This is a horror story in the realm of content marketing.

Bah-dah-bah-bah-bah…oh no what have we done?!

UPDATE:  More stories (and examples of negative tweets with the #McDStories hashtag) at The Daily Mail and Business Insider.  (Thanks to Dave and Teddy for the tips.)

(Note: They get paid when they work for us, too.)

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So, congrats to Jeff.  He is rocking.

” 2012 will be the year that online video gets so big China borrows a ton of money from it and it also becomes a more potent source of alternative energy than oil with the environmental impact of solar.”

- Someone who is kidding and is assigning living characteristics to a non-living entity.

But, really, what will 2012 look like for online video?  Growth?  Big growth?  Disruptively massive growth?
I don’t know, but this Tubefilter article suggests it’s gonna be pretty darned big.

Will this be the year that the Internet finally takes down TV once and for all?
I think not, given that from the beginning of time, people have needed stories in their lives, and TV is both a source and outlet for them.  But venture capitalist Mark Suster argues that TV is going down…eventually.

Do all these statistical reports for online video views (see the video above) include all the times people watch porn?
For the answers to this and other mysteries, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how 2012 plays out.

Happy New Year from AboutFace Media and the Internet and Online Video (the non-porn kind) and bears and mountains.  See you in 2012.

But that’s all results of making the movie.  We’ve got Denis and Casey here, and we’re going to talk more about making the movie and the story behind the story on screen.  (Full disclosure:  I was an executive producer on Rock The Bells, but that doesn’t mean when I say RTB is an excellent film that I’m exaggerating.  It is an excellent film.)

John:  How did you get this project going, how did it come about?

Casey:  Denis and I had been producing hip hop documentaries for a few years at QD3 Entertainment.  In 2004, we went out on our own to start doing projects where we could see

Chang (left) and the GU Crew

our vision all the way through.  We read an article in the LA Weekly about the upcoming Rock The Bells hip hop festival, and it said that the Wu Tang Clan was going to be there – together with a diverse lineup of supporting acts – and we thought it would make an interesting concert DVD.  So we met with Chang (the concert’s founder, promoter, and financier).  We realized that putting the festival together was a dramatic story worth telling, and Chang and his crew were compelling characters.  There was something in their underdog, D.I.Y. risk-everything spirit that encapsulated everything we’d come to appreciate about hip hop culture.

In our initial meeting we agreed to start shooting right away because the concert was only two weeks away. Getting Wu-Tang together seemed impossible; it was something promoters simply didn’t attempt anymore because so many had been burned trying.  We shot every meeting.  And simultaneously, Denis and I started watching concert docs like Woodstock and Gimme Shelter, thinking about the most compelling way to tell this story.  The day of the show we scrambled together a lot of excellent people who were willing to work for what little money we had, and they brought their cameras and shot.  Twenty cameras.  We shot from 8am that morning to 4am that night.  Then the editing began.

John:  In the film, Chang and company put up guerrila marketing-style posters on the sides of roads, stuff like that, so the advertising doesn’t feel corporate.  Did you do that kind of marketing for the film itself?  Do you think that kind of street cred, street team style of marketing works?

Denis:  We used street teams and promoted it that way, yeah.  It was before the explosion of Facebook. With our subsequent film, Bold Native, we were able to sell out screenings all across America just using Facebook.  Our online promotion (with Rock The Bells) in 2006 was limited to discussion groups, fan forums, and chat rooms.  Which is fine, but it’s not as effective and immediate as social networking where people can build personal investment in a project.

John:  What was your favorite part of the experience?

Denis:  My favorite part was the test screenings.  When you’re editing a documentary you’re basically writing it in the editing room and you’re trying to find the most engaging and moving path through the story.  Test screenings give you the chance to engage with the audience and see what’s working and what’s not, so you have an opportunity to go back in and make it a more effective piece of story-telling.  Because once a film is released you don’t have that chance.

Casey:  (SPOILER ALERT) My favorite part of this whole process was when we were compelled to change the ending of the story, the licensing issues with Wu Tang music itself.  It was this kind of necessary thing where we had to take the music out of the movie, like it or not – at the time it felt devastating.  How can we end this movie without the music of

Fans REALLY want to see Wu Tang

Wu Tang?  But we ended up looking at it as a challenge – how can we make the best of this?  Now it ends without the musical performance and I think it’s a deeper, stronger film.  The film is about more than just this one moment where they’re all on stage together performing.  And it goes into this discussion of O.D.B., what was going on with him and their dynamic, because when he’s on stage he’s not really engaged.

Denis:  I couldn’t disagree more strenuously.  Everything Casey is saying was there with the music.  I think taking the music out limited our distribution deal.

Casey:  I think that’s true.  But I think it’s stronger without the music.

Denis:  I disagree.

Casey:  That’s why we make a good team!

John:  Other than having to deal with me and Barry Poltermann, what was the worst past of the experience?

Casey:  Maybe being in San Bernadino in 100-and-some degree weather?

Denis:  The fight to get this film to audiences.  I know there are people who would love this film who will never see it.  There are hip hop fans who go to the Rock The Bells festival and don’t even know that there’s a movie about it.  Then they see it and come back to us and say they can’t believe they missed it and it’s been out for a couple of years.  It’s hard to reach people.

John:  After Rock The Bells, you guys made a narrative film with Bold Native.  Did you use any doc-style tactics or aesthetics in BN?

Casey:  Docu-style tactics?  Yeah, from the producing side.  Producing the film, we didn’t try to own spaces.  We kept an efficient doc-style crew.  We shot in places that were working spaces, like in a restaurant that was actually open at the time.  Not a lot of big lighting.  And we tried to keep a low profile so actors could lose themselves in the moment.

Denis:  From a directing side – I agree with what Casey said.  We basically shot the film the same way we would have shot a documentary.  The only difference being that we controlled what was happening in front of the camera.  We shot in live places.  There were things happening around us we couldn’t control.  The only way we could afford to do the film was that we had to shoot it like a documentary.  And we learned so much about storytelling from documentary filmmaking because you have to take what you’re given and find the story within it.  So you have to be very creative in the editing room.  And on set you have to have an eye out for those story elements.  We’ve brought those skills to our narrative work, our fiction work.

John:  What’s next, documentary or narrative?

Casey:  We are in production on our next documentary feature, which is about a legal case – USA vs SHACUSA. Six activists were imprisoned for between 1 to 6 years in federal prison for what most Americans would consider free speech activity – running a website, making speeches, organizing protests. It deals with our legal system, animal rights, corporate power, the prison system… and tells the story of six very dedicated, intelligent and compelling individuals.

Denis:  A documentary that involves free speech, questions of what is terrorism, and the internet.

Casey:  And we’re also developing narrative projects, as well.

John:  You guys are machines!

–

Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling.

Their approach is very smart.  They selected a diverse group of actual at-risk students – representative of kids all over the country, urban, rural, and in-between – and made documentary videos showing the students’ worlds, their challenges, and their desires to graduate and overcome adversity.

It’s a very affecting approach.  The realness of it, the honesty, makes a big impact.  The choice to do these as documentaries only bolsters the feeling.  I think they’re doing a great job.  It’s touching.  And after seeing the videos, it even got me to take out my wallet and kick in a little kitty to the cause (via DonorsChoose).

They’re also doing social media right with presences on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  Hopefully more and more folks will see their work and help the cause.

Check the videos out.

FOX’s Family Guy was the first of these resuscitated shows.  In 2001, after three seasons, FOX canceled the animated comedy due to low ratings.  But fans bought the DVDs and the reruns on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim got strong ratings.  FOX subsequently brought the show back – in 2004.  If you have a TV, you probably know it’s still on FOX every Sunday night.  It was dead for three years, brought back, and now it’s a monster hit.  And it’s all because of the rabid fan base.

