Sheffield Melts Creativity – Melt 2008 Inspiration Session – Part 3
Here is the rest of my write-up on the splendid Melt 2008 Inspiration Session in Sheffield last Thursday.
I made lots of notes and they are making their way onto the web as a 5 part blog series!
Part 1 is what I learnt from Adam Gee, head of Factual Interactive Commissioning at Channel 4’s talk about 4IP, Channel 4’s £50 million fund for innovative multi-platform content.
Part 2 is full of interesting demonstrations of the web as a medium for social change, as shared by Paula Le Dieu, director of Magic Lantern.
This, part 3, is all about creating new multi-platform entertainment content as demonstrated by James Kirkham, director of Holler, the digital agency that delivered the BAFTA-winning teen drama Skins on E4, in partnership with Channel 4.
Part 4 will be an overview of each of the Melt Awardees’ presentations. I’ll post this early tomorrow.
Part 5, still to be written is Tom Savigar of The Future Laboratory’s fantastic trend briefing covering such consumer insights as the ‘Slash/Slash generation’ who would rather spend 15 minutes on their favourite social network to watching TV, reading, playing.
As before, these posts are written up from my (hastily scrawled) notes and are an archive of my favourite quotes and notable points by each speaker, in their own words. If you were there and remember it differently please speak up in the comments and I’ll amend as necessary.
James Kirkham on creating multi-platform content
James had lots of cool slides and not a great deal of time to show them so what follows might be a little scattergun.
He began by sharing that the ethos at Holler is about engagement and interaction.
“Technology facilitates. The audience creates.”
It’s about providing a platform that allows people to share, talk and trade.
He showed a short broadcast strategy video that Holler presented to Channel 4 to demonstrate this. Considering it was made before the Skins commission (I think), it was quite prescient, with lots of references to young people using the web as an entertainment channel.
Channel 4’s brief for Skins was to:
Turn the launch into an entertainment event for an audience increasingly spending time away from the TV.
How to reach a jaded audience
James had some fantastic facts about creating content for the 16-24 demographic:
There are about 7 million 16-24 year olds in the UK. So-called Digital Natives, they have grown up with phones, games and the internet.
They manage to pack 31 hours of activity into every day and 26% of their time is spent on multiple media.
How do you reach them?
Create advocates, not adverts.
Blur the distinction between TV spots (?) and marketing.
Build community via advocacy and events.
James compared Skins as a new [TV] property to music. When you hear a new band you like you become an advocate of the band. It was about getting viewers to become advocates.
Did it work?
Some stats on how effective this was:
Note: this bit was scribbled really quickly as he had lots of text on the slides and then showed a Skins trailer video at the same time(!). Numbers may well be erroneous.
350,000 users on the website(?). Some Skins trailer videos were used to invite the community submit video content, design a new logo etc.
Friends of the Skins page on MySpace were invited to volunteer as extras. Over 20,000 signed up prior to the show. The infamous 3 minute edit of the party scene that was used as a trailer received over 250,000 unique views.
And the success?
As far as raising awareness, the online-only activity for Skins beat the previous record set by Ugly Betty, with 70% of the group surveyed expressing awareness. Pretty amazing as there was no above the line (TV, press, radio) promotional activity for Skins’ launch.
Ugly Betty, on the other hand, had full London underground station takeovers (i.e. Tube stations were covered with posters and other signage for the show before it launched).
The challenge is how to keep talking to the audience.
What next?
Other multi-platform shows Holler has worked on:
The Insiders – careers advice. Partner education with digital.
The ‘target audience’ understand the grammar of gaming, they understand tasks in the context of games, missions, level-ups.
So, The Insiders uses a game-like world for content to be found in. Islands of content.
It’s about 6 ‘insiders’ who blogged for 10 weeks about their jobs. This was then written into a story by one of the writers of popular BBC sitcom, Mighty Boosh.
James showed a couple of trailers for The Insiders, ending with one by the ‘musician’ who is actually in a charting band. I enjoyed it. I’d like to see more of that particular series.
Next up: presentations by the Melt Awardees. Probably live early Tuesday. I underestimated how long it would take to blog these…
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