Digital Holllywood: Discussing Broadband Content

Moderated by Interactive TV Alliance CEO Allison Dollar, a group of panelists discussed the issues involved in creating successful business models and creative content for broadband platforms: Jen Pate and Barb Machen, co-creators and co-executive producers of “Jen and Barb: Mom Life,” Oren Katzeff, vp/gm. Demand Media Entertainment (which runs Crack); Rafi Fine, co-CEO of Fine Brothers Film; Mark Warshaw, chief interactive officer/co-founder of The Alchemist; and Will C. Rogers, CEO of Rooftop Comedy.

Dollar started the panel off by asking what their strategies are on incorporating different social media tools. Pate answered that, since Mom Life is about making moms feel like they’re not alone, “social networking is a very important part of what we do.” After creating 50 episodes, she added, they will now be incorporating more social media with user blogs and polls.

Katzeff offered the point of view of a destination website. “Crack used to be a magazine and is now an online success,” he said. “Social media has been key to our success. We leverage an audience that likes to share content with their friends, without batting them over their heads. We’re always thinking about appealing to an audience that goes beyond the Crack audience that we can monetize as well.”

Warshaw, who worked on Smallville and then Heroes, reports that ” by accident we saw the intersection of fans, advertising and stories we were telling.” “We grew organically with that,” he said. “Now, we’ve realized it’s essential, because you have that captive audience. The Alchemist is a place to create original and derivative content for this purpose.” Rooftop Comedy’s Rogers noted that they have a huge library, based on partnerships with many comedy clubs. “We have an automated way to record comedy shows in HD and pull it into our production studios in San Francisco where we process dozens of hours and send it to mobile carriers, in-flight entertainment, online, and now TV,” he said. “Social media is about ensuring the content lends itself to the tools our clients have at their disposal.”

“We like to think of ourselves as the Zappos of the interactive comedy space,” Warshaw continued. “We bend over backwards to make sure the comedians are happy. If they’re not satisfied with how we’ve edited it, we’ll pull it. If they’re satisfied, then everybody’s happy. We would be out of business pretty quickly if we didn’t listen to those performers.”

Dollar asked Fine how he–as both the performer and the CEO–balanced the creative and the business sides. “We like to make controversial content but to reach larger audiences and get brands interested in us, we can’t create the more edged-up material,” said Fine, who pointed to a successful parody of the TV show Lost. “Lost fans are rabid and wanted to spread that around.”

With regard to Mom Life, Machen reported that they’d partnered with Broadband Enterprises, and have worked closely with brands including Kraft, SC Johnson and Verizon to develop content that moms would be interested in. “The brand integration is happening in the background,” she said. “The brands do pay for the show, so there’s a balance between making it friendly for our sponsors and making sure the demographic and show match the brand. Red Bull won’t sponsor us, that’s clear.” The sponsors don’t offer coupons; the show does pre-roll and product integration.

Katzeff noted the challenges of comedy, which can be racy and is also very individual. “We all have very different types of comedy,” he said. “What you see on Crack won’t be what you see on another comedy site. That makes it tougher to find the brand.” He reported on one episode they did for sponsor Fox, integrating The Simpsons. “We’ll apply the message the brand want to push on the show,” he said. “This one was the seven creepiest fan tributes for the Simpson.”

Which shows how granular this thing can get, said Dollar. Warshaw said that what The Alchemist started to do was to find brands aligned with the kinds of stories they want to tell. For companies in Brazil, for example, they’re telling stories about sustainability. “We are going to energy companies,” he said. “It’s symbiotic relationship between the two. We go directly to the digital or marketing people to have that conversation.”

Rogers said that, with their very large library, Rooftop Comedy is in the enviable position of being able to slice-and-dice content to target the exact demographic audience that the brand is interested in. The other way they can approach the conversation is to access the large community of comedians they work with, on behalf of brands, to write original content.

Balancing the needs of the brand and the integrity of the content can be tricky. Machen said that “there has to be more of a real partnership with these brands.” “Say we want to talk about whether or not parents are spanking their kids,” she said. “The brand may say, that doesn’t fit our image. Can you talk instead about what happens when your kids don’t listen? We think we’ll get more views by focusing on spanking. But brands have spent millions on their image and that has to be paralleled with what we put out.”

Katzeff believes that the audience is smart enough to tell the difference between a video and a commercial. “Your audience will leave you in a second if they think you’re trying to put one over on them,” he said. “It’s about figuring out what the brand wants to do, and working together to figure it out.”

What gets the Fine brothers excited, said Rafi, was that it can be an entire experience. “The brand can be involved in the navigation,” he said. “It’s seamlessly and completely integrated.” Rogers said that “when we’re working with brands interested in working with us, we spend an inordinate amount of that time on this experience.”

Katzeff is drawing in users by enabling them to get involved with contributing story ideas and write scripts. “We ask viewers what kinds of parodies they want to see,” said Fine. “Transparency is good. You want them to feel like they’re part of it.” He said that when they upload something on YouTube, their fans all know they’ll spend the first hour answering any and all questions. “So the fans come,” he said.

When it comes to favorite social media tools, everyone named YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. “MySpace is dead,” he said. “It’s gone.Will it happen with Facebook and Twitter some day?” Rogers said they’re working on a TV product called “That Sucks,” in which TV comedians talk about what sucks. “Then we ask people in the online community to comment on what sucks, using a Twitter-like application,” he said. “We package that and distribute it through Mad Television and push smaller segments on mobile and web.”

Warshaw’s company is working on a new cause-based reality show. In one episode, people go to Uganda to build a well. “The idea is to use a mobile phone to show things that are part of their cause,” he said. “You’ll get new updates, and you can vote for what the next experience will be. The TV show is the big commercial, then people follow it online and on mobile.”

Fine described a pilot they made for Comedy Central with the premise of what would happen if you logged out of your social network profile and everything in it–including the ads–came alive. “It’s a show about building a community,” he said. Kratzeff’s next up-and-coming project is a 14-episode series called Agents Crack, which he described as The Office meets The Naked Gun and which was created by a small team of under 8 people. “No one online has the best way to program series,” he said. “There’s no answer as to what works best.” Their strategy is to launch an episode every business day, and make earlier episodes easy to find for late-comers.

Pate revealed that Mom Life will be starting a segment on the Rachel Ray show. For the online show, they’re asking moms to send in their own reality footage and share their expertise online. They will soon be launching e-commerce by featuring books written by guests to the show. Rogers said they also do e-commerce, by producing CDs and DVDs on behalf of the comedians, which are distributed through iTunes and other venues but not direct to consumer.

Katzeff’s company has an exclusive deal with Sprint’s TV channel and has signed with a publisher for a book deal. “We’re trying to be smart about how we extend the Crack brand,” he said. For the Fine Brothers, it’s been about transitioning to TV. “Our peers are so obsessed with the web,” he said. “For an indie producer online–unless you’re an anomaly–you won’t be able to be a huge game changer unless you have some traditional success. We have our foothold in the digital space, but we’re pitching TV to hopefully get that crossover.”

As to these panelists involvement in the mobile world? “The mobile space is very important, but it’s difficult to work in,” said Rogers. “But we should all be thinking about the mobile platform particularly if you want to do something out of the U.S.” Katzeff reiterated that Crack is distributed to mobile via Sprint. “We think about the Crack mobile experience all the time,” he said. “A lot of people are accessing our site via smart phones and we have to think about making that experience as good as on the desktop. Mobile is becoming a big audience. We’re building out a unique and robust iPhone experience.”

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