[CASE STUDY] Digital Marketing for Web Series: SPIRAL
5 Lessons on Playing with Fandom
Recently, I have been working on the web series SPIRAL, which is nearing the end of its initial Season 1 rollout. This project has been in the works for about five years, so it is exciting to finally see the digital marketing strategy put into action. I always want to share what I learn, so here are the lessons so far, focusing on the built-in audiences and fandoms that come with our actors
First of all, what is SPIRAL?
The SPIRAL web series is the brain child of executive producer Andrew Williamson (Motive, High Moon, Emergency Room: Life + Death at VGH) and executive producer/writer Karen McClellan (The Next Step, Being Erica, Cracked). The story is about a group of college students who are implicated in the mysterious death of one of their own and find out they share not only a disturbing recurring dream, but also a past life. The series stars a strong group of actors (Alexandra Beaton, Brennan Clost, Angela Palmer, Cody Kearsley, Louriza Tronco, Corteon Moore, Kailey Spear and Enuka Okuma) who come from TV series with serious fandoms like The Next Step, Make it Pop, Riverdale and Rookie Blue. We have been trying to make the most of the fans of these shows. Below are five of the lessons we have learned so far:
Lesson 1: Support & motivate your actors’ participation
The bottom line is, the reason these particular fans are responding to your story is because actors they love are in it. You need to find ways to include your actors and encourage their support (because it doesn’t matter if they have the biggest social media following in the world, if they don’t do anything for your show). Here are some of the ways we have supported the SPIRAL actors:
An extremely positive production experience and quality end product bonded the actors, made them excited to share, and motivated them to want to do it again (without this foundation, I don’t think any of the following would have worked);
Regular meetings and/or communication let them know what the plan was for the rollout, where they could help, and what the results and impact were so far. (I have been doing weekly group emails with updates and asks, as well as providing individual outreach when necessary);
We have found ways to weave the actors into the strategy as much as possible with tactics like social media account takeovers and providing unique visual assets for them to share;
We also activated their competitive spirits with a leaderboard that tracks and compares how much traffic each of them have sent to the website;
And we try to celebrate our actors whenever possible: birthdays, film festival screenings, other TV appearances and premieres, etc
Lesson 2: Meet the fans where & when they already are
Recognizing our strategy had to include our actors’ fans, meant learning about who those people were. Part of our initial meeting with the actors was asking them about who their fans were, where they lived, and so on. Quickly we learned that a lot of our potential fans would be coming from Instagram, likely from England (where The Next Step is huge) and would include a lot of young 12-14 year old girls.
This knowledge completely changed our Instagram strategy. We made it all about the actors and their fans, got rid of any pictures that did not include the faces of our cast and looked for ways to weave them into the online chatter. We also learned we could get a big bump around the time of day young girls in the UK were getting home from school if we were active and available on Instagram at that time.
Lesson 3: Be responsive & inviting (& protective)
Once you start the fandom train, you need to take care of it, every day. Active community management, supported with new content has been critical to this kind of audience growth, especially on Instagram. We try to respond as quickly as possible to any comments or mentions there, on both feeds and stories. We also have been actively looking for ways to engage and invite them into the storyworld.
There are strong emotions at play here. The young girls that make up the majority of this fandom are passionately dedicated to these actors and this is not something we take lightly. There is an intimacy created in the social media space which is very powerful. We have been and will continue to be careful with the kinds of conversations we support. For instance, there are some difficult themes related to suicide and violence in the story and we have tried to point to resources for those who might be triggered or need help.
Lesson 4: Leverage milestones & “ships” of the original series
We haven’t done this enough, but are planning to do it more. Two of the series fandoms we are focusing on are The Next Step and Riverdale . Besides trying to be a part of the online conversation on the days of the week new episodes for these series are released, we also are trying to play on fan desires to see certain characters from those shows in a relationship. We’ve seen this demonstrated most dramatically with last week’s Episode 6 unlocking and fans seeing Alex and Brennan’s characters share a kiss in their past life. Images of this moment got an amazing response, especially when shared by the actors with their fans. We broke almost all our weekly records for online activity.
Lesson 5: Celebrate the fans
Although the actors’ fans were not a part of our original strategy, we quickly recognized their eagerness as an asset (especially when fanart and edits were being created before the episodes were even online). This led to the creation of a fan corner on the website where we included interviews with the cast and, even more importantly, featured a superfan each week. Celebrating fandom in this way has paid off. The fan edit output is ridiculous (in a good way). Fan accounts and creations for the show continue to pop up with great regularity. We are also very lucky to have actors who also consistently like and comment on these to the great delight of the fans.
