Distribution

Reverse Distribution Model

Our Show proposes to employ a reverse distribution model, whereby a comedy concept would, through careful viral and popularity marketing, attempt to gain a niched following before going to air in the conventional broadcast sense. This would provide a testing ground for characters and concepts, and an accurate indication of what advertisers or potential investors can expect.

This would be sketch driven, beginning with characters all marketing in short videos and distributed throughout the web, but all feeding into a central site. This distribution model aims to build a pre show fan base, but does not make a secret of the fact that this is a concept which is trying to get onto air. This would mean that when there is a transition to the mainstream broadcast model fans would not take it as a sell out, but rather a natural progression.

Loyalty would be maintained by the web componant still being intergral to the show, after it has gone to air, with new episodes, unseen footage, behind the scenes docos, and character studies all being made available only on the web. Material would also constantly be used through viral marketing to generate more support.

Background

Friends

The Website of the successful TV sitcom Friends is a great example of a basic arbitrary take on the web component of a successful commercially distributed comedy series. Nielsen Media Research Australia had Friends averaging 2,340,000 viewers per episode in Australia, and ranked it as the most watched program. The site of this program features: a few cheesy games, a tour of the set, some bios, plenty of flogging the DVD set, a message board and a feature allowing insight into the costuming. All of this content may provide some amusement for the hardcore fans, but does not enrich the experience, or provide a space for the winning of new fans.

Dawson’s Creek

The series Dawson’s Creek featured a web component called Dawson’s Desktop, which allowed fans to access the show’s characters’ desktops. This created depth to the characters and allowed the fans insight into their lives. Clearly this is a much more creative way of distributing the show with an additional web component.

We dissected several models of distribution according to our Case Studies.

Viral Marketing

The term [viral marketing] applies to the epidemic that occurs when a company uses the network effect of the Internet to create hyper-growth.

This was first successfully employed by Hotmail. It is an effortless and cheap form of marketing distribution.

In its first 18 months, [Hotmail] signed up over 12 million subscribers, spending less than $500,000 on marketing, advertising and promotion before selling to Microsoft for a cool $400 million in Microsoft stock.

Source:
Knight, Christopher M. “Viral Marketing.” Boardwatch. Golden: Nov 1999. Vol. 13, Iss. 11. page 50, 3 pages

Key Important Points

1. Offering Free Services
As viral marketing relies heavily on word of mouth to reach a vast audience it is crucial that there is something to talk about. The most effective in this case is the word ‘free’ attached to something cool, powerful, beneficial, radical or at least worthy to be passed on to a friend.

2. Easy of Transmission
If the person exposed to the viral campaingn wants to pass the message on, they have to be able to do so effortlessly. If there is technical knowhow or other problems involved they might change their mind. Viruses spread with utter ease, others have to avoid contact with the infected.

3. Scalability
If exponential growth is approaching vast numbers of people using the service (as mentioned above), planning ahead is essential. If for example a video is accessed so many times at once tha the bandwidth is overloaded, the campaign can’t work to its fullest extent.

4. Primal Factor
We are humans marketing for humans, therefore addressing primal human needs such as to communicate, the desire to be cool, popular, loved, and understood.

5. Use Existing Tools
If we assume that everyone has 8 to 12 people in their close social network, we need to take into account how people communicate with each other. Via phone, email, chat and most recently my space and facebook.

6. Leech
As established above under “Scalability” resources may soon become an issue. Using other resources is a creative viral marketing campaign. For example a video should sit on you tube not your own site, a cool banner can also sit on other sites, etc.

Source:
Wilson, Ralph F. The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing.” Web Marketing Today. February 2005. Accessed April 2008. http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

Concept Video

Concept video as a form of fun entertainment, which can indulge in lower production values, parody, behind the scenes, bloopers, etc to engulf an audience on a more familiar level (eg. home videos, their owen wedding videos for example).

Dawson talks about concept video to propell a viral marketing campaign and what needs to go around it in order to be successful. Of course he does not fail to mention you tube as an excellent distribution method for concept video

Another form to increase viewer interest is to serialize the video. Shorter punch-like segments that will starve an audience for more entertainment in the same form. This gives them a reason to come back for more, forming a connection with the product.

