Search results matching tags 'digital' and 'FriendFeed'

Is Purefold pure gold for brands or pure confusion?

2292853 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:14:00 GMT

Coming soon from Free Scott, the new entertainment venture of Ridley Scott and his brother Tony, is a trippy new sci-fi entertainment project called Purefold that plans to let brand’s sponsor the content, and let the audience drive the plot line using social networking platforms.

Produced by Ag8, the concept will see participating brands “…take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.” The project explores transmedia entertainment and will launch off of cross-platform channels. What? Purefold just might represent pure gold for brands looking to reach audiences in an extremely interactive format, but as of now, it has a lot of people baffled as to how it will work, what it will be, and if branded content is a good idea or not.

Discussions about Purefold on Friend Feed, the main resource planned to “harvest” story ideas, are already brewing about the question of what it means to be human, the driving theme behind the story that will be loosely based on Blade Runner. Ag8 is getting people to explore the idea of what “transhumanism” is in the Purefold discussion group on Friend Feed, but the project is often met with confusion, with participants trying to understand what is happening, and what role they will play. For insight as to what people think of Purefold, I’ve been asking around.

A few entertainment insiders were willing to go on the record to share what they think of the project and here is what they had to say: Jenifer Hanen, a blogger from Los Angeles, was wary of the idea of brand’s sponsoring content based on projects she has seen fail, but likes the DIY media side of the project and the idea to have the plot line driven by the audience. Listen to a conversation I had with Jen about Purefold here.

Film Production Designer Tema L. Staig, who is based in Los Angeles, first reacted to the idea of Purefold saying “The project sounds almost like virtual mad libs for content and advertising.” She also had this to say: "Universally, people have always needed to create visual and/or verbal stories and have a cathartic experience through those stories, either through the telling or the viewing. This is what makes us human. This is what connects us across the globe. Historically, unrelated cultures share similar myths and stories, suggesting that we all have a desire to explain the natural, unnatural, and supernatural. It’s our most primal of needs.

It will be interesting to see how Ag8 takes story telling to humanity’s next level. The idea of us, the greater audience being involved directly in the story is compelling in that it creates (in theory) even more empathy for the characters – those characters are a part of us. It’s our baby, even if just a little bit. How will it effect society? Will it bring us together around a global campfire? What new brainstorms might it spark? The possibilities are endless."

Here in London, I asked Mervyn Lyn, who is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Sony Music and often gets involved with branded content for the entertainment company, what he thinks of Purefold. At first reaction, he said it reminds him of MTV’s Dubplate Drama that turned to the audience to drive the story line, a show he enjoyed because it made the viewers feel part of the show. As for letting brand’s sponsor the content, he was cautionary about the idea because so often people are suspicious when a company attempts to sell them something through a new medium. “It depends how it is done and if it is trying to lean on branded content then they will have to strike a balance between the brand and the content so that each side doesn’t feel they are losing out,” he said.

They need to be very careful in making it driven by advertising because people see this as being railroaded and people will be cynically asking ‘what are they trying to sell me?’” The approach Purefold is using will be ground breaking in entertainment, according to producers, and it will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms equal use rights through their participation.

According to Ag8’s Tom Himpe, Purefold will be broadcast across a variety of media platforms and spread virally across the Internet. “Most brands are aware of the fact that social media has changed the dynamics of the conversation, and they can't just spell out their message in the same way as with one-way advertising methods,” he said. “We are giving brands the opportunity to create stories over an extended period of time, in collaboration with their audiences and relying on top industry talent in both writing and directing. That's quite a unique package, especially in view of the fact that they can use the audiovisual assets freely across all their platforms and channels, from retail to mobile, from cinema to television.”

For now Ag8 is not revealing who the brand sponsors will be, but based on Friend Feed discussions the writers are already compiling what the story line will be, all set in the near future. The question many have is how brands will fit into the discussion, and for that, Himpe had this to say:

“There are two ways in which we are "guiding" the conversation. First of all, the brand is setting up the framework of the conversation, by defining one or multiple brand propositions they want to explore and picking a story line through which they want to explore that proposition. This sets up the framework within which we harvest online conversations.

So we're not just harvesting random conversations across the entire web, we set out specific parameters with the participating brands. Secondly, while we're listening to what the audience wants to see within the episodes, the ultimate creative control still resides with our editorial team and the Free Scott Directors, who are making creative sense of the audience's input. So there is another level of control there. However, it's very important for brands to understand that Purefold is about creating top quality entertainment, and not about extended the length of their tv commercials.