[CASE STUDY] Digital Marketing for Transmedia: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – Pt. 2
Measuring Success
So now onto some of the hard numbers of success. You can check out the infographic to the right to get some additional highlights, however the main success metric for the show creators has been the video views. Each LBD episode boasts about 300,000 views on average (comparable to successful niche television programming). This clearly reflects a quality “lean back” experience, but there are other numbers that show how much this content engages and inspires its audience. Do a search for “the lizzie bennet diaries” on Google now and it returns over 3.5 million pages of LBD content; this includes pages from the story itself, articles written about it, social media memes created, and fan frothing of the highest caliber. The first LBD episode with over 1,000,000 views has spurred over 2,100 fan comments, while the exciting episode 60, has received over 500,000 views (100,000 of which were received in the first 24 hours) and over 7,000 comments. Keyword research shows that people are searching for “the lizzie bennet diaries” over 12,100 times every month (which compares to other modern retellings such as “pride and prejudice and zombies” with 9,900 or the Bollywood “bride and prejudice” with 22,000 searches).
LBD fans (many of whom call themselves Seahorses) are highly motivated and engaged throughout the whole transmedia experience and were just waiting to be asked to do something for this show they loved so much. And ask the team did, in that now famous Kickstarter campaign. Three asks were made for fan support: 1) to finance DVD production (a completely fan driven desire), 2) to help pay for a little summer bridge series Welcome to Sanditon and 3) any “extra” would go towards paying the team of twenty who had brought Lizzie’s world to life over the past year. Jay firmly believes it is this last ask that spurred the fans on to pledge as generously as they did. Most of the comments on the campaign make it clear they wanted to give back to the people who had taken them on this amazing journey. The team is incredibly humbled by this response, perhaps a bit overwhelmed by the responsibility, but excited to see what they can do with and for this audience next. This, more than anything, may be the ultimate success metric and the lasting legacy of LBD, especially if it can become part of an ongoing and evolving business model for the creators and sew the seeds for multiplatform storytelling success of others in the future.
Transmedia Lessons Learned
Speaking with Jay he had three very clear lessons learned from this amazing transmedia success story:
There is no such thing as digital marketing. He explained this means every piece of content they put out was considered part of the story. The social media and other online assets were not siloed into a separate marketing department, they are as much a part of the LBD storyworld as the core vlog series.
The transmedia team needs to be in the writers room. An extension of the philosophy above, for a multiplatform story to work, the transmedia content producers need to be as deeply embedded in the creative process as possible. Major plot points unfolded in the social media storylines and synergy and knowledge exchange needed to happen between all the storytellers involved.
Interactivity does not mean surrendering the storytelling to the audience. If the audience had its way Lydia would never have fallen for Wickham and a big part of the drama, conflict and character growth of LBD would not have happened. Jay feels the audience still wants to be taken on a journey that transports them somewhere else. Interactivity can happen by creating spaces where the audience can play and interact with characters but the story is still protected and guided by the creative team.
My Digital Marketing Takeaways
Despite not having a formal strategy I see LBD as a digital marketing success story which demonstrates some important fundamental truths, including:
Know your niche and be where they are. This achievement was built upon two initial niche audiences: the Nerdfighters and the most voracious Pride and Prejudice fans, those who had shown a willingness to consume this story over and over again. With zero dollars for publicity, digital offered a way to reach out to these audiences directly and have a presence on the social networks that mattered the most to them (like Tumblr).
Use the power of the digital two way conversation to engage them. The transmedia elements of the LBD story leveraged this power not in a “used car saleman” way, but with an authenticity, narrative and responsiveness that generated strong emotional reactions (which makes people want to share and spread the word).
“Don’t ask before you give”. Sheri Candler recently made this statement when we were teaching together in the IPF workshops. I agree it is absolutely key to digital marketing success and the LBD team proves to be a perfect example. They gave their fans a year of fantastic story and experience before they launched their Kickstarter campaign. It is highly unlikely this campaign would have seen similar success if it has been launched before or even early on in Lizzie’s journey.
What Comes Next for LBD?
Two things are clear: 1) the successful Kickstarter campaign means Welcome to Sanditon will have more resources and it was just announced that this story will start to unfold next week on May 13, 2013; and 2) the next big series is set to start in July (which they don’t need to Kickstart because it has already been funded by Deca.TV). However, what the new big series is to be is still a secret. Looking again at the keyword research might I suggest “sense and sensibility” (with 49,500 monthly searches on Google), “mansfield park“ (27,100), “northanger abbey” (18,100), “emma jane austen” (12,100), “persuasion jane austen” (6,600). Or what about doing The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in another language? In Spanish “orgullo y prejuicio” gets almost 50,000 searches a month. Then there’s the possibility of looking further afield outside the Austen canon. Perhaps to the Bronte sisters and “jane eyre” (165,000) or “wuthering heights” (135,000). Wherever the LBD team chooses to try their collective hands next, I have no fear they will continue to build an authentic brand that delivers compelling story experiences complete with fantastic, relevant modern day writing, great characters and casting, and a respect for the audience they have built and continue to serve.
[CASE STUDY] Digital Marketing for Transmedia: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – Pt. 1
Recently the online creative community’s collective head exploded when a crowdfunding campaign for a movie about the long cancelled TV show Veronica Mars exceeded its $2 million goal on Kickstarter by over 285%. But I, and many others in the digital crowd, were even more impressed by the modernized Pride and Prejudice web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries that also ran a campaign at the same time and exceeded its goal of $60,000 by 771%. I was lucky enough to recently speak with LBD’s transmedia producer Jay Bushman who generously shared his experience of this wild screen media ride. In this issue of From Search to Screen I explore the journey of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries so far and pass along lessons in digital marketing learned, especially when it comes to owning your own success and finding, engaging and galvanizing your audience across multiple platforms.
The Story is the Thing
Lizzie Bennet co-creators Hank Green and Bernie Su recognized from the beginning Pride and Prejudice was their “greatest weapon,” a fantastic tried and true story (as Hank’s wife had pointed out). The book was first published on January 28, 1813, but has been retold and reimagined in plays, movies, television shows and multiple other creative works. This romantic comedy of errors has also often found significant commercial success. I could not help doing a little keyword research and noted that “pride and prejudice” is still searched over 200,000 times a month on Google. This enduring story clearly has much resonance, which the LBD team handled beautifully, transitioning it to a modern setting and narrative with great writing and pitch perfect casting (especially for Lizzie, Jane and Lydia).
By Luck or Design?
Now the digital marketer in me would love to say that this huge success story was also because the LBD team had a solid yearlong marketing strategy mapped out right from the beginning. However, this is not the case. Hank had enough faith in the power of the Pride and Prejudice story to literally put his money where his mouth was and become the sole investor, financing the initial 24 episodes. He also knew a little something about YouTube success from his many years running his VlogBrothers channel with his brother John. Although LBD wasn’t incorporated into that content, he knew he had over 1 million Nerdfighters (what VlogBrother fans are called) to help him get the word out. With zero dollars for marketing and promotion, the team still expected that after about three weeks of LBD they would have to reach out and do some active PR to get write ups in on and offline publications. This turned out to be unnecessary…
LBD soon took on a life of its own and was generating enough revenue from YouTube advertising to be self-sustaining. But this really hit home for the team when they went to Vidcon at the end of June 2012 (3 months into Lizzie’s story) and found themselves swarmed by fans, with sold out panels and an impromptu signing that lasted three hours. It was clear this show had struck a chord. Soon Deca.TV came onboard as co-owner, helping Hank recoup his original investment, providing infrastructure and financial support, taking over administrative duties, and freeing up the creative team to simply create.
And still the growth continues. Unbeknownst to the LBD team, January 28, 2013 marked the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and also coincided with the climax of the narrative of the web series resulting in a new wave of fans discovering the show and spreading the word even further. LBD can now boast coverage in top shelf media such as The Guardian newspaper, TIME Newsfeed, USA Today, ABC News, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, BBC News, and The Wall Street Journal.
Marketing = Telling the Story?
Although there were no marketing dollars in LBD or formalized plan in place, the pervasive storyworld of Lizzie Bennet across so many social networks created a huge in-story marketing machine. For instance, a clever writer named Kate Rorick wrote episode 59 which had Darcy walk into the frame for the first time at the very end of the episode, without revealing his face. This sent LBD fandom into a tizzy of anticipation which exploded in episode 60, heretoafter known as #DarcyDay. This storytelling machine with many moving parts managed and created by Jay and his transmedia team, also listened and responded, answering fan tweets, sharing gifs and memes on Tumblr and giving them more Lydia Bennet when they demanded it. While there are no hard stats on this, the teams’ anecdotal evidence suggests the majority of the audience discovered LBD because it appeared in their social media feeds as their friends shared and frothed about the series. What an amazing example of the power of superfans when a story and experience is truly authentic and engaging enough to move and inspire them in this way. Is it marketing, smart storytelling, or a hybrid of both? I bet you can guess what I think.
Continue to Part 2 > Measuring Success, Lessons Learned & Digital Marketing Takeaways…
[CASE STUDY] Digital Marketing for Web Series: Seth on Survival/My Lupine Life
It all began with an online phenomenon known as Seth on Survival – a web series, blog and app that has been dishing out monster fighting advice to kids since September 2009. Hosted by charismatic ‘Seth Greening,’ kids continue to be invited into his world of surviviology:
“Seth on Survival is the helpiest site dedicated to your ongoing survival and the ultimate destruction or at least suppression of your most annoying enemies. Join us for practical supernatural survival tips, tricks, tools, controversies and true-life supernatural survival stories.”
In this issue of From Search to Screen, I invite you to share the journey of Seth, his collaborators and the highly engaged community of SOS kids that led to the recent release of the werewolf spinoff about living the Lupine Life.
Canadian Web Series Pioneer
When Seth on Survival launched in the fall of 2009 the world of webisode series was just starting to pick up some momentum. Home Internet connections were finally getting fast enough to be able to carry video without too much frustrating buffering. The International Academy of Web Television (IAWTV) was created and held its first awards show, the Streamys in March of 2009 (at which Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog cleaned up and whereSOS went on to be nominated in 2010 for the Best Mobile Experience). The third season of Felicia Day’s The Guild had just premiered in August and The Annoying Orange was about to launch its first episode on YouTube in October. In Canada, Vuguru was about to partner with Rogers Media to produce upwards of 30 new web shows a year. SOSlaunched against this background as an experiment in this new kind of storytelling.
Finding an Audience
One of the biggest challenges for SOS was the target audience. Seth appealed to tweens and younger kids and without a television network or huge marketing budget, it was hard to reach these potential fans. This age group was also not on social networks in the way teenagers and adults were, meaning grassroots DIY social media marketing was not going to reach them. The key to finding this audience was when the SOS companion app, the Monstrometer, was added to iTunes (it was the 50,000th app added – iTunes now boasts over 700,000 apps as of September 2012). Kids LOVED the app. And they loved to tell their friends about it and scan them to discover what kind of a monster they were. The app ended up growing the audience for the web series and website through viral word-of-mouth that actually happened offline. In five months the website had ‘saved’ 100,000 lives (received 100,000 visits). At the year and a half mark that number reached one million and nine months later it was two million.
A Complete Storyworld
SOS is so much more than the original web series (in fact this is perhaps the smallest part). It is, by the most common definition, a true transmedia experience. Seth’s story is told over the five webisodes, the Monstrometer app, supplemental websites like the Zombie Actors Guild, an early SOS Twitter feed and, most importantly, through the website, blog and discussion forum where a highly engaged and committed group of fans lives. 65% of the traffic to the website is made of repeat visitors who come over and over again to interact with Seth and share their stories with each other.
“More, More, More!!”
But it still isn’t enough. The kids keep on wanting more – more content, more engagement with their favourite surviviologist and more of the world he inhabits. SOScollaborators Torin Stefanson and Teri Armitage were inspired by the conversations of the kids on the site and also saw from the metrics data on the website that werewolves were a hot topic. And so the idea for My Lupine Life was born, expanding the storyworld and transmedia experience of SOS even further with this lycanthropic spinoff.
The Birth of Louis Pine
Accessing Independent Production Fund money and the Saskatchewan Film Employment Tax Credit, a healthy web series budget was put together to shoot My Lupine Life in Saskatchewan (the home stomping ground of Torin and Teri). It cost roughly $4,000 per minute (although not all minutes were created equal with over a quarter of the budget being spent on one effects heavy episode). It increases the SOS storyworld by 13 webisodes, an additional website rich in werewolf mythology (launched August 2012) and a second app (which has just launched in the iTunes App Store).
To Web Series or Not to Web Series?
‘Seth,’ Torin and Teri have built an amazing world where “there are more supernatural threats to your survival than at any time in recent memory. Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves, Leprechauns, Yeti, Kraken – the list goes on.” The most fulfilling part has been the amazing engagement of the fans and their generosity as collaborators in helping to create, sustain and build the world of Seth. Would they do it again? Probably. But perhaps now that web series and transmedia experiences are maturing, there may be opportunities in the world of branded entertainment or new content delivery mechanisms (like gaming platforms) that would enable the SOS team to enjoy the fun more and minimize the struggle.
Editors Note: Some of the statistics above were updated on November 9, 2012 and if you want to enjoy Louis Pine’s story right now you can watch below: