Engagement Marketing: An Interview With Alan Moore (Part Two)

Last Friday, I introduced my readers to Alan Moore -- not the comic book creator but the brand guru -- a cutting edge thinker about the ways that grassroots communities are reshaping the branding process. Moore, with Tomi T Ahonen, wrote a book called Communities Dominate Brands. The book spells out their vision for where media is headed -- towards what Moore described last time as a "connected society"-- and what it means for the branding process. Here, Moore gets deeper into some of the issues which will be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog -- the economic value of fans to advertisers and media producers, the issue of compensating for user-generated content, the case of Pop Idol as a global media franchise, and the concept of transmedia planning. Moore will be speaking at the CMS colloquium later this term and we hope to make a podcast of his remarks available down the line.

There seems to be an implicit tension running through this book between the focus on the individual consumer (which has been a cornerstone of branding theory and which gets new attention in an age of personalized and customized media) and the focus on communities (which take on greater importance in the age of networked communications.) I wonder if you could talk a bit more about this tension -- should companies be targeting individuals or communities? What do you see as the relationship between individual consumers and these

new kinds of brand communities you are describing?

My view is that one can create greater opportunities, by appealing to communities of interest.

Doc Searls said that markets are conversations. I think communities form around 3 principle tenets.

1. Information

2. Entertainment

3. Commerce

Lets take the equine community, or the climbing community, the motivations for belonging are at a deep human level.

By creating platforms that can better serve these communities around these 3 tenets, one can build I believe sustainable businesses, that are not geographic specific.

Communities form around values, not demographics.

Also, I believe that by combining, user generated content, peer production, inter-community trade and knowledge exchange, in conjunction with services and entertainment specific to that community, the community will grow and expand. This is where the advertising becomes the content and the content becomes the advertising. The advertising becomes the conversation and the conversation becomes the advertising.

Also, there is an opportunity to listen carefully to the community so that one is in a constant process of refinement of how best to serve that community.

The money flows in a different way.

Of course such a view is heresy, within the world of mass media, which are tied to location and old distribution/business models.

In the book, you describe the emergence of "brand promiscuity." As Sex and the City might put it, we are just not that into you any more. What do you mean by brand promiscuity? What factors are giving rise to it? and what steps might companies take to make sure they still have some place in the hearts of their most loyal consumers?

There is no doubt brands wax and wane. But the brand manager wants their customers to always consider their brand before others, and where hopefully price is not part of that consideration process.

However, through the process of search, customers have been able to do much more research about the products and services they want to buy. There is mounting evidence that people go online - and research before they buy.

Customers have become far more aware, that their interests are not always put before the company interests.

That's not to say certain brands don't have die-hard fans, many do, and Apple is a great example of the extraordinary loyalty shown by Apple users.

But none the less, we know that by researching, we can find a better deal on our terms.

The steps companies have to take are to put the customer at the start of the value chain and not at the end. There can never be an excuse for disappointment. Brands have to learn that customer service is not lip service.

Recently I flew to the US via the business airline EOS. It was quite clear to me that they had designed their service from start to finish around the customer experience. I would advocate flying with that airline to anyone.

Such an experience means I will always consider EOS before anyone else and they are cheaper than BA.

Equally, when a community reacts angrily to what they consider as malpractice by a brand, the brand has to engage with that community.

If we look at the near collapse of Kryponite, the resigning of Trent Lott from the Senate, of Jeff Jarvis's personal crusade against Dell computers, Brands have to understand that at the very least they could suffer severe bad publicity at the very worst they could loose their business.

The most extreme example of brand promiscuity comes from China. Chinese stores are being hit by mobs of customers who are engaging in a spot of Tungou, or team buying. Shoppers are coordinating times to hit stores using the web. The shoppers turn up en-masse and demand discounts - and often store owners concede! Sites such as www.51Tuangou.com and www.teambuy.com.cn provide forums for shoppers to meet and plan their next target.

You have interesting things to say in the book about fans: "Such fans are more precious than gold. You should find them, recruit them to work with you, never try to 'brainwash' them, but let them be themselves and use their own creativity and passion to promote your product or service. Find gentle but supportive means to promote them and their work. Pay them for their

intellectual property, at least as well as you would reward a star-performing advertising agency. Celebrate this kind of passion -- you will ignite other such sleeping giants from amidst your fan base." You touch on a key issue here we have been discussing on the blog -- should companies be compensating fans for user-generated content? Why or why not?

Like all things its about context.

The BBC for example, feel they should not be paying for user generated content. Whereas, Current TV pays those that get their 15min pod onto cable $1000.

Spreadshirt.com - which enables me to create my online shop and to trade and transact, with spreadshirt handling all the printing, distribution and financials, are in a way benefiting from user generated content. In a more sophisticated manner.

What about fans writing for the Soprano's or TV formats? Should we be paying them. Well yes. Wikipedia? No, because the motivation is completely different.

Again, we are the mid-wives of a new socio-economic model. It is interesting that we have never ever before really considered seriously that engaging such a fan base could be of huge benefit to various companies.

But, there is enough evidence to show that redirecting some capital in different ways can ignite creativity and therefore drive commerce.

Andy Warhol it was that said in the future everybody will be famous for 15mins. I don't think he could have ever possibly imagined how this would manifest itself. But we are living with that prophecy today.

Could we fire our advertising agencies, that cost us millions if not billions of dollars and just get our most passionate fans to create our advertising for us?

So I guess the formula, is to think about what is the incentive? What is the benefit? Is it short term or long term, is it about reputation and just a sense of belonging or do we want something else? Do we corrupt what we are by paying a revenue share, or are we really igniting the blue touch paper of our passionate community by offering a financial reward?

More generally, what advice would you provide to media companies about forming strong ties to their fan base? Can you cite some examples where companies got this right and where they've gotten it wrong?

So the old rules of command and control don't apply. It is about listening and building trust, it is about real dialogue and actions being taken on that dialogue.

It is about persistent conversation, and creating platforms that will attract, and reward in a variety of ways. It is about a better customer experience, and always, always delivering on the promise.

Who got it right?

Well I think Spreadshirt has got it right, Jamie Oliver and his School Dinner campaign got it right (through a TV programme he invited his audience to form as a community and embarrass the British Government in changing its policy as to how we feed our kids in UK schools), the Boeing Design Team, Soloman sports .

Trent Lott got it wrong, as did Kryptonite, as did Dell, Sony and Verizon all vie for the "how we really fucked it up" award.

But let me also say that, this is work in progress, and your fan base could be the many thousands of employees that work for your company, they are quite often a small army.

Jonathan Schwartz the COO of Sun Microsystems famously said:

The perception of Sun as a faithful and authentic tech company is now very strong. What blogs have done has authenticated the Sun brand more than a billion dollar ad campaign could have done. I care more about the ink you get from developer community than any other coverage. Sun has experienced a sea change in their perception of us and that has come from blogs. Everyone blogging at Sun is verifying that we possess a culture of tenacity and authenticity

And he talks about how Sun's bloggers have created a more transparent company that appears more human as a result. This is the natural consequence of two-way flows of communication. Something that many brand and advertising managers struggle with. Command and control should no longer be part of any marketing communications strategy.

We are at the very beginning now of a revolution in marketing communications. How businesses will engage with their audiences, how marketing budgets will be spent, and how marketing departments will be organized.

You've done some writing about the Pop Idol phenomenon worldwide. What factors have led to the consistent level of engagement which this property generates? What do you see as the most significant commonalities and differences in the ways consumers respond to this franchise in different parts of the world? What lessons might other media producers draw from the success of Pop Idol?

Today's world is a world of experience of content, of culture and of content-rich brands, a world where knowledge is profit and interconnectivity is power, where enabling and personal empowerment are keys to future success. The implications for business are clear. People will want more 'experiences' and to be able to define themselves by those experiences.

In no TV show worldwide has this been more obvious, than in . Generating over 3.2 Billion viewers over the past six years, the various national editions of Pop Idol are regularly the most watched TV show in their respective countries when they air, and the final episode to Pop Idol has broken viewing records from Norway to Singapore.

In Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy, Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan, and, Professor Christian Welzel Professor at the University of Bremen, have been studying how developing economies affect and change individuals and society. Living in a world where survival is now taken for granted, and migrating from an industrial economy to a knowledge society places increasing emphasis on individual autonomy, self-expression, and free choice. Emerging self-expression values transform modernization into a process of human development, giving rise to a new type of humanistic society that is increasingly people-centered.

This new society they argue, seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity-based community. Taking control of one's life, having total control over one's identity. These issues therefore, are central to the underpinning of Pop Idol.

Most viewers fully understand that Pop Idol is a manufactured format. What is crucial is not that these wannabe stars are just great performers, but that they come across as genuine and authentic.

Authenticity is one of today's zeitgeists. The cumulative net result of blogs, the explosion of user generated content and self-publishing, is about the exploration of identity on the one hand and on the other it is about communication that is unmediated, unfiltered, and perceived as genuine/authentic. Distrust of Governments and global brands explain why authenticity plays such a critical role in post-modern society.

In one Pop Idol show a contestant is told by the judges that her singing style lacks emotion. Her response to this observation is that she is not interested in the judges view, because she is performing for the audience. It is the audience with their voting power that she appeals to. Su Holmes explains in her paper Reality Goes Pop! Reality TV Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol: Sage publications 2004:

Contestants situate the audience not only as the primary point of address and recipient of the performance but the primary arbiter of its meaning. This structure validates audience choice, discrimination and agency at the moment of transmission in which the audience is actively encouraged to adopt a viewpoint at odds with an official or expert opinion.

In early Hollywood the stars were exceptional stage performers who transferred their skills to the silver screen. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin fell over for real, Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers truly did dance, though Rogers did dance backwards and in high heels! Elvis and Frank Sinatra did sing. The movie was special, and stars were closely guarded maintaining their sense of aura, and a heroic image. Today's Hollywood star relies on stunt doubles, plastic surgery and special effects. Doing the publicity tours for each movie, the stars are over-exposed, and discuss the tricks of the trade ad nauseum, destroying any lingering admiration for skills beyond purely that of acting. Actors are now known to be that and nothing else: actors. Audiences sense that this is more fake, than authentic. While a movie or TV show may be great entertainment, it is still fake, whilst there is an increasing demand for authenticity.

Reality TV is built on co-creation, participation, and persistent peer-to-peer flows of conversations on the television via voting in the chat rooms and forums. This signals that commercial success for broadcasters can be defined by better improving the dialogue via rich flows of communi-cation. Modern viewers think like this: "When I can see, that my vote counts, that my voice counts, then I will willingly engage. When I can be identified as myself within a group context, and listened to, that is important to me."

Sure, some of us may not want to participate in the Pop Idol's of this world, but we may be passionate about other issues, and Pop Idol is more about participatory democracy, true enough in a crude from, than some people may care to accept. If this is the case, then it is worth pausing as a broadcaster, to mull over; how am I engaging my audiences? How as a commercial broadcaster could I better retain our customer base thus reducing our acquisition costs? Or keep the size of our audiences, and therefore keep our advertisers?

Here are 8 key points to consider as a commercial broadcaster

1). Attraction = Pull to engage. We are deeply social

2). Co-creation / participation / peer production / collaboration / persistent conversations

3). Transparency and authenticity are key components of any engagement initiative.

4). Flowability of content across all media platforms

5). Valuable and contextual content

6). Idea driven

7). Deliver a memorable experience

8). Editorial can link to commercial revenue streams

As an American reading your book, I was consistently fascinated with your accounts of mobile media and SMS in other parts of the world. We lag so far behind Asia and the Nordics in terms of our adoption of these technologies. You've spent a lot of time helping clients to understand how they change the information flow and alter their branding efforts. So, what do you see as the future of mobile media and SMS in the North American context? What do you see

as some of the innovative uses of these technologies in other parts of the world and what changes would need to take place if American companies wanted to deploy these approaches in our context?

This is such a vast topic I feel defeated before I even start.

Well - operators have to really consider how they stimulate peer to peer flows of communication.

Mobile is not a mass market. it's a market of mass niche audiences.

In Norway you can buy plane tickets, pay for your parking space. In Finland you can be notified by your library that the book you wanted is now in stock or you can renew your borrowing by SMS, pay for your train tickets via SMS or buy your lottery ticket.

Bands have their own MVNO including the rock group Kiss and P.Diddy.

There is the obvious Citizen Journalism package, for example the Norwegian newspaper Aller, has equipped its journalists with video mobile phones where a print is translated into a 5 min sound-byte via the web.

In Hong Kong one can play the community horse racing game super stable, and in Japan play the community treasure hunt game Mogwai. As teams hunt a prize in an urban jungle.

Mobile is not Heinz baked beanz. One has to put the tools in the hands of creators.

There was one passage in the book which provoked sharp disagreement from me. You write, "Undebiably the storylines of content in popular culture have shrunk, which has shortened the attention spans of especially the younger audiences." Yet, writers like Steven Johnson have made a convincing argument that popular culture texts have greater complexity now than ever

before. We can certainly point to the short lengths of music videos, YouTube segments, or content for the mobile platform, yet we can also point towards people camping out all weekend to watch long marathons of complex serialized dramas on DVD. How would you respond to the claim that popular culture is demanding more, not less, from its consumers in response to the fragmentation and interweaving of storylines you discuss?

I agree, and it is something we have been researching from the last book. Culture is more layered. And is an area we have given more thought to.

I think what we were trying to say was that conventional storylines had been exhausted. Pulp Fiction was perhaps the last film to exploit the old movie genres to great success, where narrative is pulled, pushed and squeezed in innovative ways.

I think kids watch less television, my kids do, but seek greater immersion, in myspace or Grand Theft Auto, or any other gaming experience, or fan fiction site one cares to think of.

But the important criteria is, that they CAN be part of the co-creation experience. That changes everything.

Think about it, you're a kid, you're 9 standing in the schoolyard. Your lonely, you see the cool kids playing soccer, or baseball. The coolest kid in the school comes over to you and says, "do you want to join in?" what are you going to say?

All of a sudden you belong. Your identity recognised.

We've been talking here about transmedia planning as an approach which recognizes the growing complexity of popular culture and rewards the competency and mastery of fans. This approach would seem to be consistent with your own emphasis on fan engagement and brand communities. How do you respond to this concept and how might we reconcile it with your discussion of fragmented attention and declining brand loyalty?

Create context, attraction and reasons to engage. These are myriad.

Deliver a valuable experience, and rewards for engaging. Again, depending on what the reasons are for creating engagement will depend on how one structures the engagement initiative.

I like the concept of transmedia planning, it acknowledges the complexity of story-telling, and co-creation in a super-connected world.

It requires the combination of different skill sets, to develop and deliver such an experience.

All writers about media change face the problem of print being too slow a medium to respond to unfolding events. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book?

Well, we are blessed, with the sequel or son of. So I have no regrets. At times I wondered if we had gone too far. Also we built the book off of the SMLXL blog, and had 172 pages of draft text in the 1st weekend. When we went to print we were right on the bleeding edge.

It has however, taken until the middle of 2006, for the rest of the world to catch up.

The conversations that I am having with many companies and organisations demonstrate that we have pushed the envelope. They are just starting to grapple with the difficult issues of Darwin. Adapt or die. Or as we say, engage or die.

I think organisational structures, is perhaps the one issue Tomi and I grossly underestimated. Companies are struggling to grasp what they should be doing, how and why.

But everything pretty much that we wrote about has evolved into reality.

I am proud of the book as a body of work, as we tried very hard to mix theory with practical examples. Proving that our assumptions were and are already true, which they are.

As a creative person, I deal with putting things into reality, its no good, offering advice others can't see as practical.

Of course web/mobile 2.0 was still a twinkle in the sky, and the Apple iPhone a mere dream.

Its amazing what has happened in 15 months.

Engagement Marketing: An Interview with Alan Moore (Part One)

Alan Moore created quite a stir when he called my apartment a little over a month ago. The guy on the phone had a delightful British accent of the kind one might imagine coming from the British comic book artist who is responsible for such works as Lost Girls, From Hell, Watchman, League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Promethea, Top Ten.... Well, it wasn't that Alan Moore. This Alan Moore is a distinguished figure in the marketing world -- the CEO of SMLXL, the Cambridge based "engagement marketing" firm, and the co-author of Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century. In Convergence Culture, I write about what I call "affective economics" -- the reappraisal of the value of fan and brand communities within the marketing sphere. I'd recommend Communities Dominate Brands to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the realm of "affective economics." Moore and his co-author, Tomi T Ahonen, have thought deeply about the changes that are rocking the current media landscape and their implications for the ways that brands will court consumers. The book is informed by contemporary media theory and rich in examples for recent marketing efforts that put the theory into practice.

In this interview, Moore shares with us some of his insights into what is going to happen to the branding process given the rise of participatory culture and the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm.

HJ: Your Bio in the book describes you as a specialist in Engagement Marketing, which begs the question -- what is Engagement Marketing and for that matter, what constitutes engagement from your point of view?

AM: Engagement marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create.

And why is this important? Because in advanced economies the values of society and the individual change. AT the heart of this is the key issue around identity and belonging. We have always had community. Pre- industrialization, we were tied to our communities by geography, tradition, the state and birthright. External forces shaped our identity. However, in a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological Self-Determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition.

The Community Generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The Community Generation, seek and expect direct participation and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. These people are not watching television and have grown up in a world of search and two-way flows of communication.

Going further Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media.

The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, Social search, The Guinness visitor centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre.

For example Al Gore believes Current TV's hybrid of digital platforms and broadcasting can help re-engage young people with politics and the media. A third of its schedule is created by its mainly 18 to 34-year-old audience with digital video cameras and desktop editing software. Al Gore says It's not political, it's not ideological. You get a cornucopia of points of view and fresh perspectives that force people in rigid frameworks to reassess everything.

You can load up your 15 min film. The community gets to vote if it should be broadcast on cable and the creator gets $1000

Interestingly it's a different set of incentives both personal and commercial.

So reputation begins to play an important role here. And will increasingly do so.

I see this process as having value, not only in a commercial context, but also in education, civil society, science and politics.

Engagement Marketing could help sell a product, an industry, a region, combat a social issue. It can attract and deploy the collective intelligence of the many people.

Engagement Marketing is built upon the power of the meritocracy of ideas, and the strategic combinations of different media to propel that idea into the world, stimulating and facilitating the involvement of its audience to a commonly shared goal.

Engagement Marketing is about connecting large or small communities with engaging content to a commercial or social agenda. Rather than boiling everything down to a unique selling proposition, Engagement Marketing creates bigger ideas that emotionally engage its audience, who have a desire to participate.

Rather than focus on the one single proposition which would be a manufactured communication strategy, Engagement Marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared experience, something which 'interruptive' communications cannot do.

Mass media, presumes, only one thing of its audience that they are passive and they will consume as much as marketers can persuade them to.

Mass media is cold media, its push, its myopic, its about as relevant to the 21st Century as First World War military strategy. The age of set piece competition is over.

If the 20th Century was about managing efficiencies, then the 21st Century will be about managing experiences.

In the book you write, "Conventional marketing and advertising is the silent movies of the 21st century. The proletarian nature of the internet, blogging, moblogging, the mobile phone, interactive TV, media choice and the PVR, the rich flows of information and the reach of that information, have all contributed to bringing an era to an end." A bold claim, indeed! I'd love to

see you unpack this for us a bit more. Why is this era ending? What evidence can you offer that this era has ended?

"TV advertising is broken, putting $67b up for grabs, which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup." Stated Bob Garfield in a Wired article just before Christmas. He cites "evolution of dance," which has got nearly 35 million views in six months on YouTube, as evidence that conventional media is in meltdown. These numbers are impossible in a conventional media world.

P&G bankrolled commercial television, so when Jim Stengel CMO for P&G said:

In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. In the early 1960s, typical day-after recall scores for 60 second prime time TV commercials were about 40 per cent and nearly half of this was elicited without any memory aid. Currently a typical day-after recall score for a 30 second spot is about 18- 20 per cent and virtually no one is able to provide any form of playback without some form of recall stimulate.

The number of brands and messages competing for consumer attention has exploded, and consumers have changed dramatically. They show an increasing lack of tolerance for marketing that is irrelevant to their lives, or that is completely unsolicited. Traditional marketing methods are diluted by a hurried lifestyle, overwhelmed by technology, and often deliberately ignored.