There's a different balance here, and sure, that's something they might have to get used to.”

Still confused, but ready to watch Purefold unfold,

-Lisa

Is TV more fun when you tweet?

2292853 — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:29:00 GMT

Boring old telly has been getting a lot more fun lately, if you are using Twitter. The micro-blogging service is increasingly becoming the back channel of broadcast, where people turn to exclaim delight or disgust about what they are watching. Tuned into Channel 4's My Monkey Baby, and wondering what others are thinking about the parade of monkey loving characters? Popping onto Twitter and searching for the programme title reveals a trail of hilarious tweets, and you can add in, that is, if you actually want to confess that you are watching the show.

A television programme can come alive when you chime in with your own views, and see the intelligent, dumb, off-colour or utterly bizarre commentary of others, adding a whole new layer of entertainment experience. In America, broadcasters are fully embracing the interactive power of Twitter, with even local news stations inviting people to tweet in with updates about the weather conditions, or share views on issues. Political elections were the first and most noticeable examples of how the views of many can be shared using Twitter, as seen when Hack The Debate aired on Current TV in the lead up to the presidential elections.

For broadcasters, the service can be an instant way to guage if programming is having any impact on viewers, or, for the more clever, use the service to ignite interaction with audiences. When a show starts "trending" on Twitter, broadcast executives can know they have a hit, as has happened with Eurovision, ITV's Britain's Got Talent and Channel 4's Surgery Live.

Twitter got noisy surrounding Eurovision, as it sparked hundreds of amusing tweets about the song contest, and gave rise to an alternative tweeting voice when journalist Ewan Spence used Twitter to cover the event from the show's frontline in Moscow, sending tweets, blogging and podcasting from the event. Followers of @ewanspence got treated to extra facts, insights and a few trumpeted early previews of what was to come, as entrants paraded on stage in gladiator costumes, thigh high patent leather boots or full green body paint.

"I decided to offer pithy, humourous, pre-emptive insight of what we were all seeing, and joined 1,000 other press people from around Europe to cover Eurovision," he said.

With viewing figures of 10 million in the UK, and 112 million across Europe for Eurovision this year, Spence thought that 2009 would be the year that millions of fans would tweet about the song contest, based on the growing number of entertainment trending topics he noticed, and recognizing that this year Twitter's popularity has expanded, with estimates of 33 million monthly visits. He out-tweeted much of the official BBC correspondents by speed of updates and depth of information, winning rave reviews from followers. Several said they preferred the commentary of the renegade Eurovision tweet host to the banter of Graham Norton's debut year as Eurovision host.

"The public love it, but mainstream coverage does not match up to the public viewpoint so the Internet's communities are augmenting what they see using Twitter," he said. Listen to an Audioboo interview with Ewan Spence here.

Ewan Spence

While Spence may still be a rare visionary in how he used Twitter as a journalist, the big broadcasters are certainly wading into the water with experiments. Channel 4's Surgery Live invited people to send in questions using Twitter, some of which the show's host Krishnan Guru-Murthy then posed to both the doctors, and even the patient, on live television. Following along with the programme's hashtag of #slive, a rather surreal conversation developed with audience members, with one even asking if the patient's brain tumour was edible. Brave, risky, groundbreaking, Channel 4 proved that entertainment can also be educational, and the show did manage to top Twitter's most watched trending topics.

"What this new generation of social media brings is a networked conversation which is global, searchable, tagable and open. In other words, unlike emails, text messages or phones, you can join in a discussion among numerous people from right across the Uk and beyond -- fellow viewers, experts, medical students, enthusiasts, all manner of interested parties -- live and simultaneously," said Adam Gee, Channel 4's Cross-platform Commissioning Editor for Factual.

Channel 4 has just started a new programme incorporating Twitter, beginning to share updates from documentary film maker Ed Wardel, who is putting his wilderness survival skills to test in the Yukon, for the series Alone In The Wild. The programme airs in July, but Wardle has already started tweeting about his experience.

Using Twitter, and other social media websites, to add interactivity to television watching might just be transforming how we interact with the medium, and Twitter's founders are keeping an eye toward possibilities, with news that a Twitter television show may be in works for the future.

"Twitter's open approach might have the power to transform television -- the dominant communications receiver worldwide. We're very excited to see where these experiments take us," posted Twitter founder Biz Stone on his blog.

