Lessons from FOE5

I recently attended one day of the "Futures of Entertainment 5" conference at M.I.T., which included a diverse group of panelist from advertising, academia, and entertainment.  Below, I've included everything I learned at the conference in one raw information dump...

Intro (William Uricchio of MIT, Ilya Vedrashko of Hill Holiday ad agency)

---In Europe, they are experimenting with technology that can transfer the data of 700 DVDs in one second.  It’s not publicly available, but supposedly demonstrates the expanding power of the internet.

---The Progressive Insurance Facebook page has 35,000 “likes.”  The Facebook page for their Flo character has 3.2 million “likes.”

---“Advertisers are content producers now.”

Panel 1: “Spreadable Media” (Henry Jenkins of USC, Sam Ford of Peppercom Strategic Communications, Joshua Green of Undercurrent)

---I think this Jenkins guy claimed to have invented the term “spreadable media.”  That is what you do as a professor, I guess.  You come up with a new name for something which is happening anyway, and then you get credit for the whole phenomenon.

---Supposedly the word “viral” is not accurate because it doesn’t recognize the agency of the community which spreads the thing around.  So that’s why “spreadable media” is better.  (I plan to still use the word “viral,” because people will actually know what I’m talking about.)  During the Q&A portion, Jenkins had a good phrase about how people might incorrectly think of social media, calling it the “smallpox infected blanket” theory of viral media.  This is what happens when you think you can force the viral phenomenon.  But just because you put it out there, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will spread.

---Copyright and piracy: Copyright owners have the right to exercise total control over their property.  But depending on the situation, it may or may not be in their BEST INTEREST to exercise control.

---Panelists recommended “Sita Sings the Blues” as an example of something that was released in an unconventional way.

---If you need to talk about internet piracy in a nice way, it’s better to say “unauthorized circulation” than “piracy.

---Distribution or circulation?  Distribution = top-down.  Circulation = part top-down, part bottom-up.

---A “gift economy” has different rules than a regular economy.  This is used in the context of user-generated content, crowd-sourced stuff, etc.  Do the people need to get paid for this?  Or would it corrupt their labor of love?  (Example: Would it be like paying for sex?)

Panel 2: Audience Participation in Decision-Making (C. Lee Harrington of Miami University, Seung Bak of Dramafever, Jamin Warren of Kill Screen)

---Piracy = a demand for content which has yet to be monetized.  (Sounds like something that belongs in the last panel, but was actually mentioned here.)

---Bak (Dramafever video streaming website): Korean TV show “Heartstrings” was a ratings flop in Korea, but a big hit on the internet among non-Koreans.

---Harrington: Fan participation in soap operas is a long-standing tradition that didn’t start with the internet; fans have long tried to drive soap opera plots through letter-writing campaigns.

---Fans who love a television program can become connected to their advertisers, too.  When the TV show Chuck was going to be cancelled, fans brought their protests directly to Subway, who saved the show with a sponsorship deal.  When All My Children was about to be cancelled, Hoover vacuums pulled all their advertising from ABC in protest.  It didn’t exactly work, but it endeared Hoover to soap fans by actually NOT advertising.  Whoever was running Hoover at the time said that members of his family were big fans of the show.  This gave Hoover’s protest a “perceived authenticity.”

---Warren (runs a website/magazine about video games): Video game fans want different levels of control.  Some people just want to be led along (this sounds like the video games I don’t like).  Some people want to explore someone else’s creation (this sounds like the video games I do like).  Some people want to be able to create their own thing (I’m not sophisticated enough for this).

---Due to the success of unauthorized “mods” (people hacking into and altering their games), video and computer games sometimes come with the built-in ability to create your own levels etc.  When you allow the users to create, you have to balance simplicity (what beginners want) and the ability to have more flexibility, control, and creativity (what sophisticated users want).

---Warren mentioned the fact that the Goldeneye video game is more successful than the Goldeneye movie.  Afterwards, I mentioned to him that I was writing something about this myself.  During our conversation, he had a general criticism about video game marketing: “Video games are usually marketed as a product, not an experience,” but mentioned the Call of Duty “We Are All Soldiers” campaign as an example of good video game marketing.

---The anonymity of internet memes: Even when people have no ability to receive credit in any way, they sometimes enjoy collaboration for its own sake.

Panel 3: Crowdsourcing/Crowdfunding (Mirko Schafer of Utrecht University, Bruno Natal of Queremos, Timo Vuorensola of Wreckamovie, and Caitlin Boyle of Film Sprout)

---Timo was clearly the star of this panel.  For one thing, he had a foreign accent (Finland).  Also, he is making a film about Nazis who live on the dark side of the moon.  Every time a new subject came up, he would begin a sentence by saying something like, “So, the way you can apply this to Moon Nazis…”  And somehow it was still funny every time.