More recently, and more social, perhaps, was the campaign to save NBC’s spy comedy, Chuck.  This is a show that has a rabid fan base, yet a small (by network TV standards) fan base.  After Season 2 ended, the show was unofficially dead.  Ratings were bad, and it’s not the cheapest show in the world to make (they blow lots of stuff up… or pretend to).  But via social media, fans mounted a campaign to #SaveChuck and, smart and savvy as this show’s loyal supporters are, they targeted Subway – one of the show’s sponsors over the years.  They marched in droves to Subway stores nationwide.  There was video of it being shot and uploaded to YouTube.  Facebook and Twitter lit up with appeals to the sandwich chain.  The show’s stars Lachary Levi and Joshua Gomez heard what was happening and lent their support – both by doing TV interviews about what the fans were doing and actually meeting up with fan marches to Subway.

With all those fans going to Subway and buying sandwiches, with all the social media buzz around Chuck and Subway, and with all of the traditional nation media coverage courtesy of a little star power, Subway certainly got a lot of bang for no buck.  And seeing the passion, loyalty, and potential business opportunity in fans of Chuck, Subway made a deal with NBC to finance a more substantial chunk of the show’s budget (in exchange for some not-so-subtle product placement through the show’s run).  And thanks to the fans, Chuck was back.  Its ratings really never broke out.  It was never a true hit.  But it did make it five seasons (which will mean about 100 episodes, a successful run for any network show for sure) and make a lot of fanatic fans happy.

Just last week, the final episode of Community for 2011 ran on NBC.  It was this year’s Holiday Special, it was very funny, critics as usual praised the show, and, as usual, not a lot of people watched it.  A few weeks ago, NBC announced that their Spring lineup would not include Community.  So, is Community about to be canceled?  NBC says no, or not necessarily… but maybe…?  Twitter went crazy with #SaveCommunity messages.  The showrunner, Dan Harmon, and its cast are very good at both promoting their show and communicating with fans on Twitter.  And, like the demographics for Chuck, fans of the show are hip, savvy, technologically advanced, and let’s face it, kinda geeky.  They make money and are relatively young – so advertisers like them a lot.  But that didn’t save Arrested Development (albeit Arrested, I’d imagine, was a much more expensive show to produce).  So I guess we’ll see if NBC is simply putting Community gently/gradually into its grave, or if it is putting the show on a longer hiatus than usual.  Good news for Community is that NBC doesn’t have a ton of promising comedies on the air to fill its slot.  And, maybe even more importantly, Community fans are just as rabid as Chuck and Family Guy fans before them – so if it comes down to it, they may take the fight to NBC (or one of the show’s sponsors).  We’ll have to wait and see.

NOTE: Arrested Development, after being off the air for half a decade, will be back in production and set to have new episodes released in 2013.  It’s being financed by Netflix in a move I think is brilliant for the online distributor… but that’s another subject altogether.  Point is, if you have passionate fans, you’re never quite dead.

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Case Studies In Social Storytelling is a weekly feature examining past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling. It is published each Tuesday.

Quick recap:
1. Your Goal;
2. Your Target Audience;
3. The Content or Stories That Appeal To That Audience;
4. What You Want Your Audience To Be Saying About You;
5. What Impressions Are Out There That You Want To Capitalize On, Challenge, Or Overcome;
6. Defining The Brand Image Your Media Should Convey;
7.  Is there any relevant background information on your company or brand that you want to incorporate; and
8.  Do you have any market research that can help shape your story?

Now, back to the future.

First – results.  What do you want to get out of telling your story?  A branding experience?  A measurable action (like a click-through, a purchase, an occupation of Wall Street)?  We’re talking the ultimate end results here, so be sure to be sure about what you want to accomplish.  A metaphor to illustrate this?  Of course!  If you fire a gun, you better be sure of what you want to hit.  So what do you want to hit?

If you’re after a measurable action, what is it?  Drill down on what’s important, what will help you, whether it’s leads on new clients or purchases that immediately benefit your bottom line.

Next week, we’re going to get into how to get your story seen.  Nobody wants to make a great movie, or TV show, or video series and have no one see it.  Sadly, if you’ve ever seen Friday Night Lights or some obscure video series, you know it happens.  Sometimes, great content doesn’t get seen.  I want to make sure that does not happen for you.  So until next week, go watch Friday Night Lights and be well!  (It was a great show!)

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This is Part 14 of an ongoing series. Barry Poltermann will post one part of this series each week, at your regularly scheduled time (ie Friday mornings). Next up is “Part 15 – Get ‘Em To Watch”.

How dare CBS interrupt Two And A Half Men with commercials?! Oh, right, that's how they pay for the shows. My bad.

If you read The History Of Social Storytelling series that Barry Poltermann publishes here, you already know what Interruption Marketing means (and why it’s dying to some degree).  But if not, here’s a quick explanation.

Interruption Marketing is marketing/advertising that interrupts what a consumer is actually there for.  A commercial during a TV show is the best example.  You’re watching Ashton’s debut on Two And A Half Men and the act break arrives, CBS goes to a commercial break.  ”Break” is apt in that it is breaking the stream of one-liners you took time out of your life to tune in for.

It interrupts your viewing, whether you like it or not.  That’s Interruption Marketing.

It’s becoming less dominant every day due to neato things like TiVos/DVRs and the internet at large.  If you want to read more on why and how it’s all changed – and it has – check out Barry’s series, probably starting here with post number two.

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Buzzwords is a weekly feature that explains and demystifies one current social media “Buzzword” per entry.  If you’d like to suggest a Buzzword for us to tackle, please email us at buzzwords@aboutfacemedia.com.

Community

But on another level, Community is interesting in that its creator and show runner, Dan Harmon, has some 60,000 plus Followers on Twitter and interacts with them there.  If you follow Dan (@danharmon), you might see him briefly talk about a joke, a subplot, or what music was used in a particular scene.  He responds to fans when they Tweet him questions or comments.  And Tweets funny things on and off topic, which you would hope to get out of a professional comedy writer.  Point is, Dan’s social presence is a deepening of the stories we see on his show.  It further connects us to the Community world.

There is a recent Wired article on Dan I highly recommend if you’re interested in the structure side of story (or in Dan or his show).  Dan goes into how he views story structure, not only on Community but in everything he watches.  It’s a nice, simple, clean way to look at it.  Check it out.  And check out Community. (NBC, Thursdays, 8pm)  It’s one of the best comedies around.

–

Case Studies In Social Storytelling is a weekly feature examining past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling. It is published each Tuesday.

Over the course of the last two parts of this series, we’ve been digging into the elements that will be important for telling your story.

We looked at:
1. Your Goal;
2. Your Target Audience;
3. The Content or Stories That Appeal To That Audience;
4. What You Want Your Audience To Be Saying About You;
5. What Impressions Are Out There That You Want To Capitalize On, Challenge, Or Overcome; and
6. Defining The Brand Image Your Media Should Convey.

Now let’s talk backstory.  Is there any relevant background information on your company or brand that you want to incorporate?  For example, we did a series on Perkins + Will, a design firm steeped in a celebrated history of sustainable design.  So we made that tradition and vision a focus of the videos.  You can check one out here.

You can see how we use the background, the backstory, of Perkins + Will to show what they’re about today.  It is the history of P + W that guides them.  If you have a similar guiding backstory, or history, or tradition, embrace it and make it part of your story – possibly even the focus.