One has to start to question the value of traditional marketing communications, which is further supported by Glen L.Urban. Professor at the Sloan School of Management. MIT, who argues that:

Marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.

On top of that we are witnessing the emergence of a new socio-economic model as Yochai Benkler explains in his book the Wealth of Networks:

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

And lets not forget TRUST. According to the World Economic Forum, Trust is at its lowest level for Governments, Global Brands and even the UN since tracking began in 2001. Trust plays a key role in any interaction, and the media and business have done a great job in destroying that trust.

For example Sony being sued for the pernicious use of spyware on 24million music CD's it sold, without the buyers consent. Or Verizon promoting Bluetooth capability in its ads and then turning the Bluetooth functionality off. Which resulted in a class action against the company. the lawsuit against Verizon Wireless - and the way it came about - highlights the challenges that weblogs pose to corporations.

Verzion advertised the Motorola V710 with Bluetooth this made it possible for file sharing between the mobile device and a computer. Verizon However turned the bluetooth functionality off.

This case has been identified as being possible purely through the power of the blogosphere and the millions that provide such overwhelming force via "word of mouth"

And how about Fake TV news?

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)--a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population.

The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

So, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an; uninformed, unconnected, passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume and not question what is put in front of them.

The point is that neither the media, nor brands are in control, and we are not waiting for them. We see image advertising as junk mail and by default irrelevant, we don't believe the hype, and we have learnt to question the motive. We the people formerly known as the audience are no longer content to be good foot soldiers.

So the upshot of all of this is the people taking control and creating their own media platforms like OhMyNews . Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine "With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

The article goes on further to say that the Guardian has described it as the world's most domestically powerful news site and a South Korean diplomat was quoted as saying that the no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

What does this mean? It means we are redefining what journalism is, what media is and who controls it. If this is the case we are redefining what advertising is, what business is and who benefits. It means we are redefining how we communicate and to whom.

We are witnesses at the birth of a new socio-economic model.

The Silent Cinema analogy suggests less a fundamental break than the reconfiguration of the system to reflect a new technological environment. Your book talks a lot about what needs to change. What lessons will these new marketers carry over from the era of conventional marketing and advertising?

What can they carry over?

Well - not a lot as I can see.

It's a new set of rules and a new language.

I think there is a great deal that can be left behind. The worse thing that can happen to you is irrelevance which is always the precursor to obsolescence. And that is a one-way street.

With TV audiences in decline, globally what is the model for the future?

Your book describes a shift from a Networked Culture to a Connected Culture. Explain what you see as the difference between the two. How does this distinction map onto the distinction people are starting to make between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?

Web 1.0 is representative of a networked culture. We're all plugged in, and can be defined as Metcalfe's Law.

But a connected culture is a world of hot media, of Current TV, peer production, collective intelligence, Second Life, the world of Warcraft, Pop Idol, Citizen Journalism, Myspace, Bebo, YouTube, mobile social networking, new business platforms which is about utilising digital technologies to radically challenge the status quo of our industrialised world. It is all about persistent conversation and extended narrative.

A connected culture is one that can be better described as Reeds Law and Group Forming Networks

(GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. They allow small or large groups of network users to connect and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal.

GFN's have an exponential effect and significantly out perform either Sarkov's Lawthe law of the mass media and Metcalfe's Law which is the Law of the internet.

Connected culture is about Commons based peer production as a third model of production that relies on decentralized information gathering and exchange and more efficient allocation of human creativity.

For example Yahoo talk about better search through people. Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo talks about User generated content that is Tagged, Described, Organized and, Discovered not by editors but by the users.

Yahoo talks about: User Distributed Content, and, User Developed Functionality

And they talk about F.U.S.E. = Find - Use - Share - Expand

Another illustration of a connected culture is >em>The Elephant's Dream, the world's first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world .

All mobile/web technologies are designed around social interaction of one form or another. It's a world of Social Media not Mass Media. Niche mass audiences - forming around passion based interests that are not geographic specific.

Supernatural: First Impressions

Late last fall, I asked for readers of this blog to pimp their favorite shows. Overwhelmingly, the most popular choice was a CW series called Supernatural -- of course, there was a concerted campaign within the show's fan community to write in and share the love for the series in hopes that it might generate greater awareness of the program. Here's just a few of the things readers had to say about Supernatural:

Every week is like a new little horror movie that, most times, is really quite frightening. But that's not what really drives it. The true strength of Supernatural lies in the absolutely touching family ties and brotherly love exhibited every episode by Sam and Dean.

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The tight brotherly bond, driven by the love of their father is what keeps the fans coming back. The lore [hellhounds, demons, vamps, wendigos] keeps the fans sticking around for more and a crossover from the [Joss]Whedonverse thrills us! Each week a new puzzle piece is put down in the mystery of their family's trials and tribulations and we LOVE Eric Kripke for such a great show.

*****

John, Sam and Dean are a dysfunctional family, and so intriguing with it that all the exchanges they have about their family issues have us fan(girls, mostly, I think) squee in delight. They all have a definite character, differences and similarities quite cleverly written and filmed (the way Dean and John move, the way in which John and Sam say the same words, etc). The feelings implied in looking out for each other not only as fellow hunters but as a family make the tension in the fighting/dangerous scenes raise up a notch. We want to see Sam telling it all to his father, we want to see what Dean would do, who would he side with, we want to see John worried about his boys. In short, we want to see MEN EMOTE for each other, and the family ties allow for a narrative that can play with this instead of justifying it.

******

Usually when there's a friendship that fan glom onto, there will be hints of it onscreen--banter, and maybe once or twice per season they save each other's lives. It's the fans who had the really deep, strong emotional undercurrent in fanfic. But in Supernatural, the intense bond between the brothers is part of the text.

*********

It's got a lovely mix of an overall mytharc as well as standalone bits and episodes.

********

The arch narrative is threaded all throughout the first season, picked up in some episodes and just mentioned in others, but it's what gives the series a fundamental unity and reason d'eitre.

*******

The continuity is fabulous, and works in all sorts of extra information, both on the characters and whatever myth they're investigating. I find myself re-watching episodes, figuring out what's going on, and the researching the history of the legends.

Each of the paragraphs above comes from a different reader but they represent steps in an argument that certainly got my attention. All I can say is that your campaign worked -- at least in my case. I had only a vague awareness of Supernatural before I started getting flooded by these earnest pleas and recommendations. Frankly, I had lumped it together with Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, seeing the whole lot as basically TV knockoffs of The Sixth Sense. But, once I read those recommendations, I know I had to see it for myself and so I put the Season One DVD boxed set on my Christmas list. I've been watching Supernatural while coping with jet lag during my trip to Singapore -- maybe not the best choice under the circumstances because instead of putting me to sleep, I keep wanting to watch just one more and end up staying up later than I should be. I more or less ended up inhaling Season One -- watching the last eight episodes more or less back to back on the flight back from Singapore, and I am now craving season two.

I kept planning to write a midterm report on my viewing but given the choice between watching another episode and writing about the series, I kept choosing to watch another episode. Every statement I quoted above is absolutely true -- this is a show which delivers real haunted house style horror every week and does so while giving us an extensive look into the emotional life and personal growth of its core protagonist. Each episode is self contained enough that you can watch it out of sequence and get something rewarding out of the experience, yet there's a powerful cumulative effect of watching the episodes in sequence and thus seeing the character's inner lives come bubbling up again and again. The writing is crisp; the characters have a distinctive voice.

You can try to compare it to X-Files or Buffy or Night Stalker, all of which it superficially resembles, but this series does things its own way (as I hope to illustrate in a moment).

It's hard to imagine how or why a series this good is suffering from such total neglect from the network, from the critics, though clearly not from its most hardcore fans.

Let me tell you I was nervous going in. Having decided I wanted to write something in response to the community's push, I was terrified I wasn't going to like the show and would then have to write something negative. I never want to pee on someone else's fandom but I was starting to see some folks out in LJland grumbling because I hadn't said anything about Supernatural while I had posted about Heroes, the runner up show in my contest (You know who you are). I was already writing Heroes; Supernatural took homework and the end of a term is not the best time to be adding on extra assignments.

As it happens, the first few episodes didn't quite grab me -- they were good enough, they worked well within the terms of the genre, the characters and plot had potential, but I wasn't hooked. For me, the episode that pushed me over the edge was "Skin." And from there, it just got more and more intense. Retrospectively, it was all there from the beginning.

For those who, like me, got it confused with some of the other supernatural shows that hit television around the same time, this one deals with two brothers who are traveling across America doing battle with demonic forces and searching for their missing father. The creatures they encounter in any given episode are the stuff of campfire stories -- they are inspired by roadside Americana and by urban legends. It is supernatural horror of a kind which movies rarely give us any more -- spin tingling without being overly gory (other than an odd preoccupation with dripping blood). Indeed, its dependence on shadowy figures owes something to the vintage horror films of producer Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) than anything in contemporary horror cinema. On the making of tape, Eric Kripke cites a range of filmic exemplars, including Poltergeist, An American Werewolf in London, and The Evil Dead movies.

The film scholar Robin Wood has identified the core formula for the horror film -- "normality is threatened by the monstrous" -- and suggested that the formula breaks down into three elements - normality, the monstrous, and the relationship between the two. And it is on that level that we can understand what separates Supernatural from many of the other horror series on television.

Joss Whedon has described the vampires and demons represented on Buffy as "metaphors" for teenage experience in America: they embody the horrors to be found in the hellmouth that is American public education.

The monsters in The X-Files ultimately became clues within the vast governmental conspiracy that Scully and Muldar wanted to uncover: the truth was out there and each monster we unmask brought us closer to the truth. Earlier in the series, everything hinged on the debate between faith and science, with the two partners contesting the validity of each other's world views.

Something similar can be said of Lost where the supernatural elements are few and far between but seem to be just one more tantalizing clue to the puzzle that constitutes the series.

In Supernatural, the monsters are, in effect, emotional scars and psychic wounds. They represent unresolved emotional issues, often within the context of family life, and they are also external correlatives for the emotional drama taking place in the lives of the series' protagonists. Sam and Dean go out there looking for things that are strange and unfamiliar and they end up seeing themselves and their relationship more clearly.

This is the stuff of classic melodrama: Peter Brooks tells us that melodrama externalizes emotions. It takes what the characters are feeling and projects it onto the universe. So that the character's emotional lives gets mapped onto physical objects and artifacts, gets mirror backed to them through other characters, gets articulated through gestures and physical movements, and on a metalevel, speaks to us through the music which is what gives melodrama its name. Supernatural is melodrama in the best sense of the term.

On one level, it is made up of classic masculine elements -- horror, the hero's quest, sibling rivalry, unresolved oedipal dramas -- but on another level, it seems ideally suited to the themes and concerns which have long interested the female fan community. Heck, this series is one long hurt/comfort story. Every episode seems structured as much around the character moments as around the monster of the week plotlines. Everything here seems designed to draw out the emotions of the characters and force them to communicate with each other across all of the various walls which traditional masculinity erects to prevent men from sharing their feelings with each other. Dean in particular seems to hate "chick flick moments" and has a running commentary on how much he would like to avoid getting in touch with his feelings but this doesn't prevent us from having some real emotional revelations in almost every episode and the last few episodes of the season force each character to decide what matters most to them and to weigh their goals against their ties to their family in the most immediate ways possible.

I am someone who is definitely closer to Sam than to Dean in my outlook on life and indeed, there are moments in the series that I absolutely hate Dean, yet the series is well enough constructed that each time you reach that point, they peal back another layer and show some other aspect of his character. There are several episodes near the end of Season one which show us why he acts the way he does and suggests that his emotions run a lot deeper than his machismo will allow him to admit.

What gives the series its epic structure is the quest for the demon that took the life of the boy's mother. The goal is what holds the dysfunctional and centrifugal family together; it is also what pulls them apart (since each of them holds within them some secrets about what happened that night that they have never shared with each other and the trauma has hit each of them on a different level.) Not every episode contributes directly to this core quest narrative -- though many of them are connected to it in ways that are not immediately clear and the quest gains momentum as you move into the last third of the first season (and perhaps beyond). This is not an ensemble drama of the kind which most often wins recognition from critics these days: the focus is strongly on the two protagonists but around them, we accumulate, episode by episode, a richly drawn set of supporting characters, some of whom are recurring, some of whom appear in only a single storyline. It is not always clear which is which when we watch an episode and a real strength of the series is that what may at first seem to be throw away or one shot characters may resurface later. The series spends enough time setting up many of these characters that it produces considerable negative capability: we want to know what happens to these characters after the episode ends and in the case of the various family friends we encounter, we'd like to find out more about their history with the father before the series itself starts. There's more than enough suggestions of back story here to sustain an army of fan writers for a long time to come.

A real strength of the series is the construction of female secondary characters, all the more unusual in a series which is so centrally about its core male leads. But each week, we seem to introduce one or two women who are struggling not only against supernatural forces but against the circumstances life has thrown their way. As Carol Clover suggests in Men, Women, and Chain Saw, horror films have traditionally offered a range of strong roles for women in part because men can accept the experience of risk and vulnerability at the heart of horror by mapping it onto the female victim. Clover describes the role of the Final Girl in the slasher film genre, for example, showing how the women overcome and ultimately face down their fear in the course of the action. These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion. The result are some of the most compelling male/female relationships I've seen on prime time network television.

I am trying to write this without giving away too many spoilers. Part of my pleasure here was going into this series without knowing what to expect. Yet, I am hoping that I can lend my voice to the other fans of the series who wrote in this fall to pimp this show. You can certainly discover some of the virtues I've identified here in a single episode seen out of context but there really is a value in going back and watching this series from the beginning. There is a growth in the emotional life of the characters which is best experienced watching several episodes in a gulp. This is the kind of series that dvd box sets are made for.

I hope to write some more about Supernatural down the line. One of the things I am still working on are the parallels between Supernatural and Heroes, the other show which did very well with readers of this blog. There are several plot elements here -- the theme of dopplegangers in "Skin" for example parallels the Niki/Jessica storyline in Heroes and the slow discovery of the extend of Sam's powers has a lot in common with what happens to the various protagonists on the NBC superhero drama. I also think there's a fair amount to be said here about what I see as the surprisingly negative portrayal of fans in "Hell House," especially given the discussions we've had here about the "Love & Monsters" episode of Doctor Who.

I still have read none of the fan commentary beyond what's been posted here or the fan fiction so I don't know for sure what elements fans are picking up on in this series. That will be the next step once I get caught up with season two. But for the moment, I think you can add me to the list of Supernatural fans.

Get a (Second) Life!

Clay Shirky has been a longtime pundit about digital culture: sometimes he gets it right (or at least, more accurately, sometimes I agree with what he writes) and sometimes he doesn't. For example, he was one of the first journalists to really think hard about the emergence of participatory culture as something different from the same old consumer culture; he also took what I see as the wrong side of the debate with Scott McCloud about micropayments (though the jury is still out on that one.) I always respect what the guy has to say -- even if he tends towards the cynical side and I tend to the more optimistic. He is someone who asks the right questions -- even if he doesn't always come up with the right answers -- and that's all you can ask of anyone who writes regularly and sticks his neck out about emerging trends in a still developing medium. Lots of folks are dismissing Shirky right now without knowing the range of insightful and provocative essays he has posted in the past. Check out his homepage Agree with him, disagree with him -- as I said, I've done both through the years -- Clay Shirky's no idiot.

Right before Christmas, Shirky posted a critique of the media hype around Second Life, which has been stirring up a lot of fuss among my various friends and neighbors. The piece is worth reading as a corrective to some of the more breathless prose which claims that Second Life is "Web 3.0" and will totally change the world as we know it.

Basically, Shirky's arguments boil down to the following:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."

This story has already generated some smart responses from people I know and trust. Here, for example, is my MIT colleague Beth Coleman:

Second Life may turn out to be the Friendster of the "metaverse"--the first to disseminate the signal strongly but also fast to disappear once the My Space of this format appears. Last winter there were 200,000 who visited SL. Today there are somewhere around 2 million who have at least stepped in to use the interface, to see for themselves what this is all about. WoW has already demonstrated a mass scale of technical application and popular interest for MMORPG. SL, Multiverse, and the growing numbers of virtual world platforms beg the question of future network use. It's not like real life. Not by a long shot. One is animating a proxy through multilayered terrains of information. Some of them might take the shape of cliché singles bars, but the procession toward ever more complex simulation in computing is there. Not every user can code, but certainly more users will learn to script (or edit video or stream media) as Flilckr and Youtube have made clear. It also seems incorrect not to recognize exponential user growth in regard to 3d virtual worlds. Let's not look at the U.S. for a moment but Asia, specifically the Korean Cyworld that is a 3D world massively used for social-networking in the way that My Space functions for American youth. The all-encompassing metaverse that Philip Rosedale promises Second Life will become may be a fiction of the CEO's own virtual world fantasy. The potential of 3D search engines do not trump text-based and 2D formulations. But it seems short-sited to says that 3D imaging and spatial representation do not open doors for emergent use of communications networks. At the very least, the qualities of 2D social networks are mutated, amplified, and animated by these real-time moving image worlds. VW platforms, including SL, can claim the following qualities:

1. Community building of social networks that reach on and offline

2. Communal projects that span systems designs to educational, business, and activist organization

3. Avatar proxies are not minor. Yahoo avatar, Wii's Miis, Facebook....every place where users are able to created multi-media profiles they do. The puppet show of virtual worlds speaks very strongly to a collective desire to play in this way.

We are still in the beta stage on this, a continuing beta from the 1990s I suppose, but the tipping point from niche to popular use seems to have arrived.

Here's danah boyd:

Lately, i've become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i've been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don't think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there's a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn't be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments....

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

GSD&M thought leader Joel Greenberg spells out what matters to him about Second Life and does some pretty interesting analysis of the same numbers Shirky has been working from:

SL has two interesting charactistics: 1) SL is a community; until you start participating with other people, you haven't really experienced it to its fullest, and 2) Linden Lab does not spend money on traditional advertising, so much of the growth can be attributed to community marketing and PR.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Shirky's column has sparked a long overdue discussion about what Second Life is and why it matters which moves us beyond the first flirtations with virtual life and gets to the heart of the matter. I've written a lot here about Second Life, including describing in some detail my own first steps into this new terrain. There's a lot about Second Life that really fascinates me -- starting with Linden Lab's enlightened views about user-generated content as well as the range of different groups that are using Second Life as a site for running what I have described here in the past as thought experiments.

For me, Second Life is a powerful embodiment of what Yochai Benkler has been talking about in The Wealth of Networks: a place where commercial, educational, nonprofit, governmental, and amateur groups co-exist and interact. It is a playground where we can try on new identities, test new products and practices, explore new ways that core institutions might operate.

Second Life is NOT web 3.0.

Second Life is NOT the future of the web.

We will NOT abandon physical reality for virtual life.

Immersive realities are NOT the primary way we will interact with information environments in the future.

But it IS important as a social experiment -- even if the user numbers were in the tens or hundreds of thousands as opposed to the millions. This isn't about statistics; it's about cultural innovation and social experimentation. If Second Life didn't exist, we -- those of us who care about grassroots creativity -- would have to invent it because it is a vivid illustration of the trends towards participatory culture which are springing up all over the place.

Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there.

I got asked the other day to predict which of the current hot new websites will survive a decade from now. The answer is probably none of them will survive in anything remotely like their present form. But, if I had to make a guess, I'd guess that Second Life will outlast YouTube and MySpace even though -- or maybe precisely because -- its user base is smaller.

We have seen rapid churn with social network sites; teens don't want to hang out where their older siblings hung out and they certainly don't want to hang out where their parents hung out. So, as long as MySpace gets defined around its teen user base, it will quickly be, as Clueless put it, "so-so twenty minutes ago." Social networking as a practice will continue and grow but MySpace is toast.

YouTube is going to face an uphill battle to make money for Google on the scale anticipated and almost every choice they make to generate revenue -- from charging subscriptions to incorporating advertising or selling content -- is going to alienate large chunks of its users. Some other site will offer the same services for less money and the amateur media makers whose culture is larger than YouTube will go to whichever media sharing site offers them the best deal.

Most multiplayer games will have a life-span of four or five years: sooner or later, the producers who are generating the content will run out of creative energy, will set the wrong policy, or will simply fail to keep up with their competitors, and they will lose their marketshare to the new game in town.