---While Timo’s films elicit ideas and money from fans, he insists that the films are ultimately a “dictatorship.”  He and his producers make all the real decisions, and they get all the credit and money.  I guess he’s not quite so idealistic about stuff being “bottom-up.”

---One of Timo’s mottos regarding social media strategies is “fail fast.”  If people don’t respond to it quickly, just get rid of it.

---More Machiavellian talk from Timo (or Alinskyite talk?): It’s much easier to get people motivated when you present an enemy they can fight.  For example, people are more likely to support your campaign if you post a video of an obnoxious person saying, “It will never work.”  Then, you ask them to help prove that person wrong.

---Bruno is a young guy from Brazil who promotes concerts based on crowd funding.  When the concerts make enough money, the crowd investors get paid back.  However, they don’t make any money off of the concert; they just get the joy of making the concert happen.  Bruno and his partners make a profit.  Bruno says that people who give their money toward his concerts never complain about this because of the fact that the accounting is totally transparent.  He says, “People are OK with profit if you are honest about it.”

---No one gets anything done unless there is some sort of pressure or deadline.  Even crowds need to be put on a deadline.

---The size of the crowd is not as important as the passion of the crowd.

---No one gets noticed in social media unless they are on multiple platforms.

Panel 4: Location-based services (Germaine Halegoua of University of Kansas, Andy Ellwood of Gowalla.com, and some lady who was a last-minute replacement so her name isn't on my program)

---Online photos and virtual check-ins are today’s scrapbook.  (People don’t make real scrapbooks anymore.)

---No one uses foursquare.com for the coupons and financial incentives it gives.  It’s all about the social aspect of letting people know where they are or have been, or the gamification of building up your statistics.

---People expect that others will stalk their Facebook or their Foursquare, but if people actually come up to you and talk face-to-face with you about something you posted online, somehow that seems creepy.  So people feel like it’s OK for others to stalk them, but it’s not OK to actually respond honestly to what they’ve posted online?  Weird, but often appears to be true.

---Andy: QR codes are everywhere and people think everyone else is using them... but actually they are dumb and almost no one uses them.

---Andy: People are unwilling to waste time on anything.  If your website opens with a flash graphic, I’ve already given up on it.

Panel 5: Privacy concerns (Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard and Helen Nissenbaum of NYU)

---Nissenbaum has helped invent internet privacy tools like TrackMeNot and AdBlock Plus.

---Despite her work on privacy, Nissenbaum admits that voluntary sharing of information is different from loss of privacy, and if people demand “personalization,” they must give up some privacy.

---People want to get rid of online ads, but do they have an ethical obligation to tolerate them?  (After all, these ads are how they “pay” for “free” sites.)

---Traditionally, entertainment generates profit by either charging money or selling ads.  But is there now another way: profit by extracting labor, specifically through gamification?  Zittrain makes the analogy to Tom Sawyer and the fence; the work is portrayed as a game so that people want to do it for free.  The ESP game is an internet example.

If video games are movies now, do we still need the movies?

I don’t buy too many new video games, but when I was in the store recently and saw that the new Goldeneye007: Reloaded game was available, I couldn’t resist snapping up a copy, if only for the sake of how much I loved the original Goldeneye 007.

The first game came out in 1997, and even then, it may have been a warning sign about the future relationship of video games to movies.  The Goldeneye movie (starring Pierce Brosnan) was a moderate success, but very few of my friends actually watched the movie when it came out, and no one seems to have any fond memories of it now.  But every guy who was a teen/preteen in 1997 can remember playing the Goldeneye: 007 video game for hours on end.  Even now, the game’s “legendary” status is being used to promote the new game.  The cultural importance of the video game has overtaken that of its parent movie.

And so I was way psyched up to relive some of my old Goldeneye memories with this new, beefed-up version of the game.

The only problem is, the new game sucks.

Of the original game, one might say: “007stays fresh by never having you do the same thing twice. Players also have a bit of freedom as to what they want to do in any given situation, and what order the directives are completed in.”  There was a certain amount of open-endedness to the game’s missions, allowing for some individual creativity in completing them.

As for Goldeneye: Reloaded, it has better graphics, glitzier production values, and voice acting by the actual current stars of the Bond movies (Daniel Craig and Judi Dench).  It also has absolutely none of the freedom of the old game.  The game leads you through every step.  You always know where to go and what to do; there is no exploration or creativity necessary.  The progression is so linear, it’s a lot like watching a movie while pushing buttons.

Technology now allows video games to be more movie-like in other ways.  For old-school video games, plot was not much of an element.  The graphics and sound weren’t sufficient to include much story.  The old games were all about action.  Pac Man was way too busy eating those dots to deliver any memorable monologues.  Now that games have much more sophisticated animation, and the space to store almost unlimited voice-actor recordings, game plot is a much bigger factor.  To make their stories even more attractive to consumers, video games utilize the acting or voice-acting of superstars in order to bring attention to the game.  Stars with prominent video game roles include Mark Hamill, Patrick Stewart, Kiefer Sutherland, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson, Neil Patrick Harris, and all four Ghostbusters (Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson).

 [Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) reunited the original movie cast.]

The Goldeneye of the 1990s was a mediocre movie and a legendary game.  But now that video games basically are movies, the new game plays a lot like a mediocre movie.  Nevertheless, after I first put the disc in my Xbox, my disappointment didn’t prevent me from playing the game for 4 hours straight, long past when I’d planned to go to sleep.  Older video games used to offer logical stopping points.  If the game had a save feature, it might return you to a menu screen after each level.  If there was no save feature, you would probably either beat the game or receive a “game over” within a couple hours.  Modern video games zip you along from one task to the next, with no obvious break points.  There’s something strangely addictive about them, even when they aren’t any good.

During a recent trip to the gym, my personal trainer was commenting about the fact that he had some friends who were going out that night, but he’d rather stay home by himself and play the newly released Batman: Arkham City.  For a guy who I don’t consider to be a total loser, that’s really saying something.  This same guy once told me that he had to get rid of Red Dead Redemption to prevent it from taking over his life.

Here’s how this could be dangerous for the film industry: video games (1) are a lot like movies, (2) can take about 20 times longer to complete than the average movie, and (3) are dangerously addictive.  Movie theaters are losing business, and it’s hard not to think that these movie-like video games are one of the many culprits.  How can a 2-hour movie experience compete with a similar 40-hour movie experience with an addiction factor?

[Side note: This is Aeris's death in Final Fantasy VII, a prime example of how video gamers can feel a very emotional connection to the game characters they play as.  Can you match that emotional level without the interactive element?]

In my experience, I’ve found that people are rarely excited about watching movies, at least compared to my impressions of decades past.  Watching a movie just doesn’t seem special anymore.

But people still love going out to the movies.  And the “going out” half of that phrase may be more important than “the movies.”  Movie theaters still bear a social aura that video games may never have (despite somewhat social things like multiplayer modes or MMORPGs, but that’s a subject for another post).

People like to go to sleep knowing that they “went out” that night.  And that’s something the movies have which many competing media don’t have.  Are there ways to maximize this advantage?  More on that later...

The microscopic math of crowdsourcing

“Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call.”

--Wikipedia article, “Crowdsourcing”

To me, the basic theory of crowdsourcing is that if you ask enough people for something, you’re bound to get a response.  Most people may not be interested, but with so many people in the world, you don’t need to hook everybody.  You’re going to get SOMEBODY.

Of course, this attitude risks falling into the Contact trap of just believing that all big numbers are really big.  In this movie, Jodie Foster plays an astronomer searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life, and she delivers this little speech: “There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.”

It’s one of those “Wow, just think about it!” lines.  On the other hand, if you actually do think about it… it’s totally false.  If we take those numbers on their face, we have to divide 400 billion by 1 million to find how many stars have planets.  That’s 400,000.  Pretty big number.  OK, now let’s divide that number by a million again to find how many stars have planets with life.  The answer is 0.4.  Whoops, this isn’t looking so good.  We need to divide by a million again to find out how many stars in the Milky Way are orbited by intelligent life.  That gives us 0.0000004, which is a number even smaller than Pedro Martinez’s career batting average.  It’s effectively zero, really.  We already know there are more planets than that with intelligent life in the galaxy.  As in, at least one.  (That would be Earth, yeah.)

You’d think that, for a film with a $90 million dollar budget, somebody involved would bother to double-check what the difference is between a million, a billion, a quintillion, etc.  But apparently it doesn’t matter, because when you start throwing out really big numbers (larger than, say, 100?) people just tune out.

