NATPE: Engaging for Insight: Putting the Power of Fan Cultures to Work for You

This was lengthy, and full of fast speakers. I ran out of energy :) Picked up some interesting little snippets here and there though.

Moderator(s): Stacey Lynn Koerner, President, The Consumer Experience Practice, Interpublic Group of Companies
Panelist(s): Larry Lieberman, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Comics LLC; Lydia Loizides, Vice President, Media & Technology Analytics, The Consumer Experience Practice, Interpublic Group of Companies; Jim Turner, Vice President, Digital Media, A & E Television Networks; Ilya Vedrashko, Emerging Media Strategist, Hill Holliday

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Jim: We've launched a social networking system around The Sopranos. A&E Insider started out like a club, but we invite people in ahead of time, we give them sneak peeks... plus we poll them and get feedback. We've named shows this way, and made adjustments.. this also dramatically increases engagement from fans. Those in Insider visits are thru the roof compared to other properties. A&E is very show based.. and on the HIstory channel we have fans of shows *and* genres, or particular areas of history. We have a different set of engagements that we do with each...

How do you engage advertisers in that space, or dont you?

Jim: We've done traditional banner advertising in the community, but we're moving to a more social networking environment and sponsorship in the form of text and display, although we'll move to video sponsorship at some point. we have had a lot of interest from advertisers who want to engage community around particular content...

Larry: at Virgin we started with comic books because we're a story lab. We're storytellers, myth creators, character creators. We started as comics just so we could engage fans, it's odd cos it's so traditional, ink on pages, but it's the most engaging way to reach out to people who want to get involved in stories. so we birth a comic, first shot out to the consumer, then we create channels of communication to hear back from them. comics come out on a monthly sequence, so the story isn't done when we start, unlike a novel. It's kinda remarkable that if we like the way a story is going, we continue in that direction - it's very interactive. it's the customer who gets to tell us what they like so much, and we keep going.

Is there a lesson to be learned in that for television content creators?

Larry: Absolutely. I ran comedycentral.com when we launched Southpark. We used the web early on to let fans find each other, but I was doing it in a Viacom universe who was walking around with a sledgehammer for anyone who put a bit of fan content up on a site.. but now we do just the opposite. Comic books have their own places for people to interact: Virgin comics has been publishing since just July of last year, and already we've tracked 1100 websites talking about our comics in 12 different countries. That's wild? How many TV shows can claim something like that? There aren't many. Network programming needs to reach out and respect those people online talking about your stories. they talk about our stories, adn we don't have to pay them!  the fan is happy talking because they like the product, and we're fans of the fans.

Ilya, you're working on the advertising scene..

Ilya: yes. fans used to be these people who would audiotape the shows and go to cons and dress up... nowadays i was privileged ot be part of the group at MIT who were studying comics and fans at the Henry Jenkins course. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, check his book out. They're not considered weird any more these fans, because they're blogging about it. That's considered mainstream. My job now is to take this academic reserach and find applicatoin for it in brands. In marketing we have this concept of brand loyalists. Brand loyalists.. if you love iPods, say, but brand loyalists are attracted to the product .. fans are different. fans are attracted to the narrative. They don't care what the product can do for them, they care about what they can do for the product. SOmetimes they take narratives down a path that doesn't coincide with the strategy set by the advertisers, so we have ot figure out what to do with that. 

Larry: Yeah there's a practical, mechanical application of how this happens. if you work with an advertiser, we can take a videogame client, and take the story, and make it happen in a comic, a custom comic. That custom comic becomes a premium item that you get with the game .. virgin builds our digital comics so a fan can take it and publish it on their own site, too. Let the fan take the story with them. We do the same thing as a mobile comic, and a retail comic.. the fan helps get the material out.

There's so much that's changed recently - Lydia, can you talk to the opportunities and how things have changed [technically]?

Lydia: Well.. the reality is that since the late 80s with Usenet, we had fans out there talking from everything from porn to harleys. It was a way to communicate. When emailtook over, that's how you shared. You embedded links, you attached photos. So blogs are just an evolution of this technology, and it's still .. the glass is always half empty in my world...you're looking at siloed, fragmented applications of tech that is counter to what you should be doing with it.