But Second Life may outlive them all for several reasons: people feel a deeper investment in Second Life as a community because they have built it in their own images, because they have invested time in constructing the physical artifacts and social processes which constitute this multiverse. The core users of Second Life will be there as long as Linden Lab is there and the folks at Linden Lab seem to have a pretty realistic understanding of what it takes to support the diverse kinds of communities who are embracing this technology.

I suspect Second Life's numbers will always be lower than those of World of Warcraft or its descendents: more people want to have master entertainers construct their fantasy lives for them than want to build them from scratch. I have been surprised by how many are trying Second Life -- suggesting that there may be some hunger out there for at least testing the waters with virtual reality -- but I am also surprised how intimidated even my MIT students are of trying to build something in virtual space. So, I don't know that this will represent the tipping point in terms of multiverses -- simply that it will be an important community that has the potential to sustain itself for an extended period of time.

Shirky's column has sparked an important conversation, has caused us all to catch our breath and examine our assumptions. For that, I am personally grateful, even if this is one of those times when I think he's probably more wrong than right.

I can't say the same about some of the company he is keeping. Shirky's article appeared on a site called Valleywag, which bills itself as a "tech gossip rag." Another Valleywag reporter, no doubt inspired by Clay's critique, decided to crash a press conference being held in Second Life and act, frankly, like a wild boar. Here's the reporter's own description of what happened:

The sex is less satisfying, the money meaningless, but in one regard, at least, Second Life has matched the real world. Political events in Linden Lab's overblown virtual environment are carefully controlled, lacking in authenticity, and mind-numbingly tedious. Valleywag sent along a video reporter to the opening session of Congress, or rather an online discussion of the day's momentous events in the virtual world. The event, sponsored by marketing consultancy, Clear Ink, and has-been computer maker, Sun Microsystems, was as sparsely attended as a New Hampshire at-home with a no-hope candidate. Those attendees not from the press were Second Life publicists making sure the participants stayed in their seats. So much like the meatworld. It's uncanny. Valleywag's reporter ran into trouble with the virtual world's flacks after he floated up and spoiled the photo-op by getting into the frame. "They were really freaking out. Dude, I was laughing so hard I was crying when they finally kicked me out." Well, at least someone enjoyed themselves.

Whatever the value of your criticism of Second Life may be, acting like a jerk in a virtual world is no different than acting like a jerk in the real world. This suggests the actions of someone who imagines virtual worlds as simply a playground where individuals can do anything they want and not expect any social consequences. It suggests the actions of someone who has contempt for anyone who takes what's going on in such a space seriously and wants to show his contempt by bearing his rump to the world. Here's hoping that we can debate the issues surround virtual worlds with a bit more civility and maturity in the future.

Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006

This will be my last blogpost of 2006. By agreement with my family, I am going to take next week off, spending as little time online as humanly possible, and relaxing after the end of a term which has included at least 16 talks outside my home institution (and quite a few inside) as well as a period of six months during which I have made more than 165 blog posts. I think I have earned a short break. But have no fear, I will be back ready and rearing for conversation by early next year. I've already lined up some great interviews and have some cool topics in mind. There will also be some cool new announcements from the Comparative Media Studies community. Never a dull moment around here. I want to use this last post to provide a few updates and announcements -- especially concerning the podcasts of our events --- and then share a few thoughts about my recent venture into Teen Second Life thanks to the help of Barry Joseph and the other fine folks at Global Kids. (And I promise to answer or at least explain the title question by the end of this post).

CMS Announcements

We now have all but one of the webcasts of the Future of Entertainment conference up on line. That last one should be up soon.

We promised a while back that we would have a webcast version of Jesper Juul's talk, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" and that podcast went up earlier today. We are experimenting here -- and in the Futures of Entertainment content -- with video podcasting. All feedback on these efforts would be welcome.

I wanted to flag an upcoming event. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

The dates for this year's event will be Jan. 29-Feb.2.

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants. If you are interested in joining us, contact me at henry3@mit.edu. More details will be coming early next year.

Now About the Beard.

From the start, my beard seemed to be the object of fascination and speculation among the teens at Second Life. Barry Joseph told me about this interest following my participation in the MacArthur Foundation's announcement event earlier this term. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted my own avatar so I could enter Second Life and interact with these youth. One of them wanted to know how long it took me to grow my beard. In truth, that's not an easy question to answer. I have had a beard since I left the University of Iowa to start my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin. This means I have not shaved it off completely in almost 20 years. We have watched it grow from black to salt and pepper to grey over that time. Yet, since hair continually replaces itself, it is hard to know how long I have been growing the particular beard follicles which are currently attached to my face.

At one time, we even jokingly discussed making my beard available for distribution on Second Life, though so far this hasn't happened. Part of the issue is to figure out which beard length might be most popular -- the tightly trimmed Henry beard at the start of the term or the long and shaggy one by the end when my schedule has kept me from getting to a barbershop for a trim.

Last Wedsday night, I made my live public appearance on the Global Kids island in Teen Second Life to talk about games, learning, and popular culture. I wasn't surprised when one of the first questions I got asked was when and if I would have my beard put up in cornrows. It is an interesting question -- and one I am pondering deeply as I enter into the Holiday season. So, here's the heart of my response: I welcome any and all attempts to digitally doctor photographs of my beard. I especially throw this out as a challenge to teens in Second Life. If you want to use Photoshop to cornrow a picture of my beard or if you want to fix the beard on my avatar to have a funkier do, then it's fair game. And I promise to share the results here on the blog early next year. Think of it as a technical challenge: how to cornrow Henry's Beard.

My students have long tested their skills against the iconic quality of my persona --dressing up in Henry's costumes (complete with "suspenders of disbelief"), using Barbie Fashion Designer to put me in drag, doing graffiti on photographs of my bald head. So I welcome anyone from Teen Second Life to do their stuff!

How's this for the perfect narcissistic scenario: Last Saturday, I tried out my new avatar for the first time by beaming myself onto a desert corner of the Global Kids Island. I was going to stay for just a minute, try to work through some of the control mechanisms, make sure the connection works. There was no one else in the entire world that I saw on the screen. And then, out of nowhere, someone walks up and says "Are you really Henry Jenkins?" It turns out to be Mariel, a teenaged girl from Mexico City, who has been using some of her work for a school assignment. So, here we are: only two people in the whole world on a Saturday afternoon and one of them turns out to be a fan! It's probably the only time in my life that I hit 100% market recognition! It turns out that Mariel, who introduced me at the event on Wedsday, and asked really probing and intellectually sophisticated questions, is one of the closest readers of my work I've met in some time.

People have asked me why I wanted an avatar for my appearance on Second Life. This goes back to the meaning of the word, Avatar, which is a metaphor which has gotten lost as the word has taken on such common usage. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST: avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means "descent" (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God.

I remind us of this meaning half-ironically. I don't mean to imply that I am somehow a divine being taking earthly form. Rather, I mean to critique what happens when adult speak to youth much of the time. I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the MacArthur event because we -- the panelists -- were speaking from another order of representation (cinematically) in a world occupied by virtual beings. I wanted to get down to the same level (socially, representationally) with the community I was talking with. I think this is a real issue. Too often, adults talk about kids, maybe even speak to youth, but they don't talk with them. And becoming an avatar seemed like the best way to signal my desire to speak on the same level with my audience. Anyway, it made sense to me.

The whole experience was amazing. I will let you listen to the actual exchange which has been recorded and put on line if you wish. There's also a really wonderful video of highlights of the event which is now in circulation on YouTube. Frankly, I come off sounding much more coherent in the video than I did at the time. There was something truly overwhelming about the whole experience.

For one thing, I really am a newbie and so moving around in that body -- and indeed, remembering to keep moving -- was a challenge for me. At one point, I accidentally flew up, planted myself on the top of a sign suspended over the event, and couldn't figure out how to get down. I've had embarrassing experiences speaking before but none like that. At another point, I just slumped over in my chair because I didn't remember to keep poking at my avatar. There's a high learning curve here and doing your learning in public eye can be awkward. My students are talking about creating an animation sequence which has my characteristic hand gestures. Nobody has ever seen me speak for long without gesticulating wildly. I've got a ways to go before I blend fully and comfortably into my avatar but I was really taken with the sense of presence I felt interacting with all of the people attending the event from remote locations.

I kept getting distracted by the sheer array of avatars in attendance -- characters from anime, dancing Pandas in Ninja costumes, a monster from Will Wright's Spore... At one point I made a reference to the struggles City of Heroes had with Marvel over the fact that players might use their character design tools to create a knockoff of the Incredible Hulk and then looked out a moment later to find someone in the audience had turned themselves into the Hulk. And I was blown away by the fact that my avatar has much better moves on the dance floor than I've ever managed to master. He's one cool dude and I am, well, not. So, all in all, it was an amazing experience but I was not at my most articulate as one thing or another distracted me mid-sentence.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and to everyone who turned out to enjoy the show. I hope to have more chances to interact in Second Life in the coming year.

And to all of you who have read and contributed to the blog this year, thanks -- and best wishes on the holiday season.

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

Odds and Ends

It's Awards Season... Many of you are already starting to second guess which films are going to be nominated for Academy Awards. The past few days we are starting to see the major film critic's organization weigh in on the best films of the year -- so far, they are all over the map with no strong consensus behind any particular title. But my own focus is on the Edublog awards. As it happens, two of my projects this year got nominated. The white paper we wrote for MacArthur and which we serialized here on the blog is being considered for Best Research Paper 2006. And the public conversation which I did with danah boyd about MySpace and the DOPA act is being considered for Most Influential Post, Resource or Presentation 2006. Thanks for everyone out there who nominated me -- I am flattered!

Here's how the awards are described:

As the reality and potential of distributed learning and distributed learner identities and communities are increasingly acknowledged, articulated and understood education moves further towards facilitating truly learner-centered and learned driven environments. A lot has changed in the world of educational technology since this time last year. The continuing rise and mainstreaming of easy to use network-as-platform applications, and increasing access to affordable online speed and space, have seen the continued expansion of users of all ages creating and communicating online. Learners and educators still however face difficult issues around network restrictions, around data protection and ownership, and around commercial protectionism. This year has also seen a marked increase in hostility towards social networking sites in the US, demonstrating a widespread lack of appreciation of the informal and formal educational value of user-centered applications. The Edublog awards are more relevant than ever in this climate - a space for us to refocus the debate surrounding young peoples use of technology as irresponsible, dangerous or illegal, and look at the positive, powerful and transformative work which continues to be demonstrated.

Voting amongst the finalists will continue through December 14 with the winners announced on December 15. There are nominees in ten different categories representing a really interesting catalog of some of the most interesting writing online this year concerning youth and digital media. Many of my readers who are concerned with media literacy will find the nomination page a useful resource for further reading and reflection.

That's Transmedia Entertainment!

Paul Levitz, the President of DC Comics, shares some speculations about the future of comics in a fascinating interview with Newsarama.com. Levitz references his participation in the Futures of Entertainment conference and continues some of his thinking about comic's relationship to transmedia entertainment. Levitz thinks deeply about the comic's medium and clearly prepared himself thoroughly for his role at our conference, making a series of very thoughtful comments.

Here's what he said about the experience:

NRAMA: Thinking about the larger picture of the management of the characters and properties, are comics leading the charge in charting new territory? While there are

older properties and those that are as, if not more popular, like Mickey Mouse, but

Mickey Mouse hasn't had continuity or a line of stories that stretch back nearly 70

years.

PL: I was at a seminar at M.I.T. a couple of weeks ago on the futures of entertainment. The panel I was on was titled "Transmedia" which they defined as moving creative ideas from one medium to another. The professor who was running the conference made a similar point - how come comics have been doing all of this? What is special and peculiar about comics? He made the point in terms of superheroes, and I argued back that I felt it was really true about all comics.

I think there are a few characteristics that are relevant. One, by the nature of what comics are, we've generally had to create open- ended stories. Think of the differences between Batman and The Fugitive. Although the founding tragedy might be as tragic, the character of Batman was designed to go on to a seemingly infinite number of adventures.He wasn't restricted to just taking place in a certain narrowcast, or a certain narrow geography. Many of the great comics characters, not just the superheroes, were built with fairly complicated and interesting fictional worlds around them. Uncle Scrooge - for example.

There's also an interesting argument to be made, and I'm not sure if it's right, but McLuhan raised the issue that the less well-defined a character was initially, the more the reader or views has to interpolate into it, and therefore was not stuck in a specific image that they would measure against. Comics, with their rather raw visual structure, work very powerfully into that argument, that is to say that when you're introduced to Batman as a drawn character, you're able to more easily transform your vision between Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale and the different approaches those take, as well as the different visual styles that are developed over time. Compare that to a character you fell in love with because a particular actor was playing him or her in a particular role. That's not a well-researched issue, and there are arguments to be had about it, I'm sure, but there's something in there somewhere.

So I think we've had some natural opportunities available to us because of all of this. We also have the advantage in some comic characters, including Superman and Batman, that for them to succeed from early on, they had to open themselves to different creative talents. That's a very important issue in this world of Transmedia. If you've got something that is being guided uniformly by one great creative mind - which can yield terrific creative results - it's harder to make the jump to multiple other media, because the thing is so intimately reliant on the idea that one person so closely "gets" or sees...or understands.

So, for better or for worse, from early on, it was sort of battle- proven that Superman and Batman were ideas that multiple writers and multiple artists could get into and do good, creative work with.

As I suggested here in some of the outtakes from Convergence Culture, comics have a special relationship to convergence -- indeed, comics have been transmedia from their inception. Today, Buster Brown is best known as a brand of children's shoes but the character spanned across comic strips, Broadway musicals, and a range of other commodities at the turn of the century -- one of the first comic strip characters to make a significant impact on the public. In the first few years of his history, Superman moved from comic books to comic strips, radio shows, live action film serials, and animated short subjects, with each of these media making distinct contributions to the evolution of his mythology. Many historians argue that the character would not have had the same impact on our culture if he had not been so well designed to play out across such a broad range of media platforms. Levitz makes a good case here that it is not just the superheroes but a range of other serialized comic characters (including Uncle Scrooge) have also enjoyed extensive transmedia careers.

Today's No Prize goes to CMS graduate student Geoff Long for spotting this interview and calling it to my attention.

Speaking of Japanese School Girls...

We have been lucky enough to have a distinguished scholar of Japanese manga and popular culture, Sharon Kinsella, teaching in the Foreign Languages and Literature Program at MIT this term. Kinsella, the author of Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, spoke at the last CMS colloquium of the term, sharing some of her work in progress, Girls and the Male Imagination: Fantasy of Rejuvenation in Contemporary Japan. Her talk, "Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation," might have been called "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Japanese School Girls But Were Afraid to Ask," crisscrossing between different media and across political discourse and popular culture, to argue about the ways that the schoolgirl becomes a figure of desire, dread, and fantasy identification among adult males in that society. Her talk included some interesting insights on texts which will be known to many of my readers, including Spirited Away, Battle Royale, and Sailor Moon, but also a broad range of b-movies and soft-core porn titles which helped me to read these cult classics through some new lens. The podcast version of this talk has just gone up on the CMS homepage and is recommended to anyone interested in Japanese popular culture.

While you are at it, you might also be interested in checking out some of the other programming on anime and other forms of Japanese popular culture which my colleague, Ian Condry, has put together through his Cool Japan program. For example, here's the transcript of a fascinating session he hosted on Violence and Desire in Japanese Culture: Anime Capitalism. Podcast of this and other Cool Japan events can be found at the Anime Pulse website.

Sharon Kinsella will be repeating her talk on Japanese school girls at Harvard University through an event being hosted by the Cool Japan program. Here are the details:

Prof. Sharon Kinsella's talk

"Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"

will be held

THURSDAY, December 14

4-6pm

William James Hall, Room 1550

Harvard University

My Mii -- Oh My!

Alice J. Robison, who just finished her doctorate working with James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working this year as a post-doc in the Comparative Media Studies Program. This term, she has taught a course for us on games criticism and next term, she will be offering a course on new media literacies. When she's not teaching in the program or contributing to our various games and new media literacy initiatives, she has been spending time playing with her new Wii. I am still among the uninitiated among the ways of the Wii, despite being very enthusiastic about the concept of the new interface. As I understand it, the Wii ships with an avatar creation tool and players can build their own distinctive anime style characters known as Mii.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In certain games (including Wii Sports, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Wii Play, and The Sims Wii), each player's caricature will serve as the character he or she controls in game play. Miis can interact with other Wii users by showing up on their Wii consoles through the WiiConnect24 feature or by talking with other Miis created by Wii owners all over the world. This feature is called Mii Parade. Early-created Miis as well as those encountered in Mii Parades may show up as spectators in some games. Miis can be stored on controllers and taken to other consoles. The controller can hold up to a maximum amount of 10 Miis.

Inspired in part by the Second Life Avatar which I featured here the other week, Alice has created a Mii in the likeness of, well, me. You might call him a mini-me/mii. The pun's just keep coming folks. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks, Alice. (I am told that she has also built Mii for some other prominent games scholars. Maybe some day we can create a collector set of leading media theorists which graduate students can pit against each other. It will certainly result in my much lively seminars.)

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series examining the emergence of a new discourse about transmedia branding, inspired in part by the discussion of transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture. Obviously, I am following these developments with great personal interest. I wrote this summary of the debates for the newsletter of our Convergence Culture Consortium. The (Burger) King Is Content

Yacob's post has generated a range of other responses across the blogosphere. Here's some of the advantages which Jason Oke of the Toronto based Leo Burnett agency sees in the transmedia model:

I think it addresses those two weaknesses of media-neutral planning: ignoring that different media are better at different things, and that people are social beings. And by putting a brand community in the middle, it also forces us to think about whether we are in fact making brands and communications which are interesting enough for a community to form, and for people to want to talk about our communications.... [We] have talked about the power of complexity in

communication - that people generally find complex, nuanced, layered things more interesting than simple straightforward things. But when we talk about this stuff, we still usually talk about people processing it individually - so each one person is rewarded for spending more time or if they see it again. But what if we looked at it through the lens of a brand community? Each different layer or detail could appeal to a different group of people, who could compare stories, and thus continually be getting new perspectives on the same thing....

"The idea of brand communities solves one issue that we sometimes run into when attempting to create complex and layered communications - the pushback that we shouldn't put details that everyone (or at least most people) won't or can't get. This is often combined with research findings that indeed, "most people didn't get this reference you were trying to make." This kind of thinking dumbs down communication into the lowest common denominator. But with the brand community model, that ceases to apply - as long as someone, somewhere will get

it, then lots of details and references can work. Whoever notices it will likely tell others about it, because the fact that they figured something out reinforces their ego, status and self-image, and because the tools to widely spread that knowledge are now readily available. So instead of talking down to everybody, we can talk up to everybody, by giving many different groups

something that makes them feel intelligent for getting a subtle reference. And we give them a reason to have multiple conversations about the brand.

Oke's version moves us even further away from the idea that transmedia centers only on narrative and instead focuses on this notion of layering. Oke discusses for example a particular Burger King spot which circulates on YouTube:

On the surface, it's a jingle about the new Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch chicken sandwich. But you might also notice that the guy singing the song is Darius Rucker from 90's band (and pop culture trivia item) Hootie & the Blowfish. Or that the jingle itself is based on the old hobo ballad and Burl Ives classic "Big Rock Candy Mountain." Or that it was directed by iconic photographer David LaChapelle with all kinds of sexual imagery, both hetero and homo. Or that model and TV host Brooke Burke makes a cameo at the end (she's often used in BK ads). But you probably wouldn't notice all of those things, and in fact I'd be surprised if the same people who know who David LaChapelle is are also into turn-of-the century hobo ballads (I'm guessing those circles don't tend to overlap much). But more to the point, not getting some or all of the references doesn't detract from the main brand message (there's a new

chicken sandwich), because each bit also stands on its own. By having lots of detail, though, it gives fans of the brand something to notice and talk about and deconstruct. So you might have missed some of the details but someone else can point them out, and this gives you a deeper appreciation of it, and completes your picture of the whole a bit more.

Oke seems to be describing something close to what game designer Neal Young describes in Convergence Culture as "additive comprehension." Young uses the example of the "origami unicorn" featured in the director's cut version of Bladerunner, a detail which led many to speculate that Deckard, the protagonist, may be a replicant. At the Futures of Entertainment conference, Alex Chisholm provided another example of additive comprehension drawn from one of the Heroes comics tie-ins, where the information that Hiro's grandfather survive Hiroshima adds new significance to both his name and to his response to the challenge of saving the world from what appears to be a threat of nuclear destruction.