In the not to distant future, a new transmedia entertainment venture called Purefold from Ag8, a partnership production with Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and Tony Scott's RSA Films, will see an even more multi-layered approach to integrating social media with viewing experience. Purefold will cull storyline ideas from comments people share on Friend Feed, and other social networking websites. The programme is not planned to air on any maninstream channel, as episodes will be spread across the Internet's video sharing platforms, and brands will be invited to collaborate in the content creation to fund the programming.

Confused? You are not alone. Best stay tuned, and have some fun participating in the 2.0 tool of Twitter, and think of it as training, to get ready to adpot for the entertainment world flashing forward to even more futuristic technologies.

Watching television and tweeting at the same time,

-Lisa

Digital Britain Report Will Make PR Sector Think More Digital

2292853 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:53:00 GMT

With the release of the government's Digital Britain report this week, it comes at a timely juncture in the industry of public relations, where new technology tools are increasingly being used for communications campaigns, far more than in past years. While the main highlights of the report address infrastructure needs, improving digital access for all and controversial funding decisions for media resources such as the BBC and Channel 4, the ensuing discussions of the report have put digital on the intellectual radar for all, including those crafting PR strategy in what is more and more a fractured, niche-driven digital media landscape.

Previously, and still today, traditional PR professionals, and clients, have been reluctant to include digital media in their outreach strategy, among some excuses being:

Our clients don't care about blogs, they only want to be in the Financial Times.
We don't have the budget or time to manage online outreach, as well as traditional media outreach.
Why should we care about what someone says in a forum or a tweet about our brand?

Now, partly by force as a result of high profile cases such as Amazon experienced with bloggers and Twitter, or Domino's experienced with employees posting inappropriate YouTube videos, partly because of recessionary budget restraints on PR budgets, and partly because it seems that the tipping point of mainstream involvement in social networking has been reached (Oprah Winfrey is on Twitter!), it seems digital has snowballed into a force that must be reckoned with -- like it or not.

The government's Digital Britain report addresses many issues, and its recommendations are controversially being debated among many industries, but one of the key things it does is further force digital into the forefront of public attention and gives it a new level of credibility among businesses who may have previously scoffed at the online world.

For many years now I've been an advocate of using digital media for communications outreach and have advised many clients in how to incorporate new technology tools into campaigns, often being met with a mix of disbelief as to if it would be a worthwhile investment, and general befuddled ness as to what I've been talking about. It seems the whole wide world is now turning new attention to using digital media, and this, I think, is exciting and positive both for people and bussinesses.

While many of us who can be classified as early adopters of the digital age are already well established or have even moved onto the next new thing with tools like Audioboo for the iPhone, FriendFeed, Su.PR and the coming soon Google Wave, we've all got to remember that there are millions of newbies from all walks of business and humanity that are just testing out the tools of the online world, with a bit of intimidation and fear.

It is is up to us, who are deeply online, to welcome, to teach and to help newocmers navigate this territory. It may be your family members, your co-workers or even your boss, who have basic questions, and if the government is going to see any success from its Digital Britain report, it is up to everyone who is already active online to be friendly mentors and teachers in helping the rest of the world catch-up with digital life. Yesterday, after reading over the report, it seemed to be a 200+ page document stating a lot of the obvious. However, these last few weeks, I've got more and more people both professionally and personally asking me questions about the basics of how to use Twitter, how to write a blog, how to manage the weird professional/personal world of Facebook, and what might seem obvious to some, just isn't to most.

Recently I've also joined the ranks of being a trainer with Pinnacle PR, a company providing all levels of communications training. My role is instructing a course in PR 2.0, providing a comprehensive look at the many multimedia digital media tools available online, and giving real-life workshops in how to construct campaigns with the tools. With the release of Digital Britain this week, I'm seeing more of the increasing importance digital is playing for business, and, based on training and conversations with people, understanding more that it is still, in fact "new" media for most people.

If you are in PR, and would like to increase your skills of PR 2.0, or other offerings from Pinnacle PR (including traditional courses of media training, media relations, crisis communications, strategic campaign planning and more) sign up for a course, and get a 10% discount up until the end of July. Pinnacle PR has offices in London, Brussels, Dubai and a newly opened training centre in Bahrain, where experienced instructors both from the media and public relations sectors provide junior up through senior level executive courses and instruction.

Training for the digital future,

-Lisa