If you fundamentally look at the organisational structure of myspace or youtube, there are niches and enclaves of fans of particular topics. We keep thinking mass, mass.. but the world is a group of tiny little parts that come together as a jigsaw puzzle. So i'd like to see apps built around social networks, and see something that lets you say you're a fan of virgin, nissan, racing, all at once. You're a multi-faceted person. We keep targeting demo, single-interest. they ignore everything else. Go to A&E, you're a fan of Sopranos. Go to G4, you're a fan of star trek. That's all they know about you.

Converse shoes did this thing where fans could create their own ads for converse, and you got to know that person. Not only that they like Converse shoes, but everything else that they're about. I hope we see more of that, not just the single facet of passion, but who they are beyond that scope. For advertising that's the holy grail.

We've spent millions of dollars on questionnaires to find out what people are doing and what they like, and we merge it all into a database, but it's still only a questionnaire. One of the things about fan cultures is that it's all got a signature somewhere.. you can create multifaceted profiles of users that are real. X amount engaged in Sopranos, and X engaged in the Virgin storylines, and they're spending 15m a day shopping for a Volvo. So the promise is that there's lots of stuff we can pull out of this, from where storylines should go, to how to market it, to hitlists of potential brands..

Lydia: in the past there was a lot of research we did... we tend to think of fans around a piece of content, but if you look at the forums online, there are these huge discussions on broader things like parenting, health, etc. You can textmine these.. if you can attach conversations together during a certain time period, you can do this in fan forums too.. you go in and you read the thousands of messages for 24. We are talking about fans who have calculated how far the jet could go on the fuel capacity of the plane.. to conversations about HD. There's all these subtexts of conversations going on. What if you could cull this dynamically, and sell it in realtime to an advertiser? [Alice note: Urk!]
 

Larry: In order to keep a story alive, to keep it vibrant, it has to have an audience. When they're listening, and retelling, and talking about it. Stories die without audiences.

Would you say that narratives that are perpetuated in any segment of time, that they're perpetuated because of a certain bubbling up from culture?

Larry: there are primary needs that people have. Right now, it's spirituality. Virtually everyone in America is looking for a sanctuary, it's a universal truth. Some find it in the chaos of Jack Bauer, others find it in storytelling that can be told on multiple platforms. The Bible works visually, in words, in sounds.. the ancient stories continue to live because they live on every single platform. So many stories at Virgin are based on ancient myths, and these stories are universal truths.

You wanna see some slides? What Virgin's out to do is to create big, enormous stories. We're not tights and capes. No-one flies. Half our stories have roots in ancient culture. Our studio is based in India, and Deepak Chopra is the president of our company in India.. Ramayan. He's big. Big like Jesus big. There are a billion people who see this and say, that's Prince Rama. IT's a story of destiny. IT's told in an eastern style. What we're bringing out of india is shakti, which is the feminine story style. Here are some pics.. we're a story laboratory. We can't make this as a movie for less than 160m, but we can create these grand universes without that kind of budget.

Devi. Devi means goddess in sansrkit. There are a billion people in India who know Devi. SHe's a native indian superhero. She appeals very much to women 15-29. Hugely popular. Comics are boys' media? Well we publish stories that women find appealing.

Here's The Sadhu. He's the badass Indian samurai. This is a boy leading story - blood, guts, men love this story. Nic Cage is signed on to play The Sadhu. He's mystic, like the Jedi. Yoda is the ultimate Sadhu.

I talked about sanctuary. Here's Buddha. Buddish comes from the hindu faith. We can create stories that deliver the blood and guts of the sadhu and the sanctuary and peace of the buddha, all within the [tiny] budget.

Traditional storytellers see the web as a quick and involved way to tell a story. John Woo has a million ideas, but can only make one movie every three years. So we work with him. Film directors, actors.. they can tell alternative stories that they couldn't necessarily tell right away as films.

You can segment .. use the web, to reach out to each segment one by one, and connect them together. It's really important for creators.

Jim:  There are two pieces here. Creating the story, the culture. Then the emotional engagement that makes them care enough to come back. What is it that creates crazy fan bases? The emotional commitment. Then the second bit is how to monetise the fan culture. We have to keep building the fan bases, the commitment, then figure out how to bring other stuff into it, but we have to be careful! If they feel like they're being betrayed in any way, they will turn on you.

[ran out of energy]

Comments

[Nancy Baym]

Thanks for posting this! Interesting reading.

[inkgrrl]

Ooh I love the Devi comix! Glad to see it/them getting more press. And *boggles* at how cool are you getting to go play in the NAPTE space ;-)