How to make it in social network TV

05 Sep 07

Joanna Shields, President, International of Bebo spoke at an RTS Dinner on 25th June about how Bebo plans to take interactive drama to a new level. Read the full contents of her speech here.

I have had the privilege to spend