Lastly regarding backstory, do you have any market research that can help shape your story?  Or that can help you find your audience?  Or that can help you in any other aspect of your initiative?  For example, maybe you sell dalmatians and your target audience is firefighters (a small, ridiculous market and example, I grant you, but cute, right?).  You’ve commissioned research to find out what firefighters are into and found out they love Rescue Me (the Dennis Leary show on FX).  So, now you may consider running spots on FX or ads on the show’s website because you know one place that firefighters are already going.

Alright, backstory properly mined, we’ll continue next week with a look toward the future.

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This is Part 13 of an ongoing series. Barry Poltermann will post one part of this series each week, at your regularly scheduled time (ie Friday mornings). Next up is “Part 14 – Action”.

Wherever she is, geo targeting will allow content to be targeted to her based on her location. Big Brother style!

Here’s a bit from Wikipedia on Geotargeting:

Geo targeting in geomarketing and internet marketing is the method of determining the geolocation of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization,IP address, ISP or other criteria.

Cool.  So if you can determine where a user is, you can show them different content.  I live in Los Angeles.  You may live in New York.  If we both go to a car buying site, we can each get a video ad for a local dealer.  Mine will be in LA, yours will be in NY.  It’s good because it’s useful.  It’s useful because it’s targeted.

(The downside is that if you go to Europe or, as I did, shoot a movie in Colombia, Hulu and Netflix and everyone else will know where you are and you won’t be able to watch Modern Family until you’re back stateside.  That’s how Geotargeting is used for Copyright and Digital Rights Management, which is great unless you wanna watch some English-language TV online in Bogota.)

The Dude is one heck of a character.

This week’s case study is a follow-up/drill-down into the USA Character Project. USA and their Social Publicist, Emily Garvey of 360i, put me in touch with acclaimed filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig.  Jeff directed the award-winning and truly excellent feature documentary The Devil And Daniel Johnston (2006) and, more recently, the USA Character Project short documentary The Dude.  As way of a little background, The Dude is the true story behind the fanatically beloved Jeff Bridges character, “The Dude”, in the Coen Brothers classic The Big Lebowski.  Here is the film.  Give it a watch.  It’s top notch filmmaking and top notch storytelling.

WATCH THE DUDE AT USANETWORK.COM

Now, here are some excerpts from my call with Emily and Jeff (who are both, incidentally, super nice and super smart people).

John Murphy: How did the project come about and how did you get involved?

Jeff Feuerzeig and The Dude

Jeff Feuerzeig: Well, I’m repped over at RSA Films, and I get a call – yes I got a call from the exec producer, and he said that they’re going to be doing about eight short films – USA Network. Now, USA Network is a network and they need programming. So why shouldn’t networks be commissioning documentaries? And they said it was called “The Character Project.” And that could loosely mean whatever it means to me. And being a documentarian who catalogs, you know, “characters,” I made a list of probably 20-something people that I think are really interesting that I’d like to make a short documentary about. It was a great list, people from all walks of life. Some were musicians, some were artists, maybe some were, you know, writers or authors, journalists, people like that who were interesting to me and characters that have a story. And my number one was The Dude. I’ve known the Dude since – God, the year I got out of college. And the Dude was my very first Hollywood meeting, believe it or not? The real Dude. In 1987 indie film was very much in its early years of Spike Lee and Jarmusch and John Sayles. Anyway – so the Dude – there was an indie film book, and it was – I think it was called “Off Hollywood: Case Histories From the Front Lines of Independent Cinema” or something like that, and John Sayles credited Jeff Dowd, the Dude, for the success of his first film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven. And when I graduated from film school, I had a screenplay, and I reached out to the only person I knew to reach out to, the Dude, because of this book.

Flash forward to a month later, and I’m on an airplane from New York to Los Angeles and I end up in Venice Beach on the boardwalk. It’s not really a boardwalk. It’s like an asphalt walk. And the Dude was living in this dilapidated beach shack right on the beach, and I’m waiting for him. And about ten minutes go by and I’m watching all these people jogging and rollerblading. And the Dude – he rolls up on roller blades, and he’s wearing this really hideous Hawaiian shirt, and he’s like this gigantic totally overweight behemoth with frizzy hair, and he’s got the knee pads and white tube socks and these tight little shiny shorts which made it look like he was smuggling grapes. And like, that’s the Dude.

And he takes me upstairs to his ramshackle office/apartment, because it’s both, and I’m telling you, man, the place is filled with screenplays. I mean literally stacks of screenplays wall-to-wall. The place is just a mess, totally disgusting. It’s like – a mattress on the floor, and the Dude just lives like he’s just out of college, but he’s just – but he’s really, he’s far – he’s many, many years from not being in college you know? And he starts ruffling through all the screenplays and he finds my screenplay. And I’m absolutely convinced that he had not read the screenplay yet, okay? And he starts waving my screenplay in my face. And he spits when he talks. He’s kind of like this actor, Avery Schreiber. I don’t know if you remember him from the ’70s. And he’s spitting all over me as he’s yelling at me. And he’s telling me – he said, “You are the new Cassavetes! You will make films no matter what!” He’s… I’m the new Cassavetes, right? So anyway – it was sort of like a rite of passage in indie film back then – it was like baptism by Dude. You know – to be spit on by the Dude. And the Dude and I never did work together, but I never forgot him. And he had this partner named Jamie Willett, who’s a fantastic guy. And he was actually the person who read the screenplays and who partnered with the Dude, and they ended up producing films, like Zebrahead and FernGully: The Last Rainforest. A lot of people don’t know this. And you’re not going to learn this in my 18-minute film, but what you do get in the film is that the Dude is a serious cat. And that’s important.

So, back to the story. We all submitted treatments and obviously I wanted to do a documentary about the Dude because we remained friends all these years. And we would run into each other at film festivals and things like that, and I knew a lot about his history that fans of The Big Lebowski would never know. They only really know that one little clue that was in the movie – the Seattle Seven, the one line. I felt that the Dude had just enough notoriety and fame for people to want to check in on this subject as opposed to an unknown character. And the Dude had, of course, the myth of being “the Dude” from the Coen brothers film, and he goes around very proudly being the real Dude, and he’s made sort of a half-life out of that fame as well. That was interesting.

But the Dude also has this really heavy back story of being an anti-war activist during Vietnam and having gone to prison over his beliefs and trying to stop the war. So I thought that’d be a really fascinating story. And then of course the Dude got out of prison and is front and central at the birth of the independent film movement up in Seattle and then helped to start Sundance. And very few people know that the Dude helped start Sundance with Redford. So I thought that was a really interesting story as well. And I submitted this treatment, and came up with a structure and how it would work in 18 minutes. And they were really interested in going to a Lebowski Festival, which, as I learned, they’re happening all the time around the country. And I thought that would be a lot of fun, because the Dude does attend the Lebowski Festivals, and that’d be a fun portion of the film as well as the history lesson. My concept really was – man meets myth and myth meets man – plus a story within a story. And they green lit it.

John Murphy: Nice, nice. Did you actually – when RSA had the sort of call for three months, did you know about the Character Project? Had you already seen sort of the USA brand of “Characters Welcome” thing?

Jeff Feuerzeig: You know, it’s funny. I didn’t really know that much about it. I went online and looked it up. And the way it came about was that the year before, they had brought in a group of very well-known still photographers. So the Character Project, the way it was presented to me, was stills of characters and now they were trying to do a motion picture version. The idea of the Character Project is pretty cool, because it’s open-ended. And let’s face it. If you’re going to watch a documentary about someone, it helps if the person is really interesting. Point a camera at Mark Borchardt from American Movie, point a camera at R. Crumb. Point a camera at Daniel Johnston. There’s a reason these people work as documentaries that are memorable. Jeff Dowd certainly fit the bill. Not only was he a classic American “character” – he literally was a character in a film. And at the same time, he’s a really brilliant, well-spoken amazing guy. And when he tells you the history of Vietnam and his involvement, it’s some very serious shit. The Dude is the real deal. He’s not a clown. And this film isn’t necessarily branded content. I suppose they’re selling the USA Network perhaps. But they’re doing it so subtly – what else would you tune in to USA Network for than to watch programming?

Emily Garvey: Jeff, actually I have a quick question. I thought it was so interesting, you know, with the seven or eight other filmmakers, that everyone came back with something so different. What’s your take on kind of how the project came together as a whole?

Jeff Feuerzeig: Well I thought it was really cool that it wasn’t necessarily eight documentaries. There were three documentaries but they were all very different. One was a verite’ film. One was more of a portrait. Really different stylistically. The beautiful thing about documentary filmmaking is there are many different flavors. You know, I do a different thing than the other filmmakers do. And I enjoy watching other people’s work. So, yes, I just thought it was very well rounded. Absolutely. If I were USA, I would continue doing more of these. I mean, why not right? And they also were really amazing to work with. I handed in my treatment and we talked about it once and they just sent me off to go do my thing. There was not this – layers of meetings and, “How are you going to shoot this?” And that’s how I make my other documentaries. I’m on my own, thinking on my feet. What a great way to work.

John Murphy: That’s incredible.

Jeff Feuerzeig: Maybe that’s the secret ingredient to this, that it’s a filmmaker’s series. They wanted films by filmmakers – so the hands-off approach is a good idea. And they had very good notes, when we were in the edit. They were really thoughtful, and it was a great collaboration in the end. But they definitely “let me do my thing,” which is great.

John Murphy: Did you ever get from USA or from anywhere else, did you ever get any indication of, you know, as far as – creatively, I think The Dude is a huge success. Did you ever get any sort of indication of what their goals were for views or anything else? As far as sort of measurable… if I’m a network guy, how am I measuring the success?

Jeff Feuerzeig: I wasn’t privy to it. I mean, they did something very out of the box that was really interesting. They clearly didn’t do this for how many clicks on a Web site. Did you see some of the articles? They built these mobile theaters in – what do you call? Shipping containers. They dropped one in LA, they did one in – I’m not sure how many they did. They did quite a few. So I went to one on Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach. And it was bright colored green. It said, “The USA Network Character Project,” on it. You should Google up a couple of the articles on the shipping containers, because that’s how they made the big splash. They got tons of press off the shipping containers, and basically by dropping these mobile theaters in neighborhoods, you know, in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, etc., the branding took place by making the viewing experience something owned by USA Network. It’s like a quirky, cool, new idea to take this material off the Web page and put it out there in the public space. And people walking by are like, “Oh, my God, what’s that?” “Oh hey, would you like to go see a short film or two or three? You can hang out and see as few or as many as you want.” And they’d line up and they go in and they just sit inside a shipping container and watch the film. So I think they were trying to create more of like – “a happening.”

John Murphy: Right.

Jeff Feuerzeig: And I think that was really cool, and I have no idea what the click-through was on their Web site. Obviously people watched them and they promoted them with ads everywhere, but I think it was a big branding thing on a different level. And that was quite innovative. That was my perspective on it. I think it had a bigger branding agenda without the films having to be, you know, all USA-centric. I think they have a different strategy and I think it certainly keeps the films pure and no doubt more watchable to an audience that doesn’t want to be sold anything and it keeps their agenda pure as well.

FIN.

Jeff’s next documentary, The Real Rocky, premieres on ESPN on October 25th. It’s about the fighter, Chuck Wepner, who inspired the Rocky films. You can watch a bit of Jeff talking about Chuck and the phenomenon at ESPN. ESPN has been making some really cool films of late. So ESPN together with Jeff should be a knock out. (Wow, bad bad pun. Please still watch!)

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Case Studies In Social Storytelling is a weekly feature examining past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling. It is published each Tuesday.

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