Additive comprehension is a key aspect of transmedia entertainment/branding since it allows some viewers to have a richer experience (depending on what they know or which other media they have consumed) without in any way diminishing the experience of someone who only encounters the story on a single media platform. In this case, the same advertisement may support multiple interpretations depending on what kind of knowledge consumers bring to the encounter. If one can convey to the readers that there are secrets there to be uncovered, you can potentially motivate more conversation and engagement as online discussion forums rally to mutually decode the layered content.

Is Transmedia Branding Redundant?

Not everyone has embraced this idea of transmedia branding, though. In a post called "Transmedia Planning My Arse," Giles Rhys Jones argues that transmedia branding simply represents an expansion of the existing 360 branding model: there is still a need for redundancy in the messaging if the branding efforts are to be successful. Citing the Art of the Heist example, Jones suggests, that each element "surely required multiple channel exposure for full impact, rather than each channel living in its own right." I would argue that redundancy is an essential aspect of the transmedia experience. If every element were truly

autonomous, one would have no way to recognize the distinctive contributions of each medium to the media mix strategy. Indeed, much must remain the same across media for people to feel the strong sense of connection between the different installments and for communities to feel like the parts will add up to a meaningful whole if they work together to map the larger fictional universe. What we still need to explore -- whether we are talking about entertainment content or brands -- is the ballance between redundancy and originality, between familiarity and difference.

Will transmedia branding make a lasting contribution to contemporary marketing theory? It's too early to say. As an author, I am delighted to see some of my ideas are generating such discussion. As someone interested in marketing my own intellectual property, these discussions are themselves a kind of transmedia branding: after all, the more people talk about my book, the more people are likely to buy it. I don't have to control the conversation to

benefit from their interest in my product. The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do. In that regard, the book may have had greater impact on the discussions of branding because I didn't fill in all of the links between branding and transmedia entertainment, leaving the blogosphere something to puzzle through together.

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part One)

Cynthia and I are just back from Poland as of tonight. I hope to share some impressions of the trip as soon as I am able. In the meantime, the following post was written for the newsletter we send to C3 partners. When you write a book, you usually have no idea which ideas will get picked up or by which communities. That's part of the fun of sending your brain children out in the world. Today, I want to explore a case in point -- the ways that the idea of transmedia narrative in my new book, Convergence Culture, has started to evolve into a concept of transmedia planning as it has been taken up by bloggers interested in branding.

Convergence Culture itself deals with transmedia storytelling as an emerging

form of entertainment but never really addresses its application to branding. The chapter on transmedia storytelling immediately follows the book's discussion of American Idol, brand communities, affective economics, and product placement so the connection of ideas was there to be found but I did not myself put all of the pieces together.

The Further Adventures of Mr. Clean

Even before the book appeared in print, though, C3 researcher Grant McCracken published a series of blog posts exploring what my approach to transmedia might contribute to current thinking about brands:

In the old world of marketing, there wasn't much transmediation to speak of. Corporations made products, and informed the advertising agency, who in turn informed the consumer... The meanings went straight down a single shute. They did not run on several tracks.

McCracken focuses primarily on one aspect of the transmedia experience -- providing backstory. He questioned whether most brands have a sufficiently detailed backstory to generate the kind of consumer interest that give rise to fan communities around entertainment franchises:

For Mr. Clean there was no back story, no alternative endings, no competing interpretation. There was in fact no narrative to speak of. I think some consumers surmised that Mr. Clean was an uncorked genie, a creature out of Shahraza released from the lamp/bottle to put his magic at the disposal of the homemaker. In this case, the brand was actually removing meaning from the icon, not supplementing or multiplying this meaning.

Yet in a subsequent post, McCracken shows how easy it would be to flesh out the backstory of a seemingly empty icon:

It's not so hard to imagine Mr. Clean in more fully realized narrative terms: child of an orphanage in a French colony in North Africa (circa 1890), early childhood spend as a runner in a souk (market), taken in as a servant by a family of French nationals who holiday in Morocco and eventually he joins the household even when it is "at home" in France. In the late spring of 1907, "Gerard" is travelling back to Morocco to help to set up the summer home when (mon dieu!) he is kidnapped by pirates. Gerard sails for some years as a pirate and this allows him to built up a small store of wealth, and to return, eventually, to the souk where he buys a stock of carpets and a stall, marries his childhood sweetheart, and begins to raise a little batch of runners all his own. It is on one of his trips to replenish his supply of carpets that...

Would such a backstory enhance the brand experience? Perhaps. Especially if people find themselves wanting to find out more about this remarkable character and his many exotic adventures, if consumers seek more touch points with the brand, if they generate their own narratives about Gerard. Personally I am waiting to see the Mr. Clean/Jolly Green Giant slash genre emerge!

There have been good examples of tapping interest in characters to prolong our engagement. I am thinking of the Folger's Coffee campaign with Anthony Head, who went on to play Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here a story unfolded across a number of commercial installments -- following a fairly simple genre -- the romantic comedy. Could you imagine extending that outward into some kind of epistelary fiction? A series of love letters between the two in print or on the web, which come complete with coffee stains? Perhaps even some kind of game where the goal is help true love win out and good coffee taste find an appreciating consumer?

Yet, there is also a danger in too much specificity. We might start by pondering whether renaming Mr. Clean Gerard increases our engagement with the character or simply closes off a range of other possible associations. The most effective use of transmedia branding so far may be the BMW campaign, "The Hire," which unfolded first on the web (in the hands of some of the world's greatest filmmakers) and more recently in the comics (in the hands of some pretty damn gifted comics creators). Despite all of the screen time he enjoys, the central protagonist -- the driver -- receives very little characterization, allowing him to move fluidly across genres and across media platforms. He is more an observer figure than a protagonist: the goals of the guest stars set the terms for each new installment. One can encounter the episodes in any order, but there may be less motivation to try to find links across them.

Transmedia vs. Media Neutral

The relationship between transmedia entertainment and branding resurfaced recently in a much discussed post by Faris Yacob from the London-based Naked Communications group. Yacob embraces transmedia branding in contrast to what he sees as the media neutral approach that shapes much current thinking about branding:

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been media neutral planning. In essence, this is the belief that we should develop a single organising thought that iterates itself across any touchpoint - this was a reaction against previous models of integration that were often simply the dilution of a televisual creative idea across other channels that it wasn't necessarily suited to...The important point is that there is one idea being expressed in different ways. This is believed to be more effective as there are multiple encodings of the same idea, which reinforces the impact on the consumer.

Now then, let's think about transmedia planning. In this model, there would be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels could be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create an larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves. The beauty of this is that it is designed to generate brand communities, in the same way that The Matrix generates knowledge communities, as consumers come together to share elements of the narrative. It

has a word of mouth driver built in.

While McCracken's use of my transmedia concept emphasized back story, Yacob's version stresses world building and the social activity of consumers. His primary example turns out to be the alternative reality game, The Art of the Heist. It's worth recalling that I do discuss The Beast and I Love Bees in the context of my discussion of transmedia storytelling. Indeed, at the heart of my concept of transmedia is the distinction between cultural attractors -- works that draw like minded individuals together to form a community -- and cultural activators -- works that give these communities something to do. In a subsequent interview, Yacob fleshes out even more his idea about the role of the consumer in the process of transmedia branding:

I think consumers can handle more than a single core idea. In fact, I think in an age where increasingly consumers control the media the consume, and we can no longer simply interrupt, entertain for 25 seconds and then sell them something, then we have to offer them more than a core idea well told.

It's not about individuals responding to the whole world - it's about whether a community will adopt it. And groups naturally spring up around stories that have rich worlds to explore, discuss and share.

The industry seems obsessed by engagement at the moment - building / offering brand engagement. But from a person, or communities, point of view - why should they engage with brands unless there is some value in the engagement?

Consciously or unconsciously, Yacob is linkig my notion of transmedia entertainment with arguments about complexity in contemporary popular narrative made by Steven Johnson in his book, Everything Bad is Good For You, or C3 researcher Jason Mittell in his work on contemporary television narative. I see the kinds of complexity that Johnson and Mittell discuss as closely linked to the emergence of knowledge communities (or as Pierre Levy might call it, collective intelligence): a group of people, pooling their knowledge, working together, can process much greater complexity (indeed, demands much greater complexity) than an individual watching television alone in their living room. Transmedia entertainment simply pushes that search for complexity to the next level, spreading the information across multiple media platforms and thus providing an incentive for what Mimi Ito calls "hypersociality." The more people get absorbed into putting together these scattered bits of information, the more invested they are in the brand/fan narrative.

In a film franchise, what fuels this interest may be a story -- or more precisely, a fictional world rich enough to support a range of possible stories. But, one can imagine other structures of information generating similar interest -- we can't really call what motivates the Survivor spoilers I discuss earlier in Convergence Culture a story per se. One can imagine, for example, a trivia contest of some kind creating sufficient interest that people seek out information from multiple choices and pool data with others in their core community.

Building Soaps as Long-Term Brands: A Diatribe on Laura's Return on General Hospital

By: Sam Ford This is the third of a three-part series about my look at the world of soaps while Henry is in Poland this week. This builds off the piece I posted here two days ago about legacy characters in soap operas. As with the other two, this piece originally appeared on the C3 blog last night. For more of the C3 team's commentary on various aspects of "convergence culture," be sure to stop by our blog or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Back on Nov. 8, I wrote about legacy characters in soaps, basing much of my writing about the short-term reuniting of Luke and Laura on General Hospital the iconic couple of days gone by in the soaps industry, going back to a time when soaps carried many more viewers. The post raised spirited debate, even drawing in the former head writer of the top-rated American soap opera, Kay Alden, who is also an advisor on my thesis project.

My intent now is to start with the comments generated from that last post to move into examining the limited success of the Luke and Laura reuniting and what the industry can learn from it and hopefully not misinterpret. The show re-inventing the Luke and Laura wedding did a 2.9, above the usual average for the show but below what some projected might be possible to reach. And, what's worse for some people, the ratings were back down to a 2.6 average for the show, still putting it atop some of its competition but not resulting in any major sustained growth. However, the reunion did post the highest rating in the history of cable network SoapNet, and it generated quite a bit of publicity.

Kay Alden wrote about how unique thinking about using older characters/viewers to help "reinvent the soap opera viewing audience" was a fascinating way to think about audience-building that the genre had not thought about. "The idea of actively rejecting the consistent concern with more and more youth, and instead reaching out for the multigenerational audience is one that we would be wise to explore and, frankly, exploit."

Alden writes, "No one in my experience has said, let's bring back this old person as a means of drawing old viewers back to the show and getting them re-involved, because these old viewers might be the key to drawing in new viewers from their own families, and helping to re-establish the tradition of soap opera viewing as a family affair, passed down from mothers to daughters to their daughters."

To recap my original points from the first post:

Longevity. Soaps should celebrate what they have on their side, and one of those things is a deep history with a talented ensemble roster, many of whom have been around for years.

The WWE. I pointed to WWE's 24/7 On Demand product which makes episodes available for the archives and also markets historical footage through DVDs, etc., as proof that fans can often care about the pasts of their dramas and the character history of various characters.

Legacy Characters. I argue that legacy characters are a way to tie the current soaps products with the past of those shows and to draw in former viewers, envisioning a way to have familiar faces appear from time to time to show back up and pull them back in. I also point out that you don't have to have all the characters featured be the same age of the target viewers, as people are often interested in stories about characters older/younger than them as well.

Demographics. The problem with older viewers is that they aren't the target demographic. But most people only start watching soaps through a social relationship, whether it be a friend or spouse or parent or grandparent. So, while older viewers may not be beneficial in and of themselves for people who are looking too narrowly at a certain age demographic, they become increasingly important when the economic model shifts and they are considered grassroots marketers for the show.

The Prodigal viewers. I argue that soaps need to concentrate first and foremost on how to get the people watching their show now to love it so much they will spread the word to people who used to watch to come back. This takes time. I wrote, "And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. " However, "the problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well." So my argument that the most important marketing tool of all is good, long-term, consistent storytelling.

General Hospital

Kay writes in depth about her responses from the way Luke and Laura still capture some of the power of soaps but wonders "can it bring in new, younger viewers?" She writes:

Thus, viewers who tune in again for the nostalgia value of Luke and Laura, will witness several things: they will get their nostalgia from the many flashbacks to the Luke and Laura romance that GH will undoubtedly play; viewers will also see what the characters are like now, today, 25 years later, as this story of undying love is rejuvenated; and finally, these old viewers may well find themselves drawn into the stories of the newer characters--the "children of" stories, as well as becoming involved with newer, very powerful characters like Sonny, Alexis, Carly, Jax, who have become more the mainstay of the show, but who would be new to viewers from long ago. In short, it seems to me that General Hospital has the potential to hit it out of the park with the return of Genie Francis and all that this could mean at this time.

Now that the return (and Laura) has come and gone, it appears that it caused a blip in the map, a short-term increase, but nothing major and nothing sustained. It seems that some viewer reaction was largely that it was great to see her but that viewers knew it was short-term from the start and that it was too ephemeral to have great impact. For instance, in one online commentary site--"Snark Weighs In"--the author writes, "In many ways, the situation mirrored the viewers real-life relationship with GH. Luke entered into this ludicrous situation knowing his time with Laura would be short--and so did we. [ . . . ] Luke and Laura's re-wedding, the centerpiece of ABC's promotional campaign, was nothing more than an anti-climactic attempt to ride the coattails of the most famous wedding in TV history. It was the least interesting part of Gene Francis' return." (The author is referring, by the way, to the drug that temporarily pulled Laura out of her catatonic state, much as happened recently with John Larroquette's character on House.)

Other fans weighed in over at Soap Central, debating a wide variety of reasons why fans didn't tune back in--largely talking about flaws in the current way soaps tell stories and the fact that many viewers wouldn't return because they both knew it was short-term and didn't want to see it poorly executed. The same discussions took place at the TV Guide Community. And I would propose another suggestion--that many people simply never heard about it nor was it done long-term enough for them to develop investment in returning to the show.

Inflated Expectations

Toni Fitzgerald with Media Life Magazine wrote about the power of this storyline back in October, when the first numbers came through surrounding Laura's return. She wrote, "That in a nutshell is what's been happening on ABC's "General Hospital," and it's driving big ratings increases. The return of Genie Francis, the actress who plays Laura, for the first time since 2002 helped the show regain the No. 1 slot in daytime among women 18-49 for the first time in six months" and went on to predict more of the same. The problem is not that the event wasn't successful but just that such a short-term jump in numbers was just not enough to get a significant number of people involved in the product once again.

This takes me back to August, when I wrote in response to all the critics after the opening weekend of Snakes on a Plane did $15 million. Even our own Henry Jenkins said he was eating crow at this "low" number. At the time I wrote, "The problem is that people fell prey to their own hyperbole and expected a campy B-movie to become a blockbuster, which I don't think it was ever designed to be. " And I feel the same way in this instance.

In the comments section of that original post in November, I wrote in response to Kay's comments that "the return of Laura for a limited time is one small incident. I am not predicting it will change the industry or anything of the sort, as one smart decision doesn't turn everything around. I just think that a whole lot of these types of decisions is the way to go and a change in the way the industry thinks overall." Instead, I advocated both grounding long-term and older characters more solidly in stories and create a budgeting shift that would allow for continued short-term returns from various characters from each show's history throughout the year, so that using legacy characters becomes established with fans as a long-term strategy rather than a one-time gimmick.

A History of Quick-Fixes

Soaps have been trying to fix the ratings problems for a while--say 20 years now or so. As cable channels proliferated and choices grew exponentially, soaps slowly lost viewership. The response was to try and appeal directly to the target demographic by drawing them in a variety of ways...to think about how to increase numbers by next week. And all these quick-fixes, even if they led to some momentary jumps in ratings from time-to-time over the years, have seen an overall trend of sliding numbers.

Some quick-fixes have been colorful. My favorites have been with Passions, the only show to not be around in the more "glorious" periods and that has survived by drawing in younger viewers and by parodying the genre in various ways. They've had an animated sequence and a Bollywood episode. Guiding Light surprised everyone with a comic book/superhero crossover, although readers and viewers seemed to fill it was lacking in execution Meanwhile, Days of Our Lives is seeking out interactivity by allowing viewers to name the baby of a prominent character. There have also been interesting promotional campaigns, such as the dance videos promoting As the World Turns and the ATWT/Tyson Chicken commercials. And yet another interesting project from SoapNet is a fantasy soaps competition, modeled after fantasy football.

Some of these were intended for varying degrees of short-term promotion, but the overall trajectory of the genre has been quick-fixes. This happens in storyline form as well, with natural disaster stories or plot-driven suspenseful moments that may draw new people in for a week but gives them little to want to stick around for.

I find Laura as another quick-fix, except this time they are using history. My argument about utilizing history is not about for some short-term gains but rather as a change in approach and in practices, in attitude. Bringing Laura back for a few weeks, as an isolated incident, is not an example of a long-term approach to building an audience back. That's not to criticize the storyline but rather to explain why it did not lead to this miraculous turnaround soaps seem to continue seeking. These are all placebos. There's no secret--just good storytelling. And soaps need to realize this and start building for the future before they slowly use up even more of the cultural cache they've built up. No one in the industry wants to see the End of DAYS.

The era of quick-fixes needs to end for the genre to survive, and networks and producers alike have to think about these shows as long-time brands rather than just weekly programming. The question needs to be how shows can tell good stories now that will lead to increased viewership in two years and do everything within that time to improve the storytelling, make shows more inclusive of the whole case, embrace the history, and empower grassroots marketers to draw more viewers back in. That takes a lot of time and a long-term vision, though.

Building Momentum

Let me reiterate--the problem with the long-term approach is that it takes a long time to get results. Sustainable growth, as any city planner will tell you as well, is not just adding new populations in droves. In the soaps industry, that seems to be unlikely to happen in the first place and--if it does--hotshotting only leads to a one-time bump. That's why the approach over the past 20 years may have led to momentary spikes as soaps steal audiences from each other and temporarily draw viewers back in, but a lack of long-term planning and looking at the show as a brand rather than a week-by-week product has led to a steady decline, caused largely by a number of new choices but exacerbated by this lack of long-term vision and miscalculation of the power of the audience and the material.

What soaps need to do is develop this consistent direction and then have the confidence to pull it off. Short-term returns by old characters are just another form of hot-shotting, although particularly more interesting than a slasher storyline.

Look at the pro wrestling world once again for a parallel. Fans of wrestling remember well the 5.5-year "Monday Night War" between Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation and Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, in competing shows on Monday nights. When Nitro debuted against incumbent RAW in September 1995, it quickly took over the ratings by presenting a better show. However, after eight or nine months winning the ratings in a row, WCW got complacent and stale. WWF improved its product to the point that, by mid-1997, it was clearly among hardcore fans considered the better show. It was clear that WWF had the momentum on its side.

However, even as that momentum was slowly building, WCW was still winning the ratings battle every week. In fact, it wasn't until mid-1998 that WWF broke what was, by then, an 83-week wining streak for WCW. The key was that the show had to get better almost a full year before it reflected in the ratings. If WWF had shifted its focus anytime during that year, their subsequent unparalleled popularity in the late 1990s and early part of this decade would have never happened. If they had gone for short-time fixes and hotshotting at some point along the way, they would have destroyed what they were building up.

The key was in giving time for word-of-mouth to spread. They started putting on a better show, but people were more dedicated to Nitro. Yet, word slowly started to pass that WWF was putting on the better program week-by-week. Fan advocacy are your best chance of permanently gaining new viewers, but that relationship has to build organically, needing a long-term plan rather than a quick turnaround. Soaps could learn a lot from the wrestling world's lesson (and the wrestling world could do some good at looking back at their own history).

Fans Hold the Secret to Success

Even if some researchers want to claim that watching soaps makes you stupid, fans have often proven to be more savvy than they are given credit for. Some fan forums are known for having intriguing discussions about their shows online. Look, for instance, at how fans discuss product placement in relation to the genre's future, such as here and here. (On a tangential note, see soaps' use of embedded public service announcements as an interesting aside to product placement in the genre.)

And modern technologies dictate that there is a shrinking distance from producer to consumer. This interactivity and the personalities of other fans become an important part of the viewing experience for many people, especially as they often become fans of other fans themselves. In other words, your most ardent fans who act as historians and resources and commentators and critics to the rest of the fan community have quite a following of their own, and shows would benefit most from interacting with and bolstering those activities rather than hiding from them or minimizing their importance by ignoring that rich history.

So, while some people will decry the use of history as useless for building audiences, this short-term return of a character does not mean that history has no place on shows or that my larger arguments are wrong. Just a good story and a long-term plan that allows for multigenerational storytelling, and these shows may be able to slowly build an audience from their diaspora.

Oakdale Confidential: Secrets Revealed: How the Book's Reprint Is an Even More Striking Example of Transmedia Storytelling (with a Tangent about Bad Twin at Intermission)

By: Sam Ford In the second of my three-part series on writing about how convergence culture is changing one of television's oldest genres--the soap opera--I am focusing on the printing of a transmedia book based on the soap opera As the World Turns. I originally wrote this for the C3 blog on Nov. 25. See yesterday's post for a little bit of an explanation of my background from Henry.

Oakdale Confidential has now entered its first reprinting stage, and just as the writers wove the initial printing of the book into storylines for the soap opera As the World Turns, the reprint is becoming perhaps an even greater catalyst for events happening on the show. The book--which sat at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks in a row and made it as high as number five on Amazon's seller list--is being reprinted with the addition of a new story by author Katie Peretti, a character on the show, who reveals a major town secret in the book now that she has decided to publicly acknowledge her authorship of the book. In a chance to get revenge on her ex-husband for what she sees as ruining her current marriage, she writes what would--in the real world--be sure libel in accusing that ex-husband and his girlfriend of stealing expensive jewels, an accusation that is, in fact, true.

Following the ups and downs of this book's release, both its major success as a transmedia experiment and also its pointing at some of the troubles with creating this type of text and its subsequent instructions on future projects of this sort, has been worth following throughout 2006. Unfortunately, because of what I perceive as a bias that marginalizes certain types of content even as its popularity should rank it as mainstream, the successes of Oakdale Confidential have not been that well covered or examined. I am going to attempt to trace that history a little bit here.

Last December, I wrote about this limiting approach to marginalizing certain types of content, particularly the two types of American entertainment I study most--soap operas and pro wrestling. Both were among the earliest of television staples and both have proven to be immensely popular throughout the past several decades, yet neither are regularly understood or reported on by those supposedly covering "the entertainment industry." Wrestling and soaps are both only covered by their own press, and it is clear when the occasional feature is done on either most of the time that the "mainstream" entertainment press either have a complete lack of understanding of the genre and/or a disdain for the genre that clouds their coverage. That's largely not because there are no journalists who are fans of wrestling or soaps but rather that's the only stories that have the likelihood of getting run. (The reverse is the glowing and too positive stories in which the journalist is so surprised by discovering the popularity of one of these entertainments that they don't give a nuanced account at all.)

At the time, I wrote, "Considering many of the ideas people now celebrate as complex television came from soap opera, and considering how much of an innovator WWE has been in transmedia storytelling and many other aspects of media convergence, it just makes me wonder how many other extremely popular and profitable areas of popular culture are ignored by most mainstream journalists."

The plans for Oakdale Confidential were announced in early 2006. Back in February, I first asked what Oakdale Confidential would be. The announcement of a novel that would in some way be related to the show directed a lot of speculation from fans as to who or what would be the driving force behind this book. At the time, I wrote, "Whatever the case--this is another step in the right direction, if done well. How can a novel become a piece of transmedia? If done well, the television plot will in some way hinge on the contents of the book, so that the television show promotes the book but also requires viewers to read the book to understand the full implications of the impact the book has on the residents of Oakdale. The show has been very tight-lipped about what Oakdale Confidential is, and Amazon's page on the book has next to no information about the contents...Which makes all of the fans all the more determined to find out what's going on. There's great potential here for an interesting experiment in transmedia storytelling."

The book was a major success, as mentioned previously. In April, after the book had been released, I wrote, "What makes the book most intriguing is that viewers are looking through the text and examining shows carefully to get clues as to who authored it. There are several factual discrepancies in the book from what we have actually seen on screen that are illuminating for close watchers of ATWT, and my thoughts on the message board look into those parts of the text that stray from the 'truth' we've seen on the screen in detail to get a better sense of who might be the author and why they may have either gotten facts wrong or deliberately chosen to omit certain things in their rendering of the story."

The television writers and the book's author did not sync perfectly with each other, and it's important to realize that the book was written by someone with the company but not on the writing team of the show and that there was not substantial collaboration between the two creative forces. That hindered the quality of the project, and I would argue both that there were major factual inaccuracies that hindered the enjoyment of the book for longtime fans and also that there was not enough coordination between the book's author and the writers of the show to really make for greatly compelling television. But, because it had not been done on the show previously, this type of experiment was intriguing, and it was instructive as to what does and doesn't work for future transmedia projects and also a cautious tipping of the toes in the water that--to me, anyway--proved that there is substantial market interest in this type of project that will hopefully lead to a better coordinated and more earnest attempt the second time around.

This was my sentiments at the time as well, when I wrote, "While the experiment shows how much more coordination is needed between the real author of the book and the television writing team to really exploit all the possibilities of taking the story from one medium to the other, the one thing that Oakdale Confidential has demonstrated quite powerfully is that such an attempt at transmedia storytelling is becoming more and more profitable and that viewers are eager to join into a deep transmedia experience. I am hoping that the experiment not only shows the people at ATWT that this was a good idea but also what to do better the next time around."

I was intrigued by comments from Alina Adams, the book's actual author. She and I have corresponded on several occasions, but she also kept a blog running for a while after the book's publication about Oakdale Confidential. She wrote responses to various criticisms from the fan community of her work, explaining that "Oakdale's characters simply have too much past history for it all to be compressed into a novel. As a result, it was decided that any past events which were not relevant to the plot at hand wouldn't be included." While that makes sense, fans were not happy that it was used to change the relationship of characters in their pasts, to gloss over inaccuracies in people's families (including the complete exclusion of one of the children of a main character in the book), etc. Fans didn't buy this line of argument, but it was great to see her blog entries as a place these discussions played out. She also explained that "some of the "mistakes" in the book are deliberate," reflecting the desired world of the author rather than the reality. Again, I hope the fan response to some of these factual inaccuracies provided a blueprint to the creators for similar projects in the future, but Alina's comments are a great case study for anyone interested in transmedia, and--what's better--the comments were made publicly available for fans. (Also, see her post about the difficulties of writing about the physical attributes of characters when she is really referring to the actors.)

While I do sympathize with various fan complaints, the book was well-received as an experiment and encouraged. Yet I never saw that much about its success in the mainstream press. There were snippets here and there and a sidebar, but one would think that a show having a book that was an artifact from on-the-air storylines would be major discussion. And it was. Shortly thereafter. About Lost.

Bad Twin was not a replica experiment, as it's tie-ins to the actual show was more subtle, but it was very similar. And it got tons more publicity. Bad Twin had a better overall Amazon performance, from what I could gather, but the data I found never ranked it on the New York Times list's top 10 (I did find a reference to it making 14, and it may have made even higher). While I couldn't find direct comparisons between the two in overall numbers, suffice to say that both were a major success.

Yet, when the New York Times gave its review for Bad Twin, the ignoring of Oakdale Confidential was evident. As I mentioned, the soaps book did get a sidebar. But, despite having appeared higher on the list than Bad Twin ever did, Bad Twin was the one to get a full book review in the Times, a review that began, "Novels by unidentified authors have made the best-seller lists, as has at least one said to have been written by a soap opera character. But this may be the first time that a book by a nonexistent writer who is thought to have died in a plane crash has cracked the charts."

I'm not a betting man, but I would say that, had Bad Twin came first, if Oakdale Confidential had been mentioned at all, it would have almost been referenced as being derivative of the Lost book.

I'm very supportive of Bad Twin as well, but I wish both books had simply been more consistent stories and that both were most intricately woven into storylines from the shows. But these were experiments. And I'm hoping the success of the re-release of Oakdale Confidential will not just lead to even more ignoring of the book's success. This time around, the writers have done an even better job of weaving the release into the storylines, as Lucinda--the publisher--has hounded Katie on several fronts about getting her copy out, and the pressure of the book's release has played an important part in major decisions made by the character. Her notes about her sleeping with her ex-husband are used as pre-writing for the insert of the book in its re-release, as well as a way for her to sort through feelings about her one night stand, and her husband discovers about the affair when he's trying to print off her pages for Lucinda, who demands to have them immediately since the book needs to go to press and Katie has been dragging the deadline.

The discovery causes Mike to move out and Katie, in her frustration, to write a scathing extra chapter about her ex-husband, which she tries to stop from going to press, but too late. Since that time, we've seen characters around the mall where the book is being sold (and a couple of too obvious decisions to purchase it). On the whole, though, the promotion has been much more integrated into the show in a believable and compelling way this time around.

The press for the rerelease has had one major flaw--making some viewers think of it as a sequel rather than the same book with a few new things inserted in. That is somewhat the show's fault, as I have seen it referred to as a "sequel," although the storyline on the show and the book's description clearly indicates it is a reprinting of the original story with a few new additions.

As of today, the re-release is ranked #625 on Amazon, while the original version is still holding at #3,751. Both editions are hardcover.

Meanwhile, the hardcover edition of Bad Twin ranks #5,335, while the paperback is #6,275. And a large print hardcover edition is #1,381,487.

The point is that both are doing well in the long tail, and ATWT has had particular success in making the re-release once again part of storylines, despite being acknowledged as the same book. I'm still hoping that both will be models for the two shows to try something even more successful from a narrative perspective in the future now that the economic model is proven to have potential, and also that other shows will look at these successes when thinking of transmedia extensions in the future.

Alina has some great recent posts about how transmedia projects are implemented as well. One recent post highlights how a subtext from the book she wrote a year ago, about Katie's underlying interest in her former husband who wasn't even on the show again at the time that Alina was working on the book, has now been identified as fans as proof from back then that Katie was still in love with Simon and that this affair had been coming all along. This was serendipitous, but it demonstrates how transmedia can be deliberately programmed to provide these subtle connections for viewers.

And, as with character Luke Snyder's blog earlier this year, these types of projects allow viewers to see what characters on the show are reading and reacting to. (In Luke's case, with that "coming out" storyline, it interested me to see new fans who came to the show through that story in particular, without necessarily having a background in watching. But, what drove their viewing was a social network built around watching, through an online gay community.)

Read Alina's posts about the difficulties of trying to coordinate the release of Katie's writing on Amazon's Web site and the book to coincide with when things are done on the daily show itself.

And here are a few links to my take on transmedia projects being attempted by other shows, such as the Passions tabloid and the Guiding Light tabloid-style Web site that is worked into the show.

Also, see my previous notes about the Guiding Light podcasting process, Passions streaming on NBC's site and available on iTunes, and All My Children podcasts.

Legacy Characters and Rich History: How Soap Operas Must Capitalize on Their History (and Pay Attention to the Lessons of the WWE)

Sam Ford is the backbone of the Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Week in and week out, he pulls together some of the most important developments in the entertainment and media sector and offers his own insightful analysis of how they connect to the larger trends we have been researching for our clients. For those of you whose interests were perked by the conversations in and around the Futures of Entertainment conference, the C3 blog is a great place to go to learn more about user-generated content, fan and brand communities, transmedia storytelling, and so forth. There's much more there than I can possibly cover in this blog. I go for depth; Sam goes for breath--though, at his best, he achieves both.

Ford is a masters student in the Comparative Media Studies program who came to us with lots of experience as a small town journalist writing for his local newspaper in Western Kentucky. Ford wrote his undergraduate thesis about professional wrestling as a transmedia and fan phenomenon and is going to be teaching a class on the topic this spring. He is doing his thesis work trying to map some ways that soap operas in general and As The World Turns in particular can exploit aspects of convergence culture to broaden their market and to better satisfy the demands of their hardcore viewers. Like many of our students, he is using blogging to create some public discussion around his thesis ideas. In this case, he has posted a series of lengthy pieces on the C3 site which explore the ways soaps are going transmedia and interacting with their fan communities. I have asked Sam if we can reproduce these posts here in hopes that he may garner insights from my readers on his project.

Sam, by the way, has been nice enough to take over the management of this blog for the next few days while Cynthia and I have gone to Poland for the public debut of the Polish language edition of Convergence Culture -- my first translation. I will be speaking at a conference on the future of culture in Warsaw and will share some of my impressions when I get back.

Now, to turn it over to Sam:

By: Sam Ford

I originally wrote this piece over at the C3 blog at the beginning of November. Since that time, the episode that drove my initial writing has aired, and its success (or lack thereof) has driven a response that will be on the C3 site and will be cross-posted here on Friday. Also, Friday's post will pick up a variety of conversations that began in the comments section on the original post on the C3 blog which involved former Young and the Restless head writer Kay Alden and longtime soaps viewer and critic Lynn Liccardo, who are both serving as my thesis advisors (along with Henry and William Uricchio).

Luke and Laura have me thinking about soap operas and legacy characters and the importance of recognizing histories on shows that are fortunate enough to have a wealth of former content to draw from.

A lot of long-standing television forms have not completely grasped the idea that one of the most important selling tools they have is exactly what sets them apart from the more ephemeral primetime fare: longevity.

In this category, I'm talking about any type of program with deep archives but particularly thinking of daytime serial drama, the soap operas; professional wrestling; some long-standing news shows or features on other networks, anything that has been on the air for years, without an end in sight. These programs are special, with formats that have built within viewers the sense that, even if the program hits a down time, that its longevity and format will cause it to be around for years to come.

That's why I've made the argument with both pro wrestling programming and soap operas over the years that you can't really apply the term "jump the shark" to these shows because they have jumped the shark and back so many times over the past few decades. As the World Turns and Guiding Light have both been on the air every weekday and all year long for more than 50 years now, making PGP a brand renowned for longevity. And World Wrestling Entertainment's roots stretch back to 1963 as a regional broadcast, giving WWE a longstanding viewership history that few other primetime shows can match, other than news programs.

Yet, traditionally anyway, these shows only give a cursory glance to their history, instead relying on bragging about their history only in ambiguous terms from time-to-time.

WWE Finding the Right Direction with Legacy Content

Vince McMahon completely ignored wrestling history for a long time, and it made some degree of business sense when it came to the history of his competitors. He was trying to establish the WWE as the only wrestling history that matters. Now that he's pretty well won the game, though, now that he has established his wrestling empire as the owner of the country's primary wrestling brand, Vince has started to give more than just a passing glance at the wrestling archives.

Enter WWE 24/7 On Demand, which I've written about before. At the time, I wrote:

The point of all this? WWE has been able to draw on nostalgia in a way that appeals to a very concentrated group of fans, those who care enough about professional wrestling to throw down a few bucks a month to watch old pro wrestling programming, tape archives that were otherwise just sitting in a closet somewhere. It's an example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail, in that products like these can be profitable just by finding a fan base. Although the initial costs of digitizing and mapping out these tape libraries may put the product in the red, the long-term sustainability of this niche product should eventually turn a profit, especially considering that the footage can also be used for DVD releases, etc. (The company has found this out, especially with releasing multiple-disc sets of various wrestling personalities.)

And, the WWE has been able to pull in some fans who don't even watch the current product regularly but who love to see the wrestling of yesteryear. In fact, there are some people who are hostile against the company, who do not like Vince McMahon, but are willing to pay him for this archive, to remember wrestling from the regional era before what they see as his corrupting influence came through and changed pro wrestling.

On the other hand, soap operas don't really seem to "get it," as Vince would say. And it's not like Vince always has but rather that he has slowly come around to ways of educating current fans to care about wrestling history and then to promote that wrestling history with the 24/7 product, DVD releases, etc., in order to eventually make money off that content that was just collecting dust otherwise.

The Lesson for Soap Operas

The same needs to take place with soap operas. While every other television industry seems to make its name off target marketing and niche audiences when it comes to demographics, soap operas are the opposite. Almost everyone I know my age, male and female, who watch soaps do so because they started watching them with a relative growing up. In fact, almost everyone I know period started watching soaps this way. When the audience started falling off, soaps began to dumb down the shows' histories more and more, ignoring the past and worrying about losing viewers with such stuff. New characters with little history on the show started being the major focus, and veterans are lucky to make it on the screen a handful of times a month now on many shows.

Why? Soaps are losing their 18-49 female target demographic, and they are trying to appeal to them directly. But they don't understand the value of transgenerational marketing when it comes to soaps, and they've spent the last decade looking for a quick-fix for the target demographic when I believe they would have been better served focusing on improving creative and utilizing their history more effectively. Shows should bolster their longterm viewers' numbers and letting them act as their proselytizers for younger soap fans. In other words, if you hadn't lost grandma and mom, you would have been able to keep grandson or granddaughter.

Legacy Characters

How do you remedy that, though? Legacy characters. Acknowledging the history. Not only could soaps find more and more ways to make money off the show's archives (when you bring back a legacy character, release online content or DVDs that highlight the history of that characters, their interaction with others who are currently on the show, etc.), but they can also draw back in the prodigal sons and daughters who have drifted from the show by returning some familiar faces.

There has been a lot of talk in the soap fan communities and the industry in the past year about legacy characters and how their return can generate buzz for shows once again. A lot of these legacy characters are out of the demographic that the show is trying to reach, but...gasp...viewers seem to sometimes be interested in characters that aren't necessarily the same age as them, and--when it comes to the large families on most soap operas--these characters are woven into storylines of several generations of other characters on the show, leading to a show that is supposed to be multigenerational in its storylines in order to appeal to multiple generations of viewers.

Ed Martin with Media Village wrote about the return of Laura from the famed Luke and Laura couple on General Hospital and what it means to the show. Martin writes, "Francis' return as one of the most popular characters to ever emerge in daytime drama is worth noting because it calls attention (at a time when much attention is needed) to the enduring power not simply of daytime soap operas but to that of serialized programming overall and to broadcast television itself. Consider the enduring popularity of her character, Laura. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Laura's now-legendary wedding to Luke in a two-part 1981 episode that drew 30 million-plus viewers, still the record-holder for a daytime drama audience."

Later, he points out that this "is what a well-written, well-acted soap opera can do, a point well worth making at a time when most soap operas are fighting for their lives, the victims of repetitive writing, industry indifference, escalating competition from other media and, I am convinced, flawed audience measurement."

Martin shares an anecdote about younger viewers been involved with the storylines of older characters, saying, "Significantly, Alexis is not an ingénue. She's a middle-aged woman. And yet, young viewers remain heavily invested in her storylines. There's another industry perception smashed to bits. But that's a column for another day."

Nice to know that there's someone out there who agrees with me that soaps break the myth of niche demographics and that applying that rubric to soaps has been a driving force in diminishing the soaps audience.

Bringing Back the Prodigal Viewers

But what can shows do about it? Well...it seems fairly obvious, yet I'm afraid that it won't to most of the marketing folks. People like nostalgia. And the only way soaps are going to build their audience back up is first to get a great number of those people who have watched at some point in their lives back into the fold. And, gasp, the majority of those people need not be in the target demographic. I'm talking about getting grandmas and middle-aged mothers and fathers back into the show, so they can get back to work as your grassroots marketers to the younger generations.

And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. First, start by putting the veterans on the show more often, integrating them into storylines. A show like As the World Turns has a cast of Kim and Bob Hughes, Tom and Margo Hughes, Susan Stewart, Emma Snyder, Lucinda Walsh, etc., all characters who still have a lot to give and actors who are still able to carry scenes. I'm not saying that the shows have been completely inept at featuring them, but they haven't been great.

Don't be afraid to put Tom and Margo on the screen. Have young swindler Henry Coleman enter into an illicit affair with the older Lucinda Walsh, throwing the whole town off-balance. And so on. Bite the bullet and bring back Dr. John Dixon, a face many identified with ATWT for so many years. Sure, he's old, but that means that several generations of viewers will recognize him. Bring back some old favorites like Andy Dixon or Kirk Anderson...whatever happened to him, anyway? Dead or alive? After all, we found out that a smaller number of fans can nevertheless react very passionately when rumors start circulating that a longtime, yet neglected, character may be booted off the show--as was the case with rumors that Tom would be killed off on ATWT last year--and my post about the fan reaction generated more discussion than almost any post we've had on the C3 blog. Similarly, fans responded passionately about longtime character Hal Munson and his portrayer, Benjamin Hendrickson, after Hendrickson committed suicide earlier this year--the reaction shows both that fans care immensely about these longtime characters and felt a need to express their sympathy becuase they had grown close to the character over the years, and the actor's performances. And also look at how Ellen Dolan, who portrays Margo on ATWT, went directly to the fans to plead the case for better use of her character on the show (and her character has appeared more often in recent months, although that may just be a coincidence).

Then, by encouraging fans to promote the current storylines of these characters or one of their returns, by taking advantage and empowering the show's grassroots marketers, some of those old fans will come back into the fold. If they like what they see, they'll bring more back into the fold with them. And that leads to even more grassroots marketers. Then, they may start getting younger viewers tuning back in.

The problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well. One of the major problems is that a lot of writers currently with shows don't even know the shows' deep histories, since soap writers switch from show to show so often, it seems. But these shows need to get it together and take advantage of their greatest asset: their own histories.

The Best Marketing: Good and Consistent Storytelling

As I said, though, shows have to get good, and stay better for a while, before they can regain an audience. Word-of-mouth takes time. This type of approach needs a long-term commitment from the production companies and the network. The problem, though, is that trying one immediate fix after another in the soap industry for more than a decade now has led to continued decline in the numbers. If they had started this process a decade ago and focused on long-term growth, we might not be in the shape that so many creative direction changes and quick fixes have led to by this point.

In the end, the best marketing for a show is good quality. Soaps have the advantage of feeling permanent, and longstanding shows are probably not going to go off-the-air anytime soon. If shows start now with a more long-term approach to growth, incorporating the idea of taking greater advantage of the archives and bringing back legacy characters and empowering proselytizing among fans and the other ideas laid out here, then there may be a turnaround in numbers. But it's going to take a big shift in thinking from the current demographic-driven, short-term thinking that has guided the industry.

For those who are interested further in these ideas, feel free to contact me directly or read some of my previous posts on the soaps industry and pro wrestling industry at the C3 site. I'm teaching a class on pro wrestling and its cultural history here at MIT next semester, and my thesis research is on the current state of the soap opera industry and how using new technologies and the new relationships with fans can transform the genre and the industry in the 21st Century.

Thanks to Todd Cunningham with MTV Networks for bringing the return of Luke and Laura to my attention.

From a "Must Culture" to a "Can Culture": Legos and Lead Users

Joel Greenberg from the Austin-based GSD&M advertising firm is one of the fascinating people I am collaborating with on the Convergence Culture Consortium. Greenberg is a true believer in the collaborationist model I describe in my book and discussed here a while back. He's been putting together a series of podcasts called Friends Talking which interview some of the key thinkers in and out of industry on topics such as viral marketing, user-generated content, and community-based innovation. Greenberg brings in guests like The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Got Game's John Beck, Linden Lab's Philip Rosendale, and others, sits down with them for a substantive conversation about cutting edge issues, and then runs the entire conversation via his podcast . In the most recent installment, Greenberg focuses attention on the concept of lead users and applies it to examine the development of the new Lego Mindstorms NXT product which is being released in time for Christmas. Lead user innovation is a term most closely associated with my MIT colleague, Eric Von Hippel, who wrote a book, Democratizing Innovation, which should be better known among media scholars than it has been. Von Hippel's focus is innovation in manufacturing -- how companies are tapping insights from their consumers to produce more effective products -- but what he says has many implications for the kinds of fan communities that emerge around popular culture. Indeed, I learned of Von Hippel's work -- not through hallway conversations at MIT but because Robert Kozinets combined Von Hippel's work in management science and my work in fan studies to talk about consumerism around Star Trek in his dissertation.

Basically, Von Hippel is arguing that companies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users -- these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.

Inspired by an article in Wired, Greenberg sought out contact with some of the executives at Lego who are working on the new Mindstorms products. (Many will recall that the original insights that generated the Mindstorm series came from MIT Media Lab professor Seymour Papert, though adapted to the needs of the mass market. These tool kits which allow kids to do simple programming and build and control their own robots have been embraced in schools around the world.) When it came time to create the next product in the Mindstorm series, Lego pulled together some of the most innovative users of its products and incorporated them fully in the design process.

Attending a national conference and robotics competition in Austin, Greenberg was able to interview Soren Lund, the man Lego put in charge of the initiative and Ray Almgren, one of National Instruments' VP's who had worked closely with Lego to adapt their Labview software as the programming environment for Mindstorms. Lund speaks about the value of linking the "must culture" of a major corporation with the "can culture" which is emerging from the hobbyist and lead users within the networked community surrounding their products:

In a company, and this goes for pretty much every company, you have a must culture. That means, if I am your boss, I can tell you I want you to do this and that and maybe you are not really into it or maybe you have other priorities but as your boss, I can say you must do this. And if you say No, you're fired, right? Any company culture is a must culture, a must organization. You must do what I tell you to do. You can put it in a nicer way but that's how it works. With a community, it is a can organization. They can decide to do something. They can decide not to. You can't say to the guys in the community -- now you must help us in doing this and now you must.. Guess what, I'm out of here. I can't fire you because you are not part of the company. So, that is what is so valuable because they can keep pushing. They don't come up with what they think the average user needs or wants. They say as a member of the community what they want. I want it to do this. I want it to do that. I don't care about the rest. It's me. So you get honest and candid feedback from these guys focused only on what they are looking for and how it can be the best tool they can ever have. And they keep pushing. We've had interviews where we say thank you for the input on that topic but we must move on and the community has said no. We want this and they keep pushing....

For these guys, it has nothing to do with money. Their passion is building Mindstorms robots out of Lego bricks, programming them, hacking them, all of that stuff. so this is their favorite Hobby. For them, it doesn't get any better. Suddenly I can influence the product I like to work with. I may have my little fingers there on some of the development....then of course afterwards there is recognition among peers in the community.

What Lund has to say about Lego echoes what I report in Convergence Culture about the games industries. Will Wright, for example, told me that the game companies are now essentially competing to see which one can attract and sustain the most creative community since user-based innovation is the key to keeping a games franchise fresh and interesting over the long haul.

This is still so different from the relationship most television production units have with their fans, yet if they had more regular contact with their fans, they might learn to anticipate audience tastes and interests, producing episodes which better reflected the themes and characters that drive the community's passions towards a particular series. For example, in the mid-1980s, my work on fan cultures was showing me that fans were pushing hard for a more serialized approach to television narrative: they were reading even the most episodic series in terms of story arcs and program history. My work on Twin Peaks fans was showing that online communities would support much greater narrative complexity than current television was offering. And my work on fan video producers was showing that people wanted simple tools which would allow them to sample and remix television content as well as platforms by which they could share what they produced with the general public. It has taken a while for the rest of the viewing audience to catch up with where the fan community was at more than fifteen years ago but fan culture in the late 1980s looks very much like the television culture of today. What we are now calling Web 2.0 is simply fan culture without the stigma.

That said, the interview keeps circling back around what is the real sticking point in the conversation about lead user innovation: if consumers are helping to generate the intellectual property and helping to market the product, shouldn't they receive some economic return on their participation? Lund says No -- that this would fundamentally change their relationship to the company, turning everything back to work for hire and returning it to the "must culture" that shapes corporate life. Yet, skeptics might note that user-generated content taken to its logical extreme would result in cutbacks in the creative labor market as experienced professionals are displaced by grassroots volunteers. Lund is correct to depict lead users as having a strong desire to influence the decisions made by the companies that make the products they use and admire -- whether physical products like programmable bricks or cultural products like television shows. At the moment, they are grateful that people will simply listen to them and take their ideas seriously, especially given the history of not just neglect but open hostility to these grassroots communities. Yet, at what point, does this collaboration become exploitation? This is a core question all of us need to think through as we move towards a more collaborative and participatory culture.

Television Goes Multiplatform

It's hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that Apple launched the video Ipod and the ABC television group was the first to announce a serious commitment to make its top rated television shows accessible to consumers via legal downloads. Within a few weeks time, the other networks were forced to cut their own deals with Apple paving the way of a new era of rerun on demand. A document shared with me recently from one of our corporate research partners gave me a glimpse into just how dramatically the landscape of American television has changed, providing a breakdown network by network of the various platforms through which one could access their content.

ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox all make at least some of their series available for download through iTunes, as do 41 different cable networks.

ABC has been experimenting this summer with ad-supported (i.e. free) downloads of episodes of Commander in Chief, Grey's Anatomy, and Lost at ABC.com and plans to extend the service to include a range of other series this fall.

CBS has launched a similar service over at Intertube -- for example, my wife and I have been catching up this week on a full season of episodes of Big Brother: All-Stars -- and the network has already announced that people will be able to download free episodes of Jericho, NCIS, and the various CSI series the day after they are aired. The other major networks are so far only offering streaming clips and news reports, not yet full episodes. The free episodes come with commercials embedded but so far, it is relatively easy to scan past them.

Several of the major networks are producing extensions of their regular series specifically for those accessing via these other platforms: NBC, for example, is offering mobisodes of The Office via NBC.com; ABC has a special behind the scenes podcast for Lost and will soon be adding Lost Video Diary, which focus on secondary and rarely seen characters for those watching on mobile phones.

All of the major networks are doing at least some experiments making content available via mobile devices, including deals by ABC (with Verizon), Fox (with Sprint and Verizon), and NBC (with Verizon).

CBS is making content available via both Yahoo.com and Google Video; Fox via MySpace and CinemaNow; NBC via YouTube.

All of this points towards a world where consumers can watch the content they want when they want it and where they want it and they can do so with a range of different options from paying to watch advertising free content to watching advertising-supported content for free. Not every show is available in all formats yet. Most of the networks are testing a few platforms at a time. They are still offering only selected series. But there's no question at this point that these various platforms are going to be increasingly central to the ways we watch television.

The cable networks have been even quicker to embrace these alternative media platforms -- though there is some tension between the network's desires to reach the broadest possible public (including many who simply do not have access to the networks via their local cable companies) and the affiliate's desire to have exclusive access to content which they can sell to their subscribers.

Some see these trends as representing the next step towards the disagregation of television content -- that is to say, consumers will follow individual series with little regard to their time slots or network placements. For some of us, that moment is already here. I have students who never watch live television, prefering to download everything they watch (legally or otherwise). In my own case, I am moving more slowly in this direction. I got started watching highlights of The Daily Show on the web because the MIT dorms don't get Comedy Central. I ended up watching the season finale of Survivor via CBS's website later the same day because I was traveling when it first aired. I ended up watching most of Season 2 Lost via various downloads (mostly legal). And as mentioned earlier, I am now catching up with Big Brother since I was without television reception most of the summer and people had told me it was one of the better runs of the series. (Indeed, having seen most of the episodes, I would agree).

Rerun in Demand is the logical response to the increased serialization of American television: we've seen over the past decade more and more shows which have tightly interwoven plots, extended story arcs, recurring emphasis on backstory and program history. Such series reward regular viewing and punish people who miss episodes. Such episodes historically were considered high risk by networks. They could lose viewers who became disinterested but they were hard to join in progress and old style broadcasting gave viewers no way to go back and see what they missed. Tivo provided viewers with some tools to stay on top of series they were watching thanks to the season pass feature but they offered no good way to go back and join an ongoing series until, minimally, the end of the season, when the episodes might be available on DVD. Often, the DVD sets have come out at the very end of the summer or even into the fall, making it hard to catch up before the second season episodes started to air. This season, a high percentage of the new series have story arc structures: indeed, many of them seem designed to last a single season or less. We should be watching to see if any of them benefit from the combination of word of mouth via the web and alternative ways of accessing previously aired materials? Will some of them experience increases in viewership as the season moves forward? And if so, which ones?

As I was finishing this post, I received a link to an interesting story about SciFi Channel developing a web series to generate interest around Battlestar Gallactica. Here's what the New York Times had to say about it:

The 10 Web segments, each just a few minutes long and viewable on devices ranging from iPods to laptops to desktops to full-size television sets, feature characters from the television show. And they have the same dark feel of broadcast episodes of Galactica, a post-apocalyptic survival tale of humans on the run after their home planets have been destroyed. The mini-episodes will go online, one at a time, on Tuesday and Thursday nights until "Galactica's" season premiere on Oct. 6. They focus on two soldiers in a new city built by humans fleeing Cylons, a race of machines that has wiped out human civilization elsewhere. The two face difficult choices about how -- or whether -- to fight back against a new Cylon invasion, the climactic moment of last season. Their decisions will help explain their actions in future on-air episodes.

This sounds like a classic example of what my book calls transmedia storytelling -- the use of the web not to remediate existing content from the series but to develop an extension of the fictional world which enhances our experience of watching the series. I am not watching this particular series but would be interested to hear from fans of the series about their impressions of what these web-based episodes bring to the experience.

Experimenting with Brands in Second Life

In 1954, Frederick Pohl, a gifted social satirist and science fiction writer, published the short story, "The Tunnel Under the World", which should have been made into a first rate Twilight Zone episode. A man wakes up in bed next to his wife, gets up, and goes to work, and along the way, he starts to sense that there's something subtly different about his world:

He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were most unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

But no one else seems to have noticed that the entire adscape has changed overnight. And then it happens again, and again, and again. By the end of the story, he discovers that he is living inside a consumer research experiment:

They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow -- heaven knows how they did it -- they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people -- right under their thumbs. Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however they do it, what happens is they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day they see what happened -- and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising....They test every last detail before they spend a nickle on advertising!

Pohl's short story about this microworld that allows Madison Avenue to run experiments on consumers anticipates the role that brands and advertising will play in new multiplayer game worlds such as Second Life. Second Life has been one of the hot new stories in participatory culture in recent months. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks uses SL as a primary example of the grassroots energies being unleashed in network society. Educators are increasingly experimented with the affordances of this space with Harvard's Berkman Center teaching a course in intellectual property law this term open to Harvard students and their avitars. Psychologists are using Second Life to conduct therapy -- especially for autistic patients for whom it can represent a gradual introduction into reading and communicating cues about emotional states during social interactions. There are experiments going on that are exploring new governance structures in political science, new forms of community in sociology, and new modes of transaction in economics. Activists are using the space to increase public awareness of their concerns. And sexual minorities are finding new outlets for erotic expression amid the hidden corners of this world.

We might think of Second Life as a platform for thought experiments -- a place where we can test ideas that might not be ready for prime time, where we can experiment with new ways of being on both a personal and communal level. If you can think it, you can build it on Second Life, and so far, if you build it, they will come. Some have called Second Life the digital counterpart of Burning Man -- a place where people come to see and be seen, to build and to see what others have built, and to celebrate their power to reimagine the terms with which they conduct their everyday lives.

One of the recent graduates of the Comparative Media Studies master's program, Ilya Vedrashko, has been exploring the relationship between games and advertising. The Russian-born Vedrashko is perhaps the most unapologetic capitalist to ever pass through our program. He has found his calling in exploring the ways new media technologies can give rise to alternative approaches to brands and advertising. He has started blog on the future of advertising and a second on advertising through games. He recently posted his thesis online. Vedrashko now works at the Boston-based agency, Hiill Holliday, analyzing trends in emerging media that impact the advertising world. It is perhaps inevitable that he would turn his attention to Second Life, where players are generating their own versions of familiar advertising icons and forming their own agencies while corporations are looking for ways of making their own presences known in this ecclectic and rapidly evolving environment.

The following text is taken directly from Vedrashko's thesis.

What Is Second Life

Second Life, whose membership has tripled in the past six months (January-July of 2006) to surpass 300,000 players, has recently landed on the cover of Business Week that wrote, "It's hard to imagine a less corporate setting than the often bizarre online virtual worlds such as Second Life. But to a surprising extent, mainstream businesses are already dipping their toes into the virtual water." Second Life, whose player base was only 30,000 a year ago, is undergoing a remarkable transformation from a little-known hobby for geeks to what can now be defined as almost-the-edge-of-the-outer-fringes-of-mainstream.

Second Life is still no MySpace.com in its mass appeal, but among its residents are high-level executives, writers, journalists and the rest of the public-opinion-shaping digerati. As far as the virtual social networking applications go, it has been able to avoid many of the problems plaguing the popular online teen hangout. Second Life has corralled everyone under the age of 18 into a walled garden impermeable to adults, solving the issue of child safety before it had a chance to arise. Its business model relies on subscriptions instead of advertising for revenue -- Second Life sells what it calls land but what in effect is server space with game templates. This has allowed the Second Life makers at Linden Lab to adopt a laissez-faire approach to all marketing activity that goes on inside their game. Every player can advertise anything without having to pay the company, and becoming a resident is as easy as downloading Second Life software and installing it on a sufficiently powerful computer.

For the uninitiated, here is some background. As mentioned earlier, Second Life (SL for brevity) lacks any overarching objectives (kill the monster and save the princess) and scoring, and is technically not a game at all. Linden Lab insists on defining it as a 3-D virtual world, but a rather fitting description was offered by Wagner James Au who spent three years as SL's embedded journalist: "[I]t's just a weird cross between a 3D development platform and a chat program, AutoCAD meets the Sims." The world sprawls across hundreds of servers, called sims, that are all connected into one grid. Unlike many other massively multiplayer games, SL is not divided into parallel realities or shards, which means that all players can see each other regardless of the server on which they are located. All of the game assets, its avatars, buildings, land and everything else, are hosted on Linden Lab's servers so the only way to experience the world is through an Internet connection. The only thing that resides on the player's computer is the so-called client that visualizes the world-related information and is best thought of as a specialized 3-D web browser. The client also comes with editing and scripting tools that allow players to create, edit, color, texture and animate three-dimensional objects, and add lighting effects. This particular capability combined with the in-world economic infrastructure that facilitates trading and stimulates it by making the game's Linden dollars convertible into the real currency is what drives the players' creative and entrepreneurial genius. The introductory kit for new avatars contains some pants and shirts, a few household items and, significantly, a basic shopkeeper kit complete with a small booth, a showcase and a blank signboard.

On any single day, the value of transactions between players tops $100,000 in real-world money. Everything imaginable is for sale: cars, trucks, houses, castles and skyscrapers, clothes, avatar bodies and body parts, hair, shoes, flowers, guns that shoot watermelons, flying cows, mountains, theme parks, tornadoes, holodecks and things unmentionable in a thesis. If something isn't available, someone will design it for you. The stores are abundant and commercial activity continues outside the world's boundaries on the websites set up by entrepreneurial residents.

The supply of goods is so high and the competition is so strong that the world's economy warrants its own advertising infrastructure. SL businesspeople whose real-life careers are often lie in unrelated fields and whose knowledge of advertising practices might have been limited are quickly learning the skills of copyrighters, art directors, merchandisers and media planners all at once. For them, an in-world magazine packed with business advice was launched in August of 2006.

Design Your Own Advertising

Many SL companies have already built what can be objectively regarded as brands in the sense that their business or product names are highly recognizable, associated with a particular image and can command a price premium on perceived product value; Betsy Book in her paper profiled two such SL brands and the strategies behind them. Strong brands can be found in many different categories: from clothing to homes, from avatar design to digital interactive genitalia.

While players can advertise their wares on the SL's official classifieds listings, many more turn to the world's independent advertising industry. They can contract services of design firms or purchase hi-tech signboards that float, rotate and flash in mid-air. They can hire one of the many modeling agencies to have their in-store signage professionally decorated. (While there are still no highly recognizable super-model names in Second Life, players with a rich collection of scripted modeling poses and an outstanding avatar design command hourly fees that can easily cover a month of rent of an in-game castle.) Shopkeepers and club owners can equip their businesses with any number of automatic vendors, sales robots, greeting systems, pagers, and camping chairs that pay residents to spend time in their establishments. Many give away free merchandise along with a business card and a bookmark to their location, or hire hosts and event managers to run their promotions.

The SL advertising market is booming. A player whose in-game name is Ruthe Underthorn has created MetaAdverse, a network of billboards placed throughout the world in high-traffic areas such as malls and clubs, and its technology can rival Massive's or IGA's in technical sophistication. Property owners place MetaAdverse's signs on their land for a 70-percent cut of the revenue. Advertisers feed their messages to the billboards belonging to MetaAdverse and the amount they pay depends on how many people have faced the sign directly, for how long and from what distance. In my exploration of the world, I have discovered at least three other billboard networks competing with MetaAdverse.

As the SL's technology evolves, new media forms come to life and with them -- new advertising opportunities. Live streaming radio shows developed specifically for the game sell advertising time, and so do in-game newspapers. Potential for video advertising exists as well; many SL homes are equipped with TV sets that stream video clips and some entrepreneurs sell ad time on those as well. TV shows with their own machinima production have also started to appear as the game's creative population grows.

Like many other games that can be modified by players, Second Life is peppered with user-created objects carrying real-world logos. My own inventory includes a larger-than-life bottle of Absolut vodka, a Corona t-shirt, an entire Hooters outfit, a pack of Marlboros, a Mac laptop, a Honda motorcycle, a case of Mountain Dew, a pair of Elmo slippers. Vending machines giving away or selling Coke, Pepsi and common snacks are a common sight in SL clubs; one can be bought for about 30 American cents. Replicas of NASCAR racing cars are emblazoned with logos of their real-world sponsors. All this brand equity is built on pure enthusiasm without a dollar spent on product placement by the trademark holders.

I have once stumbled across a resident-run store that sells iPods, Shuffles and Nanos that come preloaded with a set of popular songs (I bought instead an outfit that transformed my avatar into a walking iPod silhouette ad.) On another occasion, I rented a real-world movie from a Blockbuster-looking store. The success of these businesses - the movie store was part of a large and supposedly profitable chain -- or their very existence indicates that Second Life can become a model for content distribution that is based on a curious paradox with a new twist to Nicholas Negroponte's model of bits and atoms. When viewed from the outside, all of Second Life's assets can be considered "content", and the "bona fide content" -- music and video -- even more so. Yet when viewed from within the game, this "content" acquires certain tangibility and the assets become objects with their own volume, mass, clearly defined boundaries and often a price tag. Within this new coordinate system, content distribution as perceived from within SL seizes to be the process of streaming bits and once again becomes the task of shipping atoms that can be counted, tracked, and locked up when needed. Second Life provides a theoretically unbreakable way for item creators to limit distribution and modification of their wares by marking them with any of the three flags "no copy", "no modify", and "no transfer", and in this sense the objectified music and videos are no different from shirts and coffee mugs. SL thus becomes an overarching meta-DRM system: the only way to copy a movie marked with "no copy" and "no transfer" flags is to screen-grab the entire game from the outside.

The real meets the Second Life's virtual in many other ways. The tribute to Pink Floyd takes shape of a small hut covered all over with the band's art, with a continuously running soundtrack inside. A similar monument to Grateful Dead is a dizzying complex complete with a hot tub inside a spinning psychedelic globe. There are replicas of individual famous buildings -- such as the Twin Towers -- and the whole blocks of Manhattan, San Francisco and Amsterdam. Residents are also recreating famous fictional spaces -- the Second Life blog wrote about Counter-Strike and Mario Brothers levels built in SL's construction areas, and there are many more. One island sells avatar bodies modeled and equipped after real-world movie characters including the entire cast of Harry Potter. For a modest amount of money, you can have your avatar's body custom-made to resemble any celebrity, from Lenin to Johnny Depp. A dedicated group of players regularly puts out public tribute U2 concerts where avatars closely resembling Bono, the Edge and the rest of the band are animated on stage in sync with the streaming soundtrack.

Modding Corporate Style

The world's creative flexibility coupled with the pioneering spirit of its residents makes Second Life an attractive sandbox for advertisers willing to experiment with new ideas that might be difficult or costly to try elsewhere. Some are already taking notice. The Wells Fargo bank built a private Stagecoach Island area designed to educate kids on the basics of money management (the company later moved the island to a similar environment, Active Worlds, citing technical issues). BBC runs an SL studio where it records regular shows for broadcasts in the outside world. The movie giant 20th Century Fox organized an in-game promotion of its X-Men sequel. Warner Brothers threw a release party for its artist Regina Spektor. Major League Baseball put together a simulcast of the Home Run Derby on a specially designed stadium with the real-time reenactment of the game. One day, we might see TV commercials played out in a similar theater-like manner instead of being shown on a flat screen, or bump into artificially intelligent Burger King mascots handing out whoppers at virtual sports events. In its cover story on Second Life, Business Week described many other ways in which real-world companies engage with the world. Head of technology at an underground tank testing firm uses the game as a training environment for new hires. A PR company set up SL headquarters to "provide companies a fascinating way to build new bridges to their key audiences, whether for marketing purposes, customer support or customer feedback." Residential architect Jon Brouchoud created, textured and showed a 3-D model of a real house commissioned by his clients, all in Second Life.

This, of course, is only the beginning. As the platform's technological sophistication and its links to the outside world grow -- Linden Lab is working on integrating a standard web browser into the game and sending emails into and from the world is already possible -- so does its attractiveness to outside businesses. One can imagine a travel agency building models of its destinations, from hotels and cruise ships to exotic islands. Ikea could work with the fan base to showcase its catalog in three dimensions and let players try its virtual furniture in their virtual homes. Universities, some of which are already building in-world presence, could conduct open houses to court prospective students.

If a single 3-D game-like platform emerges and gets widely adopted and if Second Life

and similar worlds are indeed precursor of the three-dimensional web to come, advertisers would be better off by exploring the opportunities and challenges these environments present while the scale is still small and mistakes are affordable.

The challenges will be many. One issue that is likely to loom big is privacy. The extreme level of detail with which games and avatars can be tracked and measured is both a goldmine and a ticking time bomb in the hands of marketers. It is a goldmine because virtual billboards will soon be able to tap into the enormous databases that have records on every single transaction, utterance and head nod of every avatar and serve individualized messages based on the customer's entire life history in all its complexity. When AOL inadvertently released a database containing results of millions of search queries submitted by more than half a million users, called it "catalog of intentions". If Paul Hemp is correct in his suggestion that the way avatars dress up, behave and socialize tells us something about their owners, then worlds such as are catalogs not only of intentions but also of fantasies, fetishes, beliefs, aspirations and repressed desires that have found their symbolic manifestations -- everything marketers today are trying to suss out with the help of focus groups.

It's a ticking time bomb because Second Life is much more Orwellian in its omniscience than anything existing on the public Internet with its decentralized structure. On the Internet, AOL may know something about the user and Amazon may know something else but the two don't share their information to create a holistic picture. Second Life, on the other hand, is a proprietary walled and self-containing garden whose infrastructure and intelligence gathering spans the entire user cycle from shopping to private instant messaging.

On the micro level, designing a commercial experience in a 3D environment is likely to be different from developing a "flat" web shop. Thinking in three dimensions of a social world endowed with physical properties will mean calculating the ceiling height, for example, to accommodate for customers who prefer flying to walking. While a popular web store may serve thousands of customers simultaneously, each of them shops from his own parallel on-screen universe with little interaction with the others. Clothing stores in Second Life, on the other hand, are more like real-world malls filled with customers sharing impressions and offering fashion advice in real time. Merchandising -- the science of displaying goods on store shelves -- will have to learn how to retain the visual appeal of the real-world racks while combining it with the effectiveness of online search and categorization. When sabotage (hacking, phishing, scamming and denial of service attacks) of online stores is a major concern, the solutions are also evident if not always feasible -- patch the hole and call in the cops. But what are shopkeepers to do if their stores are blocked by avatars protesting unfair trade practices?

Speaking of unfair trade practices, the foray of real-world businesses into Second Life has not been greeted with universal excitement, although the reasons for players' wariness are changing. If two years ago a private island where a marketing company had set up shop was picketed by SL residents because they felt the intrusion would ruin their carefully crafted escapist haven, today their concerns are more pragmatic and are not likely to go away as easily. Some fear that their budding SL family businesses will have to compete with cash-rich and marketing-savvy business empires for which Second Life is just another foreign market ripe for expansion. Others think that real businesses will upset the virtual world's entire fragile ecosystem. Today, in-game entrepreneurs make and sell their wares and services at prices that are significant in the game's context but the return on their time is way below the minimum wage when converted into dollars. Tomorrow, these entrepreneurs will be hired by the big businesses to produce the same -- but branded -- items and will be compensated for their efforts on the real-world pay scale, never to return to their original trades.

When Starwood Hotels and Resorts announced that it was bringing into the virtual world a model of its new Aloft hotel, a resident who runs a real-estate business of selling plots of land and renting out apartments in Second Life, Prokofy Neva, wrote in his comments to a blog post:

It's not about me or others in the land business. [...] I'm trying to use my experience to speak to the much larger issue going on here: big business from RL, helped by a few who were able to leverage their experience into "RL-in-SL companies", are displacing the *need* for business inworld and displacing *the transactions* of business as well as the Lindens *change the features and the client and their orientation toward these kinds of businesses, and not inworld customer-created businesses.* [...]

I wouldn't be able to see what is happening so clearly if I hadn't been able to see what happens to countries in the real world, like a Georgia or Ukraine, when the indigenous economies were able to sustain people without them leaving for guestworker status elsewhere or be drawn into sex trafficking, before the World Bank or Chevron or whatever came in and displaced their economies. This is a worldwide phenomenon, part of globalization.

SL is now globalized."

With Linden Lab actively welcoming the expansion of big businesses into its realm, perhaps it's time for Naomi Klein to revise her No Logo to include a chapter on free-trade zones and sweatshop labor of the virtual third world.

Catching Up: The Future of Television

Today, I am just going to highlight a few things that have caught my eye recently. We picked up the July 17 issue of Newsweek, belatedly, and read an interesting article discussing what current network media consumption. The opening paragraphs, though, really annoyed me:

A guy--let's call him Brad--longed for the company of his wife, so he took his iPod to bed. Confiding in an NBC researcher, Brad tells how he inserted his earplugs, nestled down beside his bride and got lost in an episode of "The Office" or another of his favorite TV shows downloaded from the iTunes store. His wife, meanwhile, was riveted by her favorite show playing on the bedroom TV. Yet another intimacy-challenged couple dialed up the heat on their relationship during the college basketball playoffs, say researchers for Verizon, the cellular-service giant. No fan of hoops, the wife snuggled up to her basketball-craving husband on the living-room couch, unfolded her cell phone and watched video clips streaming from Verizon's VCast service while he tuned in the game on CBS. "She thought it would be a good way to spend time together," says Ryan Hughes, Verizon's chief media programmer.

There's a kind of outrage here that people might be sitting side by side in bed and consuming different media content. Now, substitute books or magazines for television content and see if you feel this same level of shock and awe. I think we'd think it a little odd if the couple always coordinated the books they took to bed with them. As my wife points out, in the old days, the wife would have been banished from the room while her husband watched the big game, so, yes, there is some element of togetherness, snuggling down physically together, even if you are in different mental spaces. In any case, other research on television suggests that while homes may have multiple televisions, only one set is on during prime time in most households because we still prefer to watch television content socially rather than individually and the shows that do best are those that give us content we can talk about with others.

Discussion of the future of television continues over at our Convergence Culture Consortium blog.

A while back, I flagged an article about the Lost Experience ARG which Jason Mittell had published in Flow. We are all following this ARG with great interest and so we were pleased that he has written some further commentary about it for our blog:

The first part of TLE was all about setting a stage, a fairly static picture of an institution (The Hanso Foundation), its supporters (Thomas Mittlewerk and Hugh McIntyre), and its detractors (Persephone and DJ Dan). Each clue revealed another layer of deception & hypocrisy within Hanso, but offered little narrative thrust developing the conflict or relationships that it portrayed. Jensen suggests this act was designed for the hardcore Lost fans, but I'd suggest it was more for dedicated ARG players whose paranoid panoramic perception searches for clues within the meta-fictional landscape. As a dedicated Lost-head (but only a lurker in previous ARGs), I found Act I's lack of narrative drive too frustrating to completely justify the time it took to parse out the clues, and I shifted to mostly an observational role of the clue-gathering work of my fellow players.

Act II is more for fans like me--interested enough in ARGs to follow them, but in it more for the story and its relationship to Lost than gameplay. The shift in Act II is both in storytelling form and medium--this portion of TLE moves away from the now-defunct Hanso website and reveals the hacker behind the pseudonym of Persephone to be Rachel Blake. In charting Blake's attempt to discover the truth behind Hanso, we follow her across Europe via her blog. This direct communication from the character is much more narratively engaging than her hacks to Hanso's website, allowing for an illusion of interaction between players and characters, as conversations between Blake and other characters within the blog's comments add to the story significantly. Additionally, most of her blog postings link to videos scattered around the web--presenting Blake's exploits in video form seems more in keeping with the storytelling strategies that most appeal to fans of serialized television.

And in another entry, Mittell writes about what he is calling "Television 2.0", citing the example of The Sci-Fi Channel's digital deployment of the pilot of The Amazing Screw-On Head (which comics fans will recognize as adapted from a Mike Mignolia (Hellboy) graphic novel):

Head is quite a delight - based on a cult comic by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, the show parodies the steampunk genre of sci-fi set in the 19th Century. The hero works at the pleasure of President Lincoln fighting threats to America (and to quote the show, "and by America, I mean the world") from undead zombies and ancient demon technology; for some as-yet-unspecified reason, he is a screw-on head. The animation is vivid and unique in its visual style, and features strong voice acting by established stars like Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce. It's a show that could easily gain a dedicated audience in sufficient numbers for a cable channel - it most reminds me of the classic 1990s cartoon The Tick, which is high praise in my animation canon.

But Sci-Fi recognizes that it will take some doing to build its audience. Fans of Mignola are vocal and passionate, but far too small in number to guarantee success. So they've put the pilot online two weeks before its TV debut. But more importantly, they have attached a viewer survey to the pilot to gauge reactions and help judge the potential for extending the pilot into a series. This design takes advantages of two great opportunities of online video - the video can go viral through blogging and reviews much more quickly and legitimately than other "official" online videos, and instant feedback gives frustrated fans a way to feel like their voices matter.

And finally, Sam Ford weighs in on the news that NBC will be distributing the pilot episodes of Kidnapped and Studio 60 on Sunset Strip (perhaps the most eagerly awaited program of the fall season) on dvd this summer to Netflix subscribers, yet another way of building up audience interests before the shows hit the air:

Will many viewers be enticed to use one of their Netflix rentals for these sample episodes and assorted trailers? My guess is that they will and that, if these shows are good, the company will get a substantial award in positive support. Of course, that support does hinge on the show's quality and--again--these types of distribution deals only work well if there is a product worth discussing. Of course, using an Aaron Sorkin show and a suspense thriller is probably a smart move on the network's part, as they are two shows that NBC already feel strongly about and are building around for the fall lineup. Once the initiative launches in August, it will be interesting to track rental numbers, but my guess is that this could further popularize these types of campaigns to gain support for shows before they ever hit broadcast television.

These three stories from the C3 blog point to new strategies that television executives are deploying to get television fans talking about their series during the traditional down months of summer. Let's face it: a growing percentage of us spend the summer watching series we missed or old favorite on dvd. Once the new fall season starts, there are going to be so many shows competing for our attention that most of them never get watched a first time. But if they can get new content or new experiences out there now, they get a leg up on their competition, can start to generate buzz, and build viewer loyalty before the season even starts.

Prohibitionists and Collaborationists: Two Approaches to Participatory Culture

Next Generation, a leading webzine focused on the games industry, ran an excerpt today from my forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which focuses on the very different ways media companies are responding to the desire of their consumers to participate in the production and distribution of media content. This passage cuts to the heart of my book's argument that the new media environment is forcing us to rewrite the relationships between media producers and consumers. Here's how the passage begins:

Grant McCracken, the cultural anthropologist and industry consultant, suggests that in the future, media producers must accommodate consumer demands to participate or they will run the risk of losing the most active and passionate consumers to some other media interest which is more tolerant: "Corporations must decide whether they are, literally, in or out. Will they make themselves an island or will they enter the mix? Making themselves an island may have certain short-term financial benefits, but the long-term costs can be substantial."

The media industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the word about valued properties in an overcrowded media marketplace and in some cases, they are seeking ways to channel the creative output of media fans to lower their production costs. At the same time, they are terrified of what happens if this consumer power gets out of control, as they claim occurred following the introduction of Napster and other file-sharing services....

One can trace two characteristic responses of media industries to this grassroots expression: Starting with the legal battles over Napster, the media industries have increasingly adopted a scorched earth policy towards their consumers, seeking to regulate and criminalize many forms of fan participation which once fell below their radar. Let's call them the prohibitionists.

To date, the prohibitionist stance has been dominant within old media companies (film, television, the recording industry), though these groups are to varying degrees starting to re-examine some of these assumptions. So far, the prohibitionists get most of the press - with law suits directed against teens who download music or against fan webmasters getting more and more coverage in the popular media.

At the same time, on the fringes, new media companies (internet, games, and to a lesser degree, the mobile phone companies), are experimenting with new approaches which see fans as important collaborators in the production of content and as grassroots intermediaries helping to promote the franchise. We will call them the collaborationists.....

As the excerpt continues, I hold up Raph Koster, the man initially put in charge of the Star Wars Galaxies game, as a prime example of collaborationist thinking within the games industry.

Here's a few of the things Koster said when I interviewed him for the book.

Just like it is not a good idea for a government to make radical legal changes without a period of public comment, it is often not wise for an operator of an online world to do the same.

You can't possibly mandate a fictionally involving universe with thousands of other people. The best you can hope for is a world that is vibrant enough that people act in manners consistent with the fictional tenets.

Koster was an early and vocal advocate of player's rights, recognizing that an interactive medium has to construct a very different relationship with its consumers than exists around more traditional broadcast media. The game player helps to create and sustain the experience of the other players. From there, we can see the games industry embrace a vast array of different forms of user-generated content and we can also see games companies seeking advice from their consumers throughout the creative process. In the case of Star War Galaxies, Koster and his team put out design documents on the web and sought input from potential players while the game was still under development. This is radically different from the secrecy that surrounds the production of the Star Wars films. As I write in the book:

It is hard to imagine Lucas setting up a forum site to preview plot twists and character designs with his audience. If he had done so, he would never have included Jar Jar Binks or devoted so much screen time to the childhood and adolescence of Anakin Skywalker, decisions which alienated his core audience. Koster wanted Star Wars fans to feel that they had, in effect, designed their own Galaxy.

Of course, not everything turned out as Koster planned and the decline of Star Wars Galaxies is one of the major disappointments of the user-generated content movement. (But that's a subject for a future post.)

Keep in mind that the distinction between collaborationist and prohibitionist logics is a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. I use Star Wars in the book to show how the same media franchise can create radically different relationships with its fans at different moments in its history and as it moves across different media platforms. Most companies today embrace some elements of both models, resulting in profound contradictions in the ways they relate to their consumers.

Grant McCracken, the anthropologist whose comments open this passage, has suggested that in this new participatory culture, it might make sense to abandon the term consumer all together, seeing it as the product of an old economic system and an old way of thinking about how culture operates. Instead, he proposes the term, "multiplier." Here's what he has to say:

The term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work

As I was putting this post together, I got an e-mail from Mark Deuze, another researcher who is currently doing his own book on the ways companies of all kinds are tapping the creative energies and collective wisdom of their consumers. On his blog today, he posted some thoughts, inspired in part from an advanced look at Convergence Culture. He is also suggesting that user-generated content changes the institutional logic of the creative industries:

Media work tends to get caught between two oppositional structural factors in producing culture within media organizations: on the one hand, practitioners are expected to produce, edit, and publish content that has proven its value on a mass market - which pressure encourages standardized and predictable formats using accepted genre conventions, formulas and routines - while creative workers on the other hand can be expected (and tend to personally favor) to come up with innovative, novel and surprising products.....

Working in an organization using an editorial logic, media professionals tend to more or less ignore the shifting wants and needs of the audience in favor of producing content that holds up to peer review, wins trade awards (such as the Oscars in the film industry, a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, the Game Developer Choice awards, or the Golden Lion in advertising), and build prestige and acknowledgement throughout the industry. A market logic on the other hand embraces a competitive way of doing things, producing compelling content for as wide an audience as possible, and thus favoring a strictly commercial mass market approach to making decisions in the creative process.....

Considering the work by Henry Jenkins (2006) and others on the increasing role of the consumer as collaborator or co-creator of media content, I have to conclude that a possible third institutional logic is emerging next to, and in a symbiotic relationship with, editorial and market logics: a convergent culture logic. Work done following this logic includes the (intended) consumer in the process of product design and innovation, up to and including the production and marketing process. The work of authors in fields as varied as management theory, product design, journalism studies and advertising define media content in this context interchangeably as: consumer-generated, customer-controlled, or user-directed. Researchers in different disciplines have documented a distinct turn towards the consumer as 'co-developer' of the corporate product, particularly where the industry's core commodity is (mediated) information.

I like where Deuze is going with this framework. My experience is that the creative and business sides of media companies often respond differently to the idea of user generated content or participatory culture. For the creative, the fear is a corruption of their artistic integrity as they turn over greater control over the shape of their work to its future consumers. This reflects what Deuze is calling an editorial logic. For the business side, the greatest fear is the idea that consumers might take something they made and not pay them for it. That's the extension of the market logic. Both may need to rethink their position if media companies are going to benefit from the work of McCracken's multipliers, who can both appreciate the value of an intellectual property and extend its shelf life. And it is the neat fit between the Editorial and Market Logics which insures that many media companies will adopt prohibitionist rather than collaborationist approaches in the short term.

Are Housewives Desperate For Games?

A new PC-game, created by Buena Vista Games, based on the ABC television series, Desperate Housewives, was one of the titles that generated a great deal of buzz at E3 this year. The game is loosely modeled on The Sims in that it involves the simulation of domestic life within a suburban community (the world of Wisteria Lane as depicted on the series); the players adopt the role of a previously unknown housewife who awakes one day with amnesia and seeks to find out more about who she is and how she fits within the community. USA Today qoutes Mary Schuyler, the producer of the title:

As fans of the show would expect, the game is loaded with gossip, betrayal, murder and sex -- you know, all the things women like.

Every so often, a media property emerges that allows us to glimpse future directions for branded entertainment. Desperate Housewives looks like such an example: one that helps us to take inventory of core trends which are going to be shaping the media industry in the next few years. I haven't played the game. I haven't even seen the game. So this isn't an endorsement. I am just interested in what the existence of a Desperate Housewives game suggests about the current state of convergence culture.

1. The Desperate Housewives game represents another interesting experiment in transmedia storytelling.

Scott Sanford Tobis, one of the TV series' writers, wrote more than 13,000 lines of original dialogue and structured the plots for the game.

In an interview with USA Today, Tobis described the game as an "additional episode" , offering new insights into the characters and introducing new situations into the story. Danny Elfman's music from the series plays throughout and narration is provided by actress Brenda Strong (as late housewife Mary Alice Young). The game's locations are modeled precisely on the familiar neighborhood from the hit series.

As such, the game represents a continuation of a trend which I identify in my forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide :

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best -- so that a story might be introdced in a film, expanded through television, novels and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self contained so you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice-versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. Redundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty.

We can see further evidence of this trend at play through the upfront announcements of the major networks last month: several of the networksspent as much time discussing their digital strategies as they spent talking about their broadcast strategies.

2. The Desperate Housewives game represents the latest effort by the games industry to attract more female players.

Let's face it: pretty much every male in America who has the slightest interest in games is probably already playing. All that the games industry can hope to do is to redivy up the pie when it comes to the core male demographic: it's hard to even imagine games companies succeeding in getting men to spend more hours each week playing games. All future growth has to come through either keeping players engaged with games later in life or attracting more female players. (Of course, this has been true for the better part of a decade and yet one should never underestimate the amount of resistance that exists within the games industry to broadening the "boys club" to allow the Kooties-carrying segments of the population access. If you don't think current games are produced and marketed primarily for men, ask yourself why a key piece of hardware is called the game boy and whether most of the people who own it would have purchased it if it had been called, say, the gamegirl.)

Indeed, there has been a dramatic growth in the number of women playing games over the past decade, as was marked by a conference hosted by UCLA in conjunction with E3. For two days, more than fifty leading feminist games scholars and designers met to talk about the emergence of the female games market and what it meant not simply for the economic future of the games industry but also in terms of women's access to technologies and technologically related skills. Again and again, we learned that women outnumber men in online and causal games sectors and are a growing segment of the games market overall. Women still spend less time playing games and see games as less central to their cultural lives. In other words, a relatively small number of women consider themselves to be hardcore "gamers" (a group represented at the UCLA event by a spokesperson for the Frag Dolls, among others) but a growing percentage of them do play games.

Mimi Ito, a USC anthropologist who does work on games culture in Japan, argues that a key factor in closing the gender gap among gamers there had to do with the integration of game content into larger "media mixes", such as the transmedia strategies which have emerged around hot anime and manga properties. She argues that girls in Japan embraced games as another source of content that interested them as it flowed organically from one medium to the next. In that regard, the use of the already successful Desperate Housewives brand to create a space for older female players makes perfect sense.

It also makes sense, given the appeal of casual games for women, to base the game heavily around a series of mini-games, including the integration of cooking challenges and card games as core activities within a larger

framework. This will allow the Desperate Housewives title to build a bridge from causal games that require short investments of time into longer play experiences. Several of the female players at the conference remarked that they didn't play longer titles because they didn't feel like they had the time to devote to really exploring them, yet they found themselves playing "just one more game" with their favorite casual titles and thus playing for several hours at a sitting. Such women may well be ready to move into more extended play experiences if the themes and structure of the game facilitate their interests.

That said, the women who attended the conference had pretty strong responses to the idea that cooking games and gossip were "all the things women like." They saw this push towards stereotypically feminine content as a return to some of the pink box thinking that doomed previous generations of experiments at creating "girls games." Many have argued that the key to getting more women as players is to create games that men and women want to play together and diversifying the range of genres on the market, rather than producing games which appeal exclusively to one gender or another.

3. The Desperate Housewives game represents a new effort at product integration in games.

A Partnership with Massive will result in an unprecidented amount of ingame advertising and product placement. Here's what IGN had to say about these aspects of the game:

Most of the products in the house will be real-world name brands. Thanks to a deal with Sears, washers, dryers, and vacuum cleaners will all have familiar logos on them. When your character walks out to the mailbox, coupons will arrive from time to time. Thanks to a print option, you can take these coupons to their respective store (in the real world) and use them towards a purchase.... Not only bringing ads to the table, Massive has also incorporated a system to stream ABC content onto the TVs within the game itself.

At the UCLA conference, I argued that advergaming could be an important force in expanding the female market for games. Right now, advertisers are using games to reach the young male demographic that has been abandoning television. Yet, historically, women are the key decision-makers shaping many of the most heavily advertised brands. Those brands are also going to want to deploy games to reach consumers and they are going to be searching out new kinds of game content that reflects the tastes and interests of their desired demographics. While games publishers may have an interest in continuing to tap their most hardcore consumers, advergaming will have a different incentive -- to broaden the game market to allow them to reach their most desired demographics. Witness the participation of Sears and other domestically-focused brands in the Desperate Housewives game.

4. The Desperate Housewives game represents another important step towards an episodic model for game content.

For some time, observers of the games industry have questioned whether the current models for content will serve the interests of even the core gamer market for much longer. The average gamer pushes older each year simply because people are continuing to play games later in life than anyone would have imagined. The generation that grew up playing Super Mario Brothers is now entering young adulthood. They now need to manage their game play time alongside expectations from spouses and offspring. Women often complain that the units of time demanded by most games are impossible to negotiate around the expectations they face within their families. All of this points towards the desirability of developing games which come in smaller units of playtime.

Across this same period, leading thinkers in the games industry have suggested that episodic content -- games structured more like television series -- might prove both creatively interesting and commercialy viable. My CMS associate David Edery recently entered into the industry debate about episodic content. What he has to say on this topic warrents a close read.

Details about the episodic structure of Desperate Housewives remain vague, as does the business plan that will support this content: early interviews describe the game as composed of eight smaller episodes that combine to form a larger story arc, each representing roughly two hours of game play. The most likely scenario is that these episodes will all ship as levels within a single game unit, but there has been speculation that there may be opportunities to refresh the game content over time, as occurs in many massively multiplayer games, especially given the ability to provide streaming content from ABC directly into the game world. One can imagine game content that gets updated in response to new information unveiled in the aired episodes, thus changing the game world throughout the television season. Such steps would insure not only viewer loyalty to the television series (in hopes of new content updates for the game) but also persistent engagement with the game itself (with new interest delivered with each aired installment). Such tight coordination between the television series and the game may be premature given the current infrastructure and business models, but the Desperate Housewives propery is certainly a rich space to experiment with new forms of episodic content.

Oreos, "Wal-Mart Time", and User-Generated Advertising

Driving around earlier this week, I happened to hear the distinctive voice of American Idol's Randy Jackson ("Yo, Dawgs") on my radio, telling listeners about a national contest for the best amateur rendition of the classic "Oreos and Milk" jingle. Jackson's participation in an advertising campaign is hardly surprising in and of itself-- after all, we got to watch Simon Cowell endorse Vanilla Coke and we've seen Ford run a series of spots featuring Idol contestants which become part of what fans evaluate as they judge who should win the talent competition. From the start, American Idol has been closely tied to a range of new marketing and branding strategies.

Upon further investigation, I found the Oreo site online. It turns out that Kraft Foods, the company which makes those delightful chocolate wafers with the vanilla cream inside, is hosting a national competition to identify musical groups who can put their own spin on the advertising ditty. The winning group receive $10,000, the opportunity to record an Oreo radio commercial and hang out with Randy Jackson in Los Angeles in August.

A panel of judges winnowed down the original submissions and now the public is being invited to go to the web and vote on the five finalists. There's Acappella Gold, a group of soccer mom types in zebra-skin pants suits, doing it up barbershop quartet style. There's the Chris Allen Band which gave the song a bit of Reggae backbeat and Odysy who perform it with a mix of hip hop and street harmony. The Oreo Cousins do it as a blues number and The Three belt it out to acoustic guitar and percussion.

Each of the videos has the ear-marks of amateur made media -- the kind of stuff the RIAA wants to take off of YouTube: most of them have fixed camera positions, poor lighting, and are shot in rec-rooms or other cluttered domestic spaces. The performances that made it this far are pretty good -- each has its own flavor and each set of performers seems to be really enjoying what they are doing. The website features a selection of the folks -- good and bad -- who got cut from the competition along the way.

Everyone Likes Oreos -- in Their Own Way

Kraft can be seen as the latest in a long series of advertisers which have embraced user-generated content as a means of generating buzz around popular brands. Such campaigns seek to tap the passion consumers feel towards cult brands and use it to draw other consumers into the fold.

I confess -- I enjoyed spending time with these entries. A great deal of the interest lies in the diversity of musical traditions represented. This makes me skeptical of the plans to select one winner and feature them on television. Each of these performers embodies different consumer niches and there's a message to be had in seeing the Oreos message translated in so many different musical languages. It seems silly to start with such multiculturalism and end up with a monovocal message -- no matter who ends up winning.

I am not sure whether Oreos represents a cult brand (perhaps it's simply a comfort food that reminds all of us of good times we had as kids) but I know that I am susceptible to peer pressure where Oreos are concerned. Some years ago, I was getting on a TransAtlantic flight to the U.K. and I saw someone sitting across the aisle from me loading a huge carry-on bag filled with Oreo Cookies which she was apparently taking back with her to England. I snorted smugly to the person sitting next to me about the degree to which some people become addicted to their favorite products. But once I got to London, I started craving Oreo cookies and couldn't find them anywhere -- at least at that time a decade or so ago -- and when I got back stateside, the first thing I wanted to do was stop at the local 7/11 and buy some Oreos and milk. I hadn't had one of those cookies for months prior to the trip but somehow traveling through a world without Oreos left me really desperate.

"It's Wal-Mart Time"

Of course, Youtube shows us that consumers will make videos about the most popular brands, even in the absence of formal contests and prizes. Just as fan communities will use the web to build visibility for their favorite media properties, brand communities celebrate their connections to their favorite brands.

Take the case of Wal-Mart -- scarcely a brand that might be expected to generate a high degree of passion or be regarded as hip. Yet, you can find countless examples of amateurs who have made media -- sometimes ironic, sometimes dead serious -- to celebrate the Wal-Mart shopping experience. Many of these videos are shot illicitly with cameras smuggled into various Wal-Mart outlets, often taking advantage of the products on display as unpurchased props. These can be snatch and grab affairs or much more elaborate. This parody of Eminem's song, "Just Lose It," involves elaborate production numbers, presumably filmed under the watchful noses of Wal-mart's ever attentive and friendly welcomers. I'm not sure that the brand managers would jump from joy to see Wal-mart associated with white trash lifestyles, cheap merchandise, shoplifting, and parking lot fisticuffs as occurs in "Wal-Mart Time", but it's hard to deny the vibrancy of this particular video. Even if we don't want to see these spots as actively promoting the brand's own agenda, they have a kind of affection for the store as a public space which contrasts sharply with the anti-corporate messages one associates with the ad-buster or culture jammers movement.

His First Oreo Cookie

And of course, look around a little deeper and one will find similar spots for other products, including a whole range of videos featuring people consuming or playing with Oreo cookies. This one is overly long but it does convey the idea that how one eats Oreos is part of standard cultural lore and that people can have a good time standing around twisting open cookies and dipping them into milk. The message here may be more mundane, more ambivalent, than what you are likely to see on a television commercial. But then, that's how we live with brands in the context of our everyday life. We snuggle down with them at the end of a hard day -- we are unlikely to speak in the hyperbolic language of television spots.

These unregulated consumer-generated segments suggest just how carefully filtered and fully scripted the official competition really is. Traditional notions of brand management stress the careful control over the brand's core messages -- every image, every bit of text gets scrutinized to make sure that it reinforces the core themes of a particular campaign. You can bet that anything that made it this far in the official Oreo jingle competition was put through that same process. The finalists were chosen as much for their reverence for the product as for their musical talent. The radio spot I heard features an unlikely Polka style version but it doesn't show people talking about being allergic to chocolate. We don't even see anything as awful as those William Hung style performances American Idol likes to play over and over on the air.

These other videos probably couldn't get assimilated into the official campaign, but then, they may be all the more powerful as brand statements because they are clearly unauthorized and outside the company's control. This could be another one of those spaces where official and unofficial culture co-exist within the crazy, mixed up world of convergence culture.

I am indebted to CMS graduate student Ilya Vedrashko for directing my attention to the amateur made Wal-mart spots. The Oreo material I found on my own.

Do Snakes or Fireflies Have Longer Tails?

Reader Avner Ronen compares the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon with what happened to Serenity. He notes:

I'm looking forward to this movie as much as the next net.geek, but I don't expect as much of a box-office surprise as many seem to be anticipating, because I've seen it before.

What am I referring to? Serenity. It would be hard to beat the online buzz Serenity was getting, and sometimes it seems like it's difficult to find a blogger who isn't a fan of the prematurely cancelled series Firefly, but all of that buzz and a good deal of critical acclaim still couldn't get people into the theaters.

He may well be right - it is very easy living at the hub of digital culture to imagine that all of the buzz we are hearing is generalizable across the population as a whole. But let's look for a moment at what happened with Firefly/Serenity and then, I will try to explain why I think Snakes on a Plane is in a somewhat different situation.

Praise Be the Whedon

Let's be clear that I am a big fan of Firefly and of Joss Whedon's other work in television and in comics. I think he's one of the smartest and most creative people operating within the media industry today. He has enormous respect for his fans and he has earned our respect in return. He had constructed a television series he really believed in.

He was watching a very dedicated, very resourceful fan community form around a television series which either got canceled because a)the ratings were low and it was not seen as having a broad general appeal or b)the ratings were low because the network had not successfully targeted its most likely audiences and given it a chance to develop the word of mouth needed to expand its core viewership. We may never know which of these explanations is the correct one - I suspect some combination of the two.

Whedon still wanted to produce the content; there was a group of people clammering for the content; but the networks didn't think there's a large enough audience to sustain a prime time broadcast series. This is a situation we've seen again and again in the history of broadcast media. I think it's about time we rewrote the rules.

Serenity and the Long Tail

We are now in the space which Chris Anderson has documented so well in his discussion of the Long Tail. In Anderson's account, media properties can succeed by appealing to niche rather than mass audiences if you can lower costs of production, publicity, and distribution, keep the content on the market long enough for consumer interest to grow, and count on the most passionate consumers to help spread the word about your brand. By those criteria, Firefly should be as close to a natural for the Long Tail as anything produced for television so far and the brisk sales and rentals of the dvds of the original episodes illustrated that point pretty well.

But Whedon got greedy - or someone got greedy on his behalf - and Firefly moved the wrong direction up Anderson's Long Tail - towards a blockbuster Hollywood movie which would have required even more viewers to be seen as successful than would have been required to keep the series on the air on a second tier network. Yes, it was way cool to watch those characters up there on the big screen but Whedon set the bar much too high for the existing market for his property and we all paid a price for his hubris.

To make something that felt like a movie, he had to produce something that didn't feel like a television episode, creating a story that turned the world of the series upside down. Along the way, he killed off some of the most beloved characters and lost some of the elements which many of us liked about Firefly in the first place. At the same time, he compressed a season's worth of plot developments into two hours or so of screentime with the result that he produced a work that was confusing to many first time viewers and that lacked the gradual character development that was the hallmark of Firefly. I still liked a lot about the movie but what I didn't like was the fact that it would seem to have pretty much closed the door to further development in the Firefly franchise -- at least in the foreseeable future.

The Road Not Taken

Imagine, instead, that he had moved in the other direction down the tail, towards the production of television style episodes directly for dvd. I've discussed such a system in relation to Global Frequency (a show that suffered an even more premature death than Firefly -- canceled before it even reached the air). CMS graduate student Ivan Askwith has advocated the use of the video ipod as a distribution platform for essentially long tail television. We have seen fan groups advocating such an approach for recently canceled series such as The West Wing and Arrested Development.

From the perspective of a producer like Whedon, who has a strong and existing fan base, this should be a very attractive proposition - make as many episodes as you want in whatever story structure you want with no risk that a network will stand between you and your audience, start making money as soon as the first product ships rather than waiting for syndication to turn a profit.

What would make it even more attractive would be to create a subscription based model so that readers paid in advance for episodes they wanted to see and they knew more or less what the core market was before production started. This would be hard to arrange for a totally new property: easier for a canceled series or for a show by a brand-name creator like Whedon. I'd pay now to guarantee access to original content by Whedon, sight unseen, a year from now. So would most of the other brown coats, I would bet. And if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of quality science fiction/western action on television, where it belongs, instead of burning up the whole franchise in two hours of big screen excitement.

Yes, there are risks involved -- if for no other reason than because no television show has ever made this transition into direct to dvd production. We can point to the example of a growing number of Disney animated features which have generated direct to DVD sequels with a fair amount of success with their core market. But the risks involved would have been lower -- financially at least -- than trying to turn a failed television series into a Hollywood blockbuster. Whedon could have done it if anyone could and if he had, a lot of other television producers would have followed his example.

What About Snakes?

Serenity had one of the most committed fan bases in media history and they would have followed Whedon anywhere but they weren't enough on their own to make a success on the tall end of the Long Tail. They needed to draw in lots of non-fans of the franchise. We might imagine that non-fans were resistant to the film now for many of the same reasons that they were resistant to the original series and we can add one more factor: they were reluctant to jump onto a film they knew was based on a series that they hadn't seen because they were afraid they were going to be lost. Whedon worked hard to make the film accessible and we were told he was going to do so, but guess what, lots of folks didn't believe him.

So, if we follow the logic of the Long Tail, success on one end of the tail depends on deep commitments from a relatively narrow fan base (that's what Firefly had) and on the other end, on superficial commitments from a broader range of viewers (and that's what Snakes on a Plane has.) I doubt anyone really has the same level of passion for Snakes as they have for Firefly. It's a fun lark -- a one night stand, a vacation movie romance. But it isn't a once in a lifetime passion.

But that's okay. What's bad/good about the concept is something anyone can quickly grasp. You hear the title and you chuckle. You see the preview and you are hooked -- or not. You don't need to have seen another media product to consume this one. There's a star - Jackson - with some box office reputation - remember, Serenity had no stars except those who were in the television series. It's got some draw as a straight out peddle to the metal action film with a good leading actor and some appeal as the best example of camp and kitsch to hit the screen in some time. Those are good reasons to think the film will have a broader appeal than Serenity - even if, especially if, it is nowhere near as good a movie.

Whedon bet that his fan followers could tell the public to turn out at the multiplex to see his movie. The producers of Snakes have used the audience to tell them how to market this movie and then have applied the capacity of a major publicity campaign to amplify that approach towards the general audience.