There are 307 million people in the United States.  So if your crowdsourced campaign reaches one out of every million people, you’ll wind up with a very small pool of people (307).  But if you reach one out every 100,000, then the answer is 3,070, which is roughly comparable to the amount of entries that might be placed into the Doritos crowdsourced ad campaign, Crash theSuperbowl.  There’s not a big rhetorical difference between one-in-a-million and one-in-a-hundred-thousand.  But it’s a big difference in reality.  Offering a large cash prize probably helps bridge the gap.  But one should note that it’s a lot cheaper than it would have cost to buy several thousand video advertisements the traditional way.

If you don’t have a million dollars to wave in front of random civilians, you might not get such a quick response to your crowdsourcing strategies.  On the other hand, free crowdsourcing can succeed as well.  I began this post with Wikipedia’s definition of crowdsourcing, which is a little bit like looking up the word “dictionary” in the dictionary.  Wikipedia’s philosophy of “everybody just write down everything you know, if you want” didn’t start out so great.  A cutting-edge friend of mine actually turned me on to Wikipedia in its infancy around 2002.  And I can say, unequivocally, that it was a useless, inaccurate, sloppy, piece of crap.  But with the entire world tasked to improve it, it’s basically become the main go-to reference for all knowledge… period.  Like a stone washing in the sand, it’s been slowly perfected.  No one is even embarrassed anymore to admit that Wikipedia is where they get all their shit.

If you don’t have a decade of time, or a ton of cash-money prizes, your other option is to simply offer people something they can actually get interested in.  Take for example, these projects that have managed to get funding through a website called Kickstarter.  The idea behind Kickstarter is that, if people are actually interested in your project, they can just straight up give you money.  Like, just give it to you.  And it actually works sometimes!  (Here's your vocab word for this one: "Crowdfunding.")

The world doesn’t owe you a living, but if you actually ask the world, it just might give you one anyway.  But don’t get your "one-in-a-millions" mixed up with your "one-in-a-hundred-thousands."  It can make all the difference.

Today, everyone is famous.

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods,and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

--Fight Club (movie)

“There are 3 things all men should know, and it’s time you did too.  You’re never going to be famous, you’re fatter than you think, and… [women] don’t keep wearing stockings.”

--Coupling (British television show)

Most of us spent our childhoods planning for the fame and fortune that never really came.  Somehow, nobody on my little league baseball team made the majors, and nobody from my fifth grade class is a movie star now.  Quite a shock to all of us, I’m sure.

And it’s too bad, because we were all mentally prepared for exposure.  We were ready for hordes of people to react to our every public comment, and we were totally psyched to see the tabloid pictures of our excessive partying.  We needed some place to put all these unused skills to use.

This is why we’re very fortunate to have grown up into the age of social media.  The internet is now the fame-simulator for the un-famous.  Andy Warhol said that someday everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, but he may have underestimated.  If you have a Facebook account, everyone is famous ALL THE TIME.

www.nataliedee.com

Ten years ago, you might have called a friend on the phone: “Hey, are we still planning to meet at the bar at 8 tonight?”  And it was just a phone call between two people.  Now, you write the same sentence on someone’s Facebook wall, and it is immediately cross-posted to the Facebook “news feed” of your 728 Facebook friends.  And all your friend’s friends as well!  It’s not just a note.  It’s on a news feed; it’s news!  And when you pass out drunk on the steps of said bar, those pictures will also be news.  Everyone knows.  The whole world is following the drama of your social life, just like you always dreamed.

And while you have “friends” on Facebook, you can do even better on Twitter, where you gather “followers,” who are ready to worshipfully follow all of your 140-characters-or-less witticisms.

I don’t mean to sound too cynical.  I know I’m glad to unleash my inner celebrity and celebrate a little bit when I’m alerted that 14 people have liked my Facebook status.  “They like me!  They really like me!”

Just a few years ago, you would have needed Brangelina-level tabloid coverage to live such a public life.  But now, the internet, as it has done for so many things, has made celebrity into a D.I.Y. project.

I think advertising can take advantage of this by letting people bypass the whole celebrity endorsement thing, and allowing people to be their own celebrity endorsement.  That’s one reason why I like, for example, this Oreo Moments Gallery.  It’s a nice little way to make people waste time thinking about Oreos, looking at pictures, videos, stories, etc.  But the biggest connection to the Oreos happens when, inevitably, people say to themselves, “You know what this site really needs?  A picture of ME holding some Oreos… Everyone will see it!”

Similarly, New Think had no trouble finding volunteers to flash the “E” for the “be the E” campaign on the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day.  There’s nothing like the opportunity to have your face shown for 0.7 seconds on an advertisement in Times Square!

Give people the chance to be famous.  They won’t settle for just 15 minutes anymore.