Kent’s Official Blog

Sorry for the posting dearth in the last few weeks.

Brief update on what we’ve been up to since I last checked in:

The first draft of the Tomatoes script is done.  We are just waiting until the contracts are signed before we show it to the producer.  It’s really solid and fun.  Looking forward to getting feedback from the producer.

The book is in galley form.  Which means we’ve now seen what it looks like in mock-up form.  It’s so exciting to see a project that we’ve been working on for almost two years become a tangible thing.  By far the biggest single thing I’ve ever been involved with (aside from the overall Ninja experience).

We are moving towards going indie with the audio book.  We had been negotiating to go with a major house for this, but they wanted way too much control for a sub five figure payday to us (that’s right under $10k).  Instead we are going to record it ourselves and have full control and will be able to use it as a way to promote the book itself and also make potentially a lot more money from it.

We are in the London countryside to speak at the Google Zeitgeist conference.  This is one of those crazy high-end conferences where Douglas was chatting with a woman who was the former PM of Norway, and we had a great conversation with Chad Hurley of YouTube and Steve Jang of iMeem.

We are sorta out of place.  We’re proudly wearing flipflops and tshirts.  Everyone else is in their stylish black suits.

(OMG Sergey Brin is behind me right now).

We might try to do some sort of low key blogger lunch or something while we are here in the UK.  Leave a comment or send a @kentnichols reply on Twitter (my username is kentnichols).

Hey CW.  I know you’re still invested in the old skool model of TV, but viewers are viewers.  Pulling the online streams of Gossip Girl is not going to drive DVD sales or any other ancillary revenue.  You have an online hit on your hands, you shouldn’t take it away from that audience.  Sell ads across all of your platforms.  If your precious network schedule is too valuable for that timeslot, move it to a cable channel or on demand.

First let’s presume each of these people will be responsible for a company that has around $100 Billion in gross revenue.  So to grow their businesses even by a single percent they need to bring in $1 Billion in bacon.  With those types of numbers, it’s going to be hard to get them excited about even the Ninja’s revenue stream.

That means we need to think bigger.  Much bigger.  They’re not interested in making a million here, a million there (crazy I know).

So let’s think huge.

What would you pay to increase your sales 5-10%?

That’s what social media can do for your brands.  That’s what it did do for Diet Coke sales thanks to the Mentos and Diet Coke phenomenon created by Eepybird.  They boosted Mentos sales by 20%.

• Younger demographics are harder to reach today, despite them consuming more and more media.  They are skeptical of marketing and advertising.
• Alternative Attention Aggregators, like web video, video games, social networks, and SMS are what MTV was a generation ago.  It’s where the eyeballs are now.
• There are too many channels now, which means you have less control.  You need to shift your PR and Marketing goals from control to facilitation, empower employees and customers to embrace and push your brand into their own personal worlds.
• People knock this sort of user generated marketing as only available to brands that inspire passion, if you yourself don’t have passion for your products, no one else will.
• If you don’t support the space with your ad dollars, your competitors will, and you’ll have lost the only avenue to these new customers.

That’s a lot of ground to cover in 15 minutes.  So I think I’ll concentrate on these three points:

• Younger demographics are harder to reach today, despite them consuming more and more media.  They are skeptical of marketing and advertising.
• There are too many channels now, which means you have less control.  You need to shift your PR and Marketing goals from control to facilitation, empower employees and customers to embrace and push your brand into their own personal worlds.
• If you don’t support the space with your ad dollars, your competitors will, and you’ll have lost the only avenue to these new customers.

Thoughts?

Sorry for the blogorrhea today, but we had an interesting call with the folks at Google Europe who are organizing the Zeigeist conference next month.  We agreed to it a while ago (free trip to Europe! and I’ve never been).  But today we got the scoop on the audience and how we’d be participating.

This conference is for very high level CEOs that may be aware of what’s going on in Web 2.0, but aren’t heavily involved in the day to day.  They aren’t Facebook users, YouTube viewers, or Flickr uploaders (for the most part), but their employees and children are.  They are smart, just busy running multi-billion dollar companies.

We’re going to make a Special Delivery and then we’re going to be interviewed for about 15 minutes.

So my question is this, what would you say (or do) to this audience that would hasten the future of small media?  What big idea would you posit to get these very high level people to open up their checkbooks and start spending more in this space?  How do you convince them it’s not a fad?

I have certainly have a number of ideas, but I’m geniunely interested in what you would do if you had this opportunity.

Daisy reports:

Podcast provider PodShow is relaunching its service today as Mevio with a focus on original episodic content programmed for the Internet, the company said.

Mevio said it will offer “millions” of hours of episodic programming, videos and music centered around a social media experience.

Meh.  Natali Del Conte was the best thing that happened to PodShow, and she left.  Cali is still there and others, but I don’t think that they ever recovered in the minds of creators from their contract being read by Keith and the Girl.

I wish them well with their new identity, but I would tend to disagree with the post-podcasting time.

Podcasting is just RSS file delivery.  It’s a season pass for your show.  If you’re not using it, you’re losing money.  People can subscribe and then forget about it.

Reading about Health Care:

It is never a good thing if many of your customers can no longer afford what you are selling.

The UnitedHealth Group, which announced disappointing first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, said the weakening economy was causing fewer businesses and employees to sign up for its health insurance.

One of the great reliefs of my professional life has been getting health insurance not only for myself, but for Douglas.  When you quit your day job, you lose those sorts of benefits.

I know that when we watched Sicko on the plane trip back from Israel, we both wanted to move to a country with Universal Health care.

I’ve only recently been going to a dentist after a lapse of 10 years.  I’m dating a woman who has chronic back pain, but can’t see a doctor because of her lack of insurance.  My parents pay over $600/month for health insurance for the same (or slightly worse) coverage that was practically free 10 years ago.  It’s out of control.

We had a scare a few years ago when D had to have an emergency appendectomy.  This was before Ask A Ninja, when we were deep into the writing of our original Ninja thing.  He was in rough shape and could have died if not for an expensive emergency surgery.

I was so angry at a system where you should be focused on the best care, instead you’re worried about if this will ruin you financially.

We all got lucky that day and he pulled through.  But I know he had to deal with the massive bill (over $20k).

Not sure how to fix it, but it needs to be fixed.

Nytimes gets it’s old media panties in a bunch.

Thursday’s episodes of “30 Rock” and “The Office,” the first new installments to be broadcast since the end of the writers’ strike, each included coy references to a vulgarity: in one case it was bleeped out; in the other it was winked at in an acronym. While not unprecedented, the occurrences in the back-to-back prime-time shows were jarring. They also raise questions about the placement of “30 Rock” as an anchor of what an NBC executive, Ben Silverman, has designated the “family hour.”

Look, asshat, you’re only being offended now because the acronym MILF has been around for over a decade.  Google “Lemon Party” and see what perversity Ms. Fey has foisted onto an unknowing public.

But on a bigger level, 30 Rock isn’t only competing against it’s timeslot, it’s competing with everything.  The family hour is a myth from the days of 3 channels.  Please let’s get with the times.

Either the show passes Standards and Practices or it doesn’t.  When the show is put out there it’s representing the network as a whole.  Now that show can and will be viewed at any time in any number of circumstances.

And parents that want to seal their precious little snowflakes in a hermetically sealed media and internet bubble, can and do so.  Referring to someone as a MILF only offends those who know what it means and choose to be scandalized.

As soon as we can stop porn surfing before 8pm, let’s talk again about family hour.

We’re away writing the Tomatoes feature right now, but these two articles caught my eye.

First Jackson West Probes Why Online Video Hasn’t Reinvented Hollywood yet:

I’m the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain’t happening. It’s finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it.

Also Nikki Finke interviewed Kenny Ziffren, a key player in coming up with a digital compromise for the DGA, which helped end the Writer’s Strike.

I believe that as representative of talent, I don’t want a lot of disintermediation. I want there to be strong networks that are willing to spend money on high-quality drama, sitcoms, and other genres.

A couple of things, Hollywood and the Web folks both need to learn from each other.

First, I respectfully disaggree with Mr. Ziffren.  Distintermediation is the reality, and it will be both good and bad for Talent.  It will allow creators to own more of their properties and get better deals with Hollywood.  There wil always be the top of the food chain for the superstars.  Big guaranteed money locks in talent.

The bigger question is what is a network?  To me the big networks are simply just Ad Networks writ large.  They work closely with the agencies and develop content that will interest the demographics that advertisers want to sell to.

So in the future as new media ad networks mature, they will start to resemble more and more Television networks.  They’ll give proven creators and popular shows up front money and then split profits after they recoup.  (Right now most just offer splits with no upfront cash.)

Sort of a hybrid between the book industry and television.  Creators will keep the copyrights, license then to these ad networks.  After the advance is recouped, creators will get a piece of the profits.

This will create a lot of competition which is good for talent.  Competition drives up pricing on what that talent deserves.  It’s scary to the old guard because it’s not just a few studios that you’re selling to, don’t worry, it’ll be okay.  Quality Talent will always demand a premium.

The bad for talent?  It’ll be harder to hide and fail upwards.  There will be less of a market for anonymous midlevel writers and directors.  Everyone will have had to have made a cult web series to get noticed.

Secondly, to Mr. West’s points.

Look, Show Business has been around forever.  There are two things this business knows how to do, make money and screw over people.  The invention of podcasting and flash video has done nothing to change this.

Create something the studios want, and then don’t give it to them until they pay you what you deserve.

YouTube is just a great way to get noticed.  Use that attention to get someone to pay for your next project.

Awesome. The perfect resume show. Funny and well executed.

from www.superdeluxe.com posted with vodpod

Yuri writes:

Mostly because our biggest views and biggest audience comes from YouTube, our dedicated fans go to the Break a Leg site, sure, but as the article states, we have nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube and around 500,000 on Blip.tv, which is the main host on our website. As someone from YouTube once told me, “People don’t need websites anymore, not when they have YouTube.”

Here’s the article where he’s frustrated by not making a lot of money.

Look, dude.  Read this blog more.  Seriously.  I’m giving away all the secrets.  2.5 million views over two years is great, but it’s what we get in a month.

YouTube is not the answer.  It’s a great way to get a little attention, but not a great way to be the only source of income or a place to build a career.  Don’t buy the hype.  You need a website, you need to be truly independent to make a real go of it.

Figure out what your goals are — is your goal to make your show at a financial loss for the rest of your life?   If so, I commend you for leading the artist’s life.  It’s a brave choice.

Do you want to make Break A Leg a profitable business?  The ship might have sailed on this one.  Showbiz is fickle.  Just ask the dozens of failed projects that never got off the ground in my life.  Or go watch the worst movie by your favorite director.

Do you want this show to get you other work?  You need to start thinking about what your next idea is.  I know you’re still in the midst of this idea, but if you don’t have a good answer for what’s next no ne else will hire you.

Whatever your goal is, the only limiting factor is your imagination.

I love that you’re starting to do minisodes.  For me it’s not about longform vs. shortform.  It’s about only being able to produce a small amount as an indie and if you have 30 minutes of something, it looks like you have a whole lot more when you cut it up into 6 or more episodes.

Keep the faith, it took me almost 6 years of dedicated work to come up with Ask A Ninja and have the filmmaking and business chops to pull it off.  This shit will never be easy.  Filmmaking is difficult enough, and then you add the business stuff on top of it.