Below is the video Rules of Engagement a viral marketing concept video of film grads Peggy O’Brien and Steven Rosenthal to announce their wedding. It utilises many of the factors raised earlier. It’s fun, a bit ridiculous, new and even though it has quite high production values succeeds in communicating its idea in a home video style.

Source:
Dawson, Ron. “Viral Marketing.” Event DV. December 2006, 19, 12. ABI/INFORM Global. Page 20

Case Studies

I came across several recent creative viral marketing campaigns and analysed a few of them in relation to our intended distribution method and initial marketing approach.

Get a Call from Samuel L Jackson

Similar to The Ring 2 or The Office, where a user could send a customized phone call to a friend, the Snakes on a Plane campaign allowed users to send a phone call spoken by Samuel L Jackson to their friends. Such a campaign can be rather resource draining as it requires these messages to be saved and then sent to the dedicated phone numbers. Also the cultural barrier did was not considered, which this poor guy discovered. It was successful however because it was considered as a ‘cool’ prank and involved a phone call which is much more personal than an email or a banner popping up.

Sources:
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2005/08/scariest_viral_.html
http://www.chuckp3.com/blog/uploaded_images/SnakesPlane1230jasfd.jpg

Dexter your Friends

A chilling viral campaign where friends are able to ‘Dexter’ their friends with a personalized news broadcast like video message. No doubt this ad was controversial as it scared many of its victims.

With this example I discovered another very crucial ingredient in a viral campaign. That is a technological achievement, something that ‘awww’s’ the audience. Personalised messages embedded inside a video, helps contextualise them in a sense of added realism. The campaign was designed by Ralph and Co. They created a a site called icetruck set up like a you tube page with fake comments and channels, etc.

CLICK HERE for an example of when I ‘Dextered’ myself. Creepy!!

Sources
Cymbler, Harry. “Dexter Case Study.” M2 Presswire. Coventry: Dec 3, 2007.
Nudd, Tim. “’Dexter’ Campaign gets away with murder.” Ad Freak. Accessed May 2008.

Team Fortress 2

Valve showed us all how it’s done with their very successful character based viral marketing campaign for their highly anticipated online shooter Team Fortress 2. The original was a highly successful game due to its caricatures of characters based on online gaming stereotypes such as the stalked, sniper, guns blazing, camper, stalker, etc. The remake was attempting a highly realistic approach, however the company decided to completely redo their initial concept and focus on these caricatures.

Their viral concept videos embrace this form of marketing. They hold high production values, communicate a character to connect with individual players and are funny so that people will pass them on. At the end of the video the viewer is directed to the purchasing site.

Here are two of my favorites:

The Heavy Weapons Guy

The Engineer

Conclusion

We plan to form characters for our show with serialized concept videos pre-air which will be distributed online. All the videos and the different characters are linked to the show’s brand and linked back to the show’s central website. On the website popularity and views will govern which top five characters the sitcom will be based around. These of course are only the central characters and there is plenty of room to introduce other successful characters into the show at a later stage via the same method.

Popularity

When discussing Video based comedy and new means of innovative distribution, it is impossible to bypass YOUTUBE as an example of a video content sharing site functioning almost solely through popularity. As we are researching into viral marketing, which is popularity marketing, we undertook some research into the effects of popularity on the web, with You Tube as a basis.

This video is by Lee Redlingshafer, part of mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university
This project was part of digital ethnography working group, a team of cultural anthropology undergraduates led by Dr. Michael Wesch exploring the impact of digital technology on human interaction and human interaction on digital technology…

See more Here

This project features a study of ways to become popular, according to popular youtube users. These include: be funny, original, to make videos you want to watch, have good production values, and above all, do NOT try to manipulate your audience.

The YOUTUBE home page is a great example of just how directly this site functions through popularity. Headings include: Featured, Most Popular, Most Discussed, Most recent, Most Responded, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Editors Picks, Spotlights…

This article is about music industry specifically but deals with some issues that Lionel and I , in our concept need to think about… in terms of the rights and use (appropriation) of any content put online…

Digital Rights

DFC Lobbies for Digital Rights
Peter Jacobs. Pro Sound News. (International). New York: Aug 2007. Vol. 29, Iss. 8; pg. 12, 1 pgs

“It’s all about you listening to music at your convenience in your home when you want to, as opposed to when you’re dictated to,” says Don Goldberg, a spokesman for the organization. “We as consumers look at it as we want to buy and own the rights to listen to music when we want and how we want to. Individuals have rights. It’s not just the RIAA and [film] studios that have rights; individuals have rights too, and we need to make our voices heard and begin to exercise those rights.”
Their efforts in Washington have not been for naught. Goldberg cites House Member Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virginia, as one of the strongest supporters of the Digital Freedom Campaign. Boucher recently introduced into the House what is being called the “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007.” With a mission “to promote innovation, to encourage the introduction of new technology, to enhance library preservation efforts, and to protect the fair use rights of consumers, and for other purposes,” the bill reads like something off the Digital Freedom Campaign website.
To help get their message out, the Digital Freedom Campaign has had a presence at music festivals like South By Southwest, various concerts in New York, and CES in Las Vegas. Said Goldberg, “Everywhere we go, anybody who listens to what we’re talking about automatically says, ‘I’m with you, where can I sign up?’ So from a grassroots perspective, we’ve been very successful in getting people interested.”

Relationship Marketing

This is a great article dealing with the importance of forming close relationships when marketing, this is a key concept for us in the online component of our concept. Below is the abstract, when they say customer think audience, when they say entrepreneur think of us as the producers of the content

RELATIONSHIP MARKETING: ITS KEY ROLE IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP
DAY, J; ET ALLong Range Planning (UK) 31(6) December , 828-837, 1998
JT: Long Range Planning (UK)

PG: 828-837

It appears that the future for marketing is building personal relationships with clients, understanding their needs and wants and being consistent with customer dedication. These are all features of relationship marketing. The difference between marketing and entrepreneurship and whether companies are proactive or reactive in their marketing efforts are explained. How SMEs can capture entrepreneurship and use ideas to their advantage has been studied by the authors and in presenting the results, they conclude that entrepreneurial SMEs are more focussed on the main idea behind relationship marketing – customer retention and development.

Relevance in Brand and Media Consumption

Tony Walker is the manager of ABC’s Digital Radio and last week came to talk in our Media Industries lecture. All the points he made were things I completely agree with, and things i tend to tell anyone who will listen. His points tended to also support a lot of what we have been discussing to do with convergence culture in PP1.
He contends relevence is the key for a modern audience deciding what to consume from the plethora of content and information. No longer do people go straight to the mothership brand as a source of reliable information, increasingly they are getting their news, entertainment, whatever from a mish-mashed collation of sources. Tony spoke about how brand was increasingly meaningless in this type of world, but on the otherhand, still people will go to a brand they know for news such as the age website, or ABC. but he does have a point that no longer are we solely reliant on that mothership brand to tell us exactly what we should belive, and what should entertain us. He used the example of Americans consuming 60% of ABC podcasts, most of whom don’t know what the ABC even are.
There has been profound paradime shift in the mainstream, conventional media model away from advertising and commercial based revenue collection. Due to decreasing TV and print media audiences, and vastly increasing web based audiences, The business model of media organisations effectively selling viewers eyes to the advertiser, is not nearly as effective as it once was.
Media consumption is a social activity, which is increasingly being produced socially (producer-consumer) as well as viewed and discussed socially. In finding a new model for revenue collection from these new trends in entertainment and information gathering, we have got to think not in the traditional sense of advertising, because the people who have moved away from the mainstream in media consumption are the people who have openly choosen against being forced to look at someones product for 30 seconds at a time. New methods are needed to open streams of revenue collection from the millions of people wanting information or entertainment but not wanting to be forced into anything, be it ads, or be it content.