Uplink, and a punishingly hard DNA game that’s used to hack your computers biometric systems. For the moment, the experience culminates in a cooperative puzzle game called Global Forager, whose ultimate goal is to pull computers into the Darknet.

The greater storyline is a mashup of ARG staples, involving the Knights of Malta, ancient temples, government cover-ups, obelisks, and a looming alien invasion.

Smoking Gun says that the ARG is just the first element of a new property that will eventually encompass a graphic novel, codenamed X and scripted by author and old-school cyberpunk Douglas Rushkoff, as well as a traditional console game. (If you aren’t familiar with Rushkoff, you should be. We have him to thank for the term “viral media.”) The three narratives will intersect and interact to create a single pervasive story. According to Rushkoff, this has led to a fluid method of writing collaboration inside the Smoking Gun team.

I build a character, and then they stick her into one of their squads in the game; or they build a weapon that I then steal for the climax of one of the scenes in my comic. If we were trying to figure out whose IP was whose, we’d be sunk before we began – which is why we’ve developed a more “communal” model of creative control and ownership.

In other words, the connection between the three will be more than skin deep. The design of the ARG’s puzzle games, which are both original and challenging, already seems to signal a strong connection between the ARG design team and Smoking Gun’s traditional game designers.

For interactive story developers, the main question is, will it take? Will we see more ARGs and other pervasive media moving to the center of large extended experiences with other, commercial branches (such as this comic)? Will that mean a final end to the “curtain” of anonymity that separated ARG creators from their players in the games that defined the medium? Will more of our work get this kind of top billing?

Read More at Culture Hacker

RELATED: Douglas Rushkoff DIY DAYS PHILADELPHIA keynote

Haley Moore is a mild-mannered reporter by day, super spy by night: an Alternate Reality puppetmaster whose game credits include Catching the Wish and Monster Hunters Club, and a news writer and columnist for the Coppell Citizens’ Advocate. When she isn’t sculpting chain-smoking midgets out of polymer clay or plopping pirate hats on unsuspecting passers-by, she writes for Culture Hacker from her Texas home.

Power to the Pixel, an influential conference for the art and craft of digital storytelling has just announced a call for entry. The Pixel Pitch is looking for cross-media projects that have a film focus. I was fortunate to take part in the first Pixel Pitch with my newest project HiM. This innovative program offers an opportunity for those who are experimenting with cross-media storytelling to connect directly with funders, broadcast partners, and brands. And if that weren’t enough of a step forward this year’s Pixel Pitch adds a cash award of £6,000 to the top project. For full guidelines and info visit www.powertothepixel.com

From the site:

The Pixel Pitch is Power to the Pixel’s ground-breaking new pitching forum for up to ten of the best UK and international cross-media film projects.

We are looking for stories that can span film, TV, online, mobile and gaming to be presented to a select group of financiers, commissioners, tech companies, online portals and media companies in front of an audience of PTTP participants.

The selected project teams will compete for the
BABELGUM PIXEL PITCH PRIZE of £6,000.

Teams will benefit from significant international publicity and be introduced to new international business and partnership opportunities as well as one-to-one consultancies.

Last year’s Launch saw four cross-media projects presented to international companies including Babelgum, Sony Computer Entertainment, BBC, YouTube, MySpace, Amazon, Channel 4, UK Film Council, Arts Council of England, Tribeca Film Institute.