According the WSJ, Revlon and Match.com are partnering for another in the latest attempt to stop people from fast-fowarding through commericials – put mini-show IN the commercials that are really just commercials but not really because hey, they’re kind of like shows but shorter… huh?!
“Beginning Monday, Time Warner’s TBS will air a two-minute show called “Commuter Confidential” during episodes of “Sex and the City.”…The show will follow the lives of Carmen, Daisy, Paula and Sylvie as they carpool, and the vignettes feature plenty of plugs for Match.com and Revlon products. In one episode, Paula is planning her fifth date with a firefighter she met on Match.com — the same online dating site where Sylvie met her current husband. All the women spend time applying Revlon products throughout the series. About 20 episodes of the minishow will air over the next four weeks, and each show will be followed by ads for Match.com and Revlon.”
This is not a new tactic but one that I haven’t heard much positive response to – first of all, none of these mini-series have proven to be especially good, certainly not good enough to actually be a show on their own. Secondly, why would I want to try to follow two different shows AT THE SAME TIME. There I am happily watching a SATC rerun when there is suddenly a whole new show on, with four women yapping about men and makeup but it’s not the show I was just watching. Just some weak reflection of the show I was just watching and this one keeps mentioning Match.com every ten seconds.
Yeesh.
Wired has a look at a very successful “viral” marketing video campaign for the yet-to-be-released webseries THE PARTY.
In a series of short videos released to YouTube, we meet purported superdelagate Tom Ryan, who pleads with viewers to help him make the difficult Obama/Clinton decision.
“The tremendous response that the fake superdelegate character received illustrates how quickly grassroots supporters in this heated political climate can pick up and transmit information regardless of its accuracy, in what has up until recently been a closely-fought race where every delegate counts.
“We assumed that people online and in the blog communities would watch the videos and realize that we were doing thinly-veiled satire, but that’s not what happened,” says Howard Thomas, a 27-year-old Democratic political consultant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the show’s creator and executive producer.”
In this heated political season (is it really a season if it lasts more than a year?) it isn’t suprising that so many people decided the videos were real. The more interesting question will be whether or not these same viewers will be interested enough to follow the character to the upcoming webseries once they know it is all an act.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0AT9XUihnM&hl=en]
I had a chance to watch the first 3 (of 50) 2-3min episodes of the Eisner-funded webseries FOREIGN BODIES.
The project is actually a very big marketing scheme for an upcoming Robin Cook novel based around the dangers of medical tourism.
Visually, the series looks like a nicely made-for-cable MOW. The actors are pros and the thing is shot in nice digital on location in lots of cool foreign locales.
The thing is, it feels so much like average television. It’s just a lot shorter. So short that it is hard to get drawn in, even with 3 episodes available. Maybe this is the sort of thing one waits for more of a resevoir of episodes before diving in?
This is certainly another step forward in terms of professionally produced online episodic video. It’s good to see more drama and thriller stuff, too. Still, this one doesn’t feel like a hit. The target audience isn’t clear and I fear the story itself is just a bit too dry.
Check them all out here.
(via SAI and Tilzy)
In a Reuters article, Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix Inc. said,
“We think the by-mail business is very strong but will probably peak in the next five years,” said Hastings at the Netflix Investor Day in San Francisco on Wednesday. A slide at the presentation showed the peak in five to 10 years.”
Yup, they see the future is in direct downloads and VOD and that means the general future for hard disc technology may be going the way of the VHS. This isn’t all that surprising but it does raise the stakes for all the traditional media distributors. Will they learn any lessons from the music industry?
The news is that the UK webseries SOPHIA’S DIARY has been picked up for a second season on the popular site Bebo (recently acquired by AOL).
“The online drama, which follows a feisty 17-year-old and her friends, invites users of the social network to vote on twists in the storyline. Sofia’s Diary typically attracts upwards of 1,000 comments each day on the show’s Bebo channel and character profile pages.” (via GuardianUK)
What’s interesting to note here is that the second season will consist of 64 episodes. This is a much larger commitment to a storyline than so many of the US webseries we’ve seen that seem to be content putting up an episode a week for a couple of months and then dying off quietly in a dark corner of the web.
