PGA Seminar Summary, Crossing Over: Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and New Media

I learned two new terms at the PGA seminar at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood last night, Transmedia and Retail Media Network.

Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment characterized his company’s work as developing Transmedia properties. His case study was the Coke “Fun Factory” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwCn-D5xFdc ). The most popular commercial ever for Coke featured an animated fantasy universe populated by whimsical characters who create a bottle of Coke for delivery through a vending machine. After the Ad Agency of record failed to deliver, Starlight took the characters and narrative threads and expanded them into a universe with back-stories, characters, myths and legends along with a 7 year rollout plan for all media to exploit for Coke which could include animated features, shorts and games. Starlight’s has also created such transmedia extenstions for Mattel, Hasbro and Acclaim Entertainment. This concept of extending story and character into all dimensions is a fascinating aspect of advertising, marketing and new media. Properly done it can imprint a brand in new and compelling ways.

Adam Sigel is a Writer / Producer with a special skill set for adapting materials across platforms. TV, Film, Internet. Afterworld.com is an example of a “universe” that could be a TV series, or feature film but exists as a 30 episode animated Internet series with a website that immerses fans in characters, backstories and mysteries about this dystopian world. Adam reminded us that on the Internet you could create and distribute unfettered by corporate media citadels and go direct to the audience.

Jason VanBorsum is Executive Director of Director Digital Content Acquisition and Strategy at Sony Picture Television’s Crackle.com. Jason emphasized that Crackle specializes in releasing original episodic content onto the Internet. One can easily spend several evenings browsing dozens of shows in almost every genre. Crackle acts like a sort of farm league for programs, some of which may graduate to Sony Televison for “traditional” production and distribution. Jason emphasized that Crackle does not rely on “supersyndication” which he felt de-values original content too much. Supersyndication is the practice of publishing content on sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Veho and others. Although simply posting content on YouTube is enough to reach a about half of the Internet audience. Mr. VanBorsum could not reveal audience statistics on Crackle so it is left for me to speculate on how the audience for original entertainment online will shakeout. From viewing eps on Crackle, it is obvious that these are low budget productions. It is also obvious that there is an explosion of creativity and experimentation here, full of programming that gets a chance to find an audience that it would not get on traditional TV.

Anne White is VP of Content and Strategy & Development for the Premier Retail Network, which reaches an astounding 300 million people per week! PRN creates the in-store, AKA, out-of-home, TV networks that you see in retail chains including Best Buy and Wallmart. It was interesting to hear her talk about how content is developed for these networks and how precisely it targets shoppers with relevant content for their demographic and their shopping mindsets. Using IP, networked technology, shoppers can now interact with screens to get specific information about what they want when they want it. Programmers can instantly adjust content at the network, store, department and even the screen level! The classic example shown is rain gear goes on sale and is advertised the instant it starts raining!