Purefold was supposed to be everything social media wonks, democratic Web advocates and SF nerds wanted – oh, and it was supposed to make money, too. It’s based on Blade Runner! They hired Cory Doctorow! It was going to use Creative Commons! Friendfeed! MIT experts! Purefold was the Platonic form of what was supposed to be good transmedia.
On paper (or in transmedia seminars) the Purefold process looks really cool. In a nutshell:
- Harvest trending content from Friendfeed based on the intersection of net talk and sponsor interest.
- Get an agile production team to turn these keywords/ideas into an episode, which would include prototype placement (think Will Smith’s car from I, Robot).
- Extend the property with Creative Commons, allowing remixing and free responses.
- Use the result to harvest content for the next webisode.
Take a look at this presentation via Vimeo and this one on VodPod. Bask in the forward-looking confidence. Too bad it’s dead. No money, you see.
What’s wrong with Purefold? Why wasn’t it worth the money?
“Branded Content Initiative”
Do those words fill you with excitement? Me neither. And believe it or not, they don’t even thrill marketing folks much. Traditional product placement attaches a brand to worthwhile storytelling (and even bad storytelling is worthwhile if it attracts eyeballs). People know there’s something insincere about straight marketing.
Product placement makes raw branding’s bitter pill easier to swallow by linking it to emotionally provocative storytelling. Emotional power makes an experience feel truthful enough to drag associated signs along for the ride. But if you make storytelling a brand’s servant you’re left with marketing that people can see a mile away – and avoid.
The audience tolerates your brand when it can either easily identify the moments you’re pushing it (commercials) or when it doesn’t disturb the story’s verisimilitude. Otherwise, the story and branding fail. Nobody’s going to believe in Binging.
That’s why “branded content initiatives” have little value compared to real stories. The audience expects you to protect the integrity of the story, including its plot and world. At best, it can be no better than direct advertising, so that’s what companies will pay for instead of webisodes.
Screw Attention, I Want Money
The Vimeo presentation linked above fielded some thorny questions about attribution. The team plans on ripping inspiration fresh from the Web. Many content producers naturally wanted to say that, *cough* they owned those inspirations, thank you very much! At one point, the Ag8 guy makes the incredible statement that attribution is better than money.
But attention is only valuable when people can convert it into money at rate proportional to the effort. Collective marketing initiatives typically exploit other people’s content through aggregation and share distribution. The base service or element (such as Adsense) takes a big chunk; everybody else gets salami slices. Purefold didn’t even offer that, opting for a glorified handshake in return for the right to use its open content. But anyone who isn’t interested in profit will already use your content, licensed or not. Nobody’s suing people for their Blade Runner fan pages now, so why care about licensing that makes it legal?
In other words, Purefold wanted fandom but had no idea how to structure itself to avoid appearing exploitative. This isn’t just an image problem but a legal one. Creatives know that they need to be very cautious about naming inspirations and work within a careful framework of disclaimers and best practices.
What Should Purefold Look Like?
Okay, I’ve knocked down Purefold. Let’s rebuild it. What should the process be?
- Develop an extensible narrative world. Yep, that means creating fiction instead of “branding initiatives.” Purefold should be a speculative world that revolves around a tight cluster of meaty themes. The world’s main narrative arc is pure back story that inspires other stories through multiple media.
- Identify branding needs. The world should suggest opportunities for brand integration that don’t feel forced, and marketing staff should find branding partners to fill these roles. The failed version of Purefold forced partners to create prototypes for glorified commercials. This Purefold identifies the branding and product placement needs of the world. This makes sponsors look like contributors, not exploiters.
- Extend the property with Creative Commons and open development teams. CC shouldn’t be used indiscriminately. Fan-intensive IP managers know that establishing canonical status is am important part of management. Purefold needs opt-in communities that will create work worthy of promotion – something that requires management from the top, but can forego the restrictiveness of traditional licensing. I envision a development authority (“canon monkey”) managing communities and giving high quality items a stamp of approval, creating a basis of unity for the extended Purefold community.
- React, extend, redevelop. Feedback guides the team’s approach to the narrative world and future episodes. It’s more than tallying keyword votes. This is a counterweight to the 9% of creative contributors in the 1/9/90 split. Creative staff needs to think of the other 90%, because that 9% might run off with the property by loudly inserting fanon and other elements that deviate from the property’s core themes.
It wouldn’t be as cheap as the old dream of Purefold, but I think it would work better, prove a little more shock resistant, and present far more room for expansion than the vision of veiled commercials in the Blade Runner universe for products that don’t exist, based on whatever keywords Friendfeed can grab.
The only product placement-based thing that I’ve enjoyed in the slightest was, bizarrely, the video game based on Skittles, Darkened Skye. The reason I liked it is because the whole game is spent ripping on third person action fantasy games and making snide commentary about itself. As soon as the heroine said “I know I can jump half my height straight up without even a running start, but OF COURSE I never learned to swim…” I knew I had something special on my hands.
There are subtler forms of product placement out there. But they work because there’s some kind of synergy (I know, I know) with telling the story. Unfortunately, this stuff may fall by the wayside because of internet marketing and the rise of more exact data collection to determine ROI. The temptation is to push and push online because clickthroughs and such provide a very accurate picture of how a campaign is doing.
Pingback: Fight the Power (Law) | Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard