This is the fourth installment in the 8 part series: 8 Things You Should Know Before Making Entertainment For Your Brand
When it comes to developing or launching entertainment,
magical thinking is not a good strategy for how to support that effort. The decision to develop and launch a
narrative/story happens because there is a need to have bankable, repeatable,
commercial success and entertainment is a driver of that success. For business that is driven by entertainment, the
entertainment itself must be good enough to succeed and, it must be launched
and supported in a way that insures it will be found, sampled and explored to
develop a relationship with your intended audience.
The age of social media is rich with stories of spontaneous
discovery, meteoric growth, garage creators and memes-turned-riches. We have
all heard the myth. A lone someone creates a story and in the absence of a
significant budget, either they themselves, or some friends who like the story,
create some visual and narrative assets, put it online, and it grows. As the
myth goes, sometimes success takes years and a lot of relentless pluck and
sometimes it’s really fast, virally exploding as the story finds its audience
and becomes big.
This can be a hopeful and motivating story for those whose day jobs aren’t
creating or managing stories or brands. It’s a chance to see if your narrative
might have merit and resonance for more than just yourself and perhaps
immediate family and friends.
The underlying truth is that for every story that has humble
beginnings yet manages to break out of the unimaginably crowded world of social
media, there are uncountable magnitudes of stories that remain obscure forever.
For a real commercial enterprise, shoestring development and
Hail Mary support campaigns cost and lose more than the meager investments
assigned to the efforts. Valuable people will spend valuable time working on
these efforts. The commercial product/services will be created, tooled and
funded. Critical external partners will become involved and bring their own
resources to bear as well. The cost and risk list goes on and on.
Here is a listing of things to consider as you develop your
thinking about how to fund and support entertainment for your brand:
Creators and Development
talent costs money
Work with a good agency or a partner who can advise you on
finding and attaching top talent. Strong results happen a lot more because of
“who” versus strategy and plan.
Time is money so be
clear about what you want developed
The more time development and production resources spend
casting about pursuing a result that gets reset because it doesn’t meet your
needs, the more expensive it is. Be clear about your goals and timing (see
section on timing).
Funds commitment horizon is longer
for entertainment
Product companies (including licensing companies) often
fluxuate their budget on a quarter by quarter basis as their results come in.
Entertainment needs to function on commitments that lock in funds for 2 or 3
years. Shortening up funds during the process is very destructive to the
process and often significantly harms the quality of the results.
Set aside a distinct
and sufficient “discovery” budget for advertising
Making the entertainment is one step. Making sure your
audience shows up and finds you is equally as important or all that good work
never has the effect you’re looking for. Set aside that budget from the
beginning and make sure it lands during the critical discovery and spread
period and that it lasts long enough (highly variable dependent on what format
you’re launching in).
You’re in or You’re
not because just a little bit often has no effect
Doing just a tiny bit of entertainment to see if there’s
interest in usually not very effective and definitely burns time and
resources. There are some exceptions.
I’ve seen multiple short forms launched to test concept ideas with direct
audience feedback that has worked. This is best when you own enough of your own
development and production pipeline that the cost isn’t prohibitive because
short forms (1 to 3 min.) are the most expensive way to produce entertainment
per minute.
Greenlight your next
round to be ready vs when you have proof.
Due to the lengthy development and production run up for
entertainment, if you are a product company, you will miss the opportunity to
continue driving your brand with entertainment if you wait until your first
round is in market and successful before you greenlight the second round. That
gap will be a year or more.
Trust the talent and
don’t get research paralysis
I get a lot of questions from non-entertainment companies
about when can research be fielded to insure they are doing the right
entertainment. The short answer is research can’t tell you much of quality
until you have some truly complete entertainment to test. Imagine testing
sponge bob with boards and an explanation: “He’s a sponge…square…and he has a
silly laugh…” It's not funny and powerful until it's all there. You need to trust your
entertainment talent and your own understanding of your brand to give you most
of those directional answers during development.
The 5th installment in this blog series will be:
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