Obviously, this sort of commitment takes money and clearly Bebo/AOL is investing at least some cash into this venture – though I doubt anyone is getting rich just yet.
This series is a clear decendent of lonelygirl15 and demonstrates that, given the right target audience, exposure and comittment a webseries can be a serious entertainment contender.
In a sort of followup to what has become by far my post popular post about the lecture my parents got from security at a screening of American Teen comes this amazing little note via BoingBoing:
“While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don’t bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.”
This is just another massive sign that the studios, in their losing attempts to stop piracy, are really just abusing and ripping off their own customers. Who will be far more likely to be open to piracy after the experience.
In a sort of followup to what has become by far my post popular post about the lecture my parents got from security at a screening of American Teen comes this amazing little note via BoingBoing:
“While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don’t bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.”
This is just another massive sign that the studios, in their losing attempts to stop piracy, are really just abusing and ripping off their own customers. Who will be far more likely to be open to piracy after the experience.
The other day NYT tech-columnist and usually cool-seeming guy wrote a pretty ignorant and short-sighted column on why he doesn’t allow there to be digital copies of his books in circulation. He believes the whole notion that just because something can be freely distributed it should free to consume is absurd.
“So yes, this is how I, as an author who’s been twice-burned, truly feel. And yet I realize that it puts me, rather awkwardly, on the same side of the piracy issue as the record companies and movie companies, who are suing teenagers for downloading songs, and of whom I’ve made endless fun.”
That is certainly a sad place to be, Mr. Pogue. And, as TechDirt points out, your position is probably only going to worsen:
“It’s not that things ought to be free because they can be free — but that things will be free because that’s just basic economics. Price gets driven to marginal cost in a competitive market, and the reason it happens is because others do learn to put in place business models that work, and then if you’re the lone holdout, people start to ignore you.”
This is part of a huge discussion going on all over the web (and the “real” world too) regarding how to deal with the fact that so many goods and services are being made obsolete by digital transmission and consumption.
Stay tuned.
Over on BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin was all excited about a video on YouTube featuring what she thought was a great homemade remake of the famous Indiana Jones boulder scene but…
“Jacob Appelbaum was one of many folks who went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, and hated it. About this internet video, in which a giant Lego-covered styrofoam boulder hurls towards hapless victims, he says, “I was happy to see that someone else was as nostalgic as me.” UPDATE: oh nooooooes, we have been duped by a sneaky viral marketing campaign. I HATE YOU INTERNET MARKETERS. Take this conversation and shove it.”
Yes, Lego was trying their hand at the viral marketing game and it looks like they’ve been burned. How did they get burned, you ask? Well, it turns out that a lot of internet users have lots of free time to poke holes in any alibi:
“The YouTube account holder google’s to an “office food blog” which shows him in the background of BSSP. They have the LucasArts games account. They’re located on Liberty Way which I’ve worked in the same building and recognized it from the photos.”
Let that be a warning to all those marketers out there hoping to go stealth. The real question is whether or not this revelation actually hurts the potential of this campaign.
Oh, here’s the video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFGVzt7c5bY&hl=en]
Short answer: I don’t think so.
However, over on TechDirt there are some comments on Ian Rogers (former GM of Yahoo Music) open letter to EMI in which he talks of a new(ish) idea:
“affinity labels. Put together various mini-labels under which similar types of bands are associated. And, include on those labels a few of the “big name” EMI artists. Thus, for all the fans who are fans of some huge artist, by creating these affinity labels, it will help drive the fans of the big name artist to those other bands as well, knowing that they all have a similar sound or musical philosophy.”
I might be crazy but this sounds a lot like every indie label out there except with the idea of using big bands to attract fans to smaller bands. Every indie label that’s any good is good because of its taste and fans of a label trust each new band the label releases will be worth listening to.
Applying this basic concept to the major labels – basically turning them into a bunch of mini-labels – is something the big film studios have tried to do over the past decade or two. They formed little “indie” studios within their bigger frameworks to distribute smaller films.
Now, these same studios are discovering that smaller films simply make less money and they are shutting down their “indie” wings left and right (Warner Independent and PictureHouse are recent examples) to focus on big-budget blockbusters.
I don’t see how it will work any better for the labels.
Uncategorized | admin | 
May 30, 2008 4:13 pm | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe