Yesterday, Brian Clark of GMD Studios spoke at Dr. Henry Jenkins‘ transmedia course at USC. He’s promised to post a detailed account of his talk, but he encouraged me to share this summary post for now.
The topic of his talk was the business of transmedia. Literally.
Perhaps keying off Mike Monello’s recent admonition for independent creatives to talk less and create more when it comes to transmedia, Brian proposed a couple of frameworks for both dissecting the current typical business model for transmedia experiences and constructing some new ones.
First, Brian outlined the five challenges he sees for current transmedia experiences:
- Funds – where will you get the money to pay for the expenses of your transmedia experience?
- Return – what do your funders expect in exchange for their money?
- Sustainability – how much money will you need over what time period?
- Audience – does it exist / how big is it?
- Promotion – how will you reach your audience?
Next, Brian laid out what he saw as the biggest problem with the current approach for transmedia experiences: almost without exception, they use the same model, whether they are produced by media companies, consumer brand companies or what Brian calls “issue” organizations (social cause, non-profit, etc.).
In the current transmedia business model:
- Funds come from someone else
- The expected return is impressions / ratings / awareness (not money)
- Sustainability for the experiences come from charging a fee (consulting, production, etc.)
- The funders will tell you how big the audience is (and who they are)
- Promotion comes from what are referred to as owned, earned, and paid media
Brian then proposed looking at examples from the independent media space for new transmedia business models. Brian identified the following (8) types of independent models:
- No-budget aesthetic
- Grass-roots / DIY / “some budget”
- R&D (learn as you; project X funds a solution that can be used on future project Y)
- Fan Incubation
- Fan Funded (think pre-sale)
- Arbitrage plays
- Audience Product
- Infrastructure Play (re-usable tool/service/process)
Brian explained that for each of these models, the response to each of the five challenges changes. For example, the no-budget aesthetic model doesn’t require funds, while the fan-funded model secures funds from existing fans. Brian didn’t explore each challenge for each independent model in detail, so I’ll leave it to him to go into more details about the subtleties between these models.
The final comment I want to make from Brian’s chat is his plea to avoid falling prey to two common but destructive concepts when it comes to experience design.
The first is the desire to maximize the “reach” of an experience. 50,000 page hits mean nothing if only 250 are likely to purchase your product/service. Reach without context makes for a poor design.
Concurrent with this is understanding the fallacy of the average. If your website has an average time onsite of 1:24, that means nothing. The better question is finding out who is spending 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes on your site. Those are the customers you should be designing for.
Big thanks for Brian to calling attention to the nuts and bolts of building new business models for transmedia experiences – looking forward to hearing more details from him about this!
For our small indie project Lowlifes (http://lowlifes.tv) the business model was to pay for the transmedia by selling books: not to everyone, but to those who’d like to.
I’m pleased to say that our freemium model has worked well – using the free web content and free interactive experience to attract audience while funding the work from the minority that buy a paperback or Kindle version of the book.
What’s interesting about Lowlifes is that there’s no fancy mobile app – even though the website is designed to be viewed on a mobile – and no flashy..er..Flash :) Our goal was to experiment with narrative: to tell a story from three points of view across three different media.
So my point is, the way to fund an indie transmedia project is to look at the audience and ask what it is they value and hence what they might be willing to buy. Some people buy books, some buy apps, some buy live theatrical performances – depends on the audience and the experience.
I’m working on a native transmedia proposal to put in front of investors that I believe has a good monetization scheme. Robert has seen my very first draft – although it has been refined considerably since then. The most difficult part of preparing to look for outside funding is finding the value proposition. I believe that if the property is allowed to flourish the monetization will come citing “create a fan base – give them a reason to buy” model. There are entertainment investors that have been hearing the “transmedia,” “new media,” “rich media” buzzwords and they are interested.
Robert, can I poke at you a little bit? Because your description of your business model sound suspiciously like the traditional one — that transmedia is an expense (“free”) that is charged with an outcome (“selling the premium”).
So where does your initial seed capital come from, and what do those funders expect returned to them? What is the promotional fuel that gets you to the audience in the beginning?
Don’t mean any of that as a criticism of your project or of the freemium model, but DO want to poke at the idea that replicating the traditional transmedia business model as an indie might not be only way (or the easiest way) to get to the sustainability goal.
Hey Brian, great questions… ok, where to start…
I agree with your 8 indie models so there’s no disagreement there and for Lowlifes we probably hit several of them: low-budget, story R&D, platform. Transmedia storytelling was not just an expense, it was integral to the whole experience – it’s only that we chose to charge for one aspect, the novella, because that’s where we expected/hoped to make the money back. Hence it is truly a freemium model – three platforms (book, video & blog) all available for free but the book and DVD are available to buy. Each media is additive none is an adaptation of the other and the more consumed so the better the experience.
This was not the approach of giving away prequel material to sell the “real” material – although we did offer a small interactive email-based game and that did fit this model :) And this was intended to raise some profile. However, in truth, the success of the project hinged primarily on the existing readership of the author Simon Wood – hence the reliance on book sales to pay for everything.
For the indie, there’s no quick win for getting away from obscurity. Either they need to work with someone with an audience (e.g. well-known cast) or need to build an audience themselves which takes longer. Building a relationship with an audience is far easier to say than do and the most successful approach is to allow your content to do the talking. Too many indies spend too much effort on behind-the-scenes materials and talking about themselves when they could be creating more story content – by far the best way to increased traction on a project. BUT I do caution against creating encyclopedia worlds with no story. There needs to be a story.
When you ask what’s the promotional fuel then it’s either paid media – business as usual – or word of mouth through seeding the story content among friends, blogs and forums but it takes time. For Lowlifes, we were originally working with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco and they were to syndicate the novella, for free, to the several thousand subscribers of their Streetsheet newsletter. For various reasons that I won’t go into here, that didn’t happen but it would have helped broaden awareness among a key audience segment (those who care about the homeless). Ultimately then, it did come down to Simon’s existing readership – always the core audience – although the blog story told from the perspective of a cop’s wife did cause the needle to move a little among middle-aged blogging women, another demographic that overlaps with Simon’s audience. The blog could have worked much harder actually and with some proper coordinated outreach could have been quite a worthwhile audience builder.
For sustainability, there’s no getting away from the fact that the indie must create something of value that someone (maybe not everyone) will pay for. I’m not saying it’s “business model as usual” but I am saying that it’s “find something someone values as usual”. It needn’t even be delivery of actual thing/experience that’s created. For example, in the patron model, the indie offers the patron meaning to their life. Many arts project funders have more money than happiness and want to feel that their hard work, which makes the money, actually make a difference and means something to someone after it stopped meaning anything to them. Is it sustainable? Yes, if the indie delivers on that promise.
But let me finish with a recent example. Marcus Lilley is a new transmedia storyteller who recently completed a locative and online storytelling experience in the film noir genre… except without the film. The experience started in an art gallery where a fictional character displayed photographic work he’d created. The story unfolded in the streets of the town, across email, twitter and text messaging. This was most definitely transmedia storytelling with the promotion being old school flyers and social media. Although intended as a learning experience with no commercial goals, Marcus successfully sold photographs in the gallery – for real money which of course goes to him and not the fictional character :) So my point is, the photographs are valued by some and hence generated revenue to pay for the whole experience but selling them does not make this “business model as usual” but it is “business” as usual – e.g. the sale of photography.