I gave a talk last week on Finding and Attracting Audiences to film & TV producers at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School Centre for Screen Business, Melbourne. I was briefed to give a talk on how producers can make themselves findable, basically, how producers advertise to reach through the noise. I chose to select examples of what film & TV producers have been doing the last few months, proven techniques that have indeed made them findable and attract audiences. I chose creative, in-story examples as much as possible. I don’t consider myself a marketer, but I do look at every aspect of cross-media production and advertising is part of it. AND, in the age of “branded entertainment”, “Madison & Vine” (Scott Donaton) and so on, there really isn’t much difference between good shows and good advertising. I also look very closely at what advertisers have learnt. And there is a good reason for that: advertisers know how to motivate a person to act. The entertainment industry is new to active audiences, but marketers are not. Whereas storytellers, artists, know how to move a person emotionally, they know how to create whole worlds with a few words or brush strokes. Anyway, rant over, a pdf of the talk is now online. 
I co-wrote an academic paper with Jeremy Douglass and Mark Marino (my WRT co-horts over in California): Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies. The paper was delivered at the premier academic new media arts event: Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) in Copenhagen last December by Jeremy. We basically put forward a theory of how new media texts can be created and analysed using the IT industry technique of benchmarking, creatively. A pdf of that talk is now online too. BTW: I have transferred my PhD from the University of Melbourne to the University of Sydney, now that I moved!
Enjoy! And of course, let me know any examples you could add, or things you would like to know more about.
Recent Comments