Tubefilter News

Developing digital content is much different – and often times infinitely more challenging – than creating traditional entertainment. You often have a less focused audience with multiple tabs, ads and videos competing for their attention, and even with recent reports touting longer form consumption on the rise, you still have a smaller amount of time to compel your audience and develop your characters. Not to mention pique their interest enough to return each week (or sometimes, several weeks) for a new episode.

No matter how you slice it, it’s a tall order, and in a media saturated space, it’s more critical than ever to engage users at the point of consumption, which is why many content creators are exploring mobile as either a complementary experience, or an entirely made-for-mobile series. In fact, I’ve been recommending that my content creator clients include a mobile component to their web series to bridge the story transmedially and blend IRL experiences. Mobile is also an excellent vehicle for activating behaviors, especially with the array of technology available to enrich and personalize the experience, such as augmented reality and geo-location-based interactions.

TV Goes Mobile

Most mobile engagements to date have been developed by studios to augment their television programming and tap into a digital audience. Marc Ostrick, founder of eGuiders, was working on original scripted mobisodes as a spin-off for Fox’s 24 back in 2006 that were intended to simulate the high drama/action experience for those who wanted to watch video on their phones. A partnership Fox struck with Verizon to promote their new 3G technology spawned a pay-for-content experience, which was pretty ambitious at that time, especially considering the miniscule mobile budgets didn’t even allow for using the actual cast in the series. “But it did offer some valuable learnings,” said Ostrick. “Just because the technology is there, doesn’t mean people really want to watch TV on their cell phones unless there is something that is truly unique about experiencing mobile content than on any other medium.”

NBC is also attempting to assert a leadership position in this arena with their recent foray into a fully integrated multi-platform experience for Heroes boasting some impressive initial results. Sponsored by Sprint, the campaign began on September 28, and runs through December 30, with the story unfolding across the web and mobile, giving viewers deeper character interactions and original scripted mobile content in the form of games, stories and clues for Sprint subscribers to solve a mystery and enter to win a $25,000 interactive storyline contest. The companion content has already resulted in a rise in viewership for the show, combined with several million mobile streams and hundreds of thousands of sweepstakes entrants.

It seems like every day a new web series launches, so content creators are continually trying to think of ways to distinguish their content from the rest. And with the one-to-one nature of the web, adding an interactive element seems like a logical step in personalizing the story and bringing the characters to life. So, I was intrigued when I heard about the launch of Chapin Circle, a new female-focused web series centering around the lives of four women living in Midwestern suburbia that boasts what the show’s creator, Michele Palermo, calls a revolutionary patent-pending “Character Selection” option that she touts “might just be the future of Internet TV.” According to Palermo, the Character Selection option is a way for viewers “to tailor their experience to the character they want to watch–without ever losing the scope of the show as a whole.”

Episode 1 was a bit slow moving, and while I often consume long form content online, it felt longer than 10 minutes, taking an interminable amount of time to set up the characters. Sort of a G-rated version of Desperate Housewives meets Lifetime special, it follows four generations of women who are endearing enough, if not somewhat predictable. You’ve got the dramatic, bride-to-be 20-something, Heather (Rachael Sheridan), having relationship issues with her doctor fiancé, the spirited 30-something school teacher, Annie (Lolly Howe), more passionate about her students than her docile husband (who you fellow Gen-Xers will recognize from the original Beverly Hills 90210), the 40-something ex-lawyer, Becca (Palermo), dissatisfied with her appearance and having misgivings about her decision to be a stay-at-home mom and the 50-something outspoken menopausal woman, Susan, juggling a career, a husband who doesn’t notice her anymore and a 16-year old daughter’s teenage angst.

Other than funding, the biggest challenge for content creators is striking that delicate balance between narrative and brand. It’s a fine line between integral and intrusive when it comes to developing a branded entertainment piece that simultaneously delivers the compelling stories audiences crave, and the measurable ROI brands demand. And everyone seems to be walking the tightrope in the sometimes futile balancing act between product messaging and story integrity.

But, in the case of Altoids’ new mobile and web series, Brainstorm, in partnership with Fox Mobile Studios and Omelet, the brand integration is anything but delicate. In fact, it’s so heavy handed that it may actually border on genius.

Set in the fictitious ad agency, Yogurt, who, in the premiere episode, we find battling a round of layoffs after a huge creative misstep with one of their recent commercials that, you’ll see is more than a little suggestive, when played in fast forward — a subtle, tongue-in-cheek commentary on DVRs and the state of broadcast TV spots that prompts Don Yolk, Yogurt President, to implore, “Doesn’t anyone watch commercials at regular speed anymore?”

We love our buzz words in the digital world. There was ’social media’ and ‘microblogging’ and ‘user generated content’ and ‘engagement’ and ‘web 2.0′ (which paved way to the 2.0 suffix attached to everything) and ‘the cloud’… and now there’s ‘branded entertainment.’

The thing is, branded entertainment is nothing new. Over 50 years ago, those crafty soap companies figured out that to get in front of women to peddle their household products, they’d need to wrap their advertising around some meaningful content. And so was born the soap opera.

To help crystallize this concept, we reached out to three pioneers who are helping to shape branded experiences that are as entertaining as they are effective. The four of us will give you our definitions of the various forms of branded entertainment in a roundtable discussion, along with our visions for the future of the space.

Roundtable Participants:

Justine Bateman – Partner, FM78.tv
Tim Jones – COO, Animax Entertainment
Gennefer Snowfield – CEO, Space Truffles Entertainment
Warren Tomlin – President, Fuel Industries

One of my core specialties is web series strategy, promotion and branded entertainment experiences that augment show content. As such, I work with a number of web series, many of whom overlap in genre. In a recent DM conversation with a web series producer on Twitter, he mentioned that one of the shows I’m working with is a competitor of his because they are both sci-fi series.

The fact is that most consumers don’t even realize the wealth of web TV that is currently out there, so the underlying issue isn’t competition… it’s discovery. Even as someone immersed in the web series space, I’m not familiar with every single show, or all of the channels for viewing them, which seem to pop up daily.

But online content producers can actually surmount this hurdle collectively by banding together to build the web TV category overall, attract new viewers, and dare I say, share fan bases. Although we’re seeing more longer form content being produced — and consumed — online (according to the recent Pew report), overall webisodes are much shorter than traditional TV, making it even more feasible for viewers to adopt several series within the same genre. And with the added benefit of being able to watch them on their own time.

So, where do you go from here?

When it comes to getting exposure for your web series, you don’t need a six-figure distribution deal (although that certainly wouldn’t hurt)… what you need is a strong hook. And for Jeremy Redleaf, creator of Odd Job Nation, that hook was literally odd jobs. The concept of the series was loosely based on a friend of his who odd jobbed his way to a 5-bedroom suburban home doing everything from walking neighborhood dogs to renting out his driveway. In the pilot of Odd Jobs, we see Jeremy’s character, Nate, get fired from his high-paying job with a big investment firm, and his roommate extolling the moneymaking wonders of Craiglist’s Odd Jobs as a viable source of income. Though somewhat skeptical of making a living from random side gigs, to support his high maintenance fiancée, Nate begrudgingly agrees to try his hand at odd jobbing. And so was born a series that only 2 episodes in has already garnered some high profile press from the likes of Newsweek, CNN, CNBC and the Washington Times. (And of course Tubefilter.)

But… the coverage wasn’t about the show.

It was about the online community of odd job seekers that Jeremy built around the site, aggregating the Craigslist ‘Odd Jobs’ listings from every major city across the country, and allowing users to post – and apply to – odd jobs of their own. In fact, with only 2 episodes available, the lure of the site to date has been the job board, not the series. But with the volume of regular traffic the site’s been getting, it’s expanded the exposure for the show to a more mainstream audience than most web series typically attract, giving Jeremy that coveted hook to reel viewers in. And reeling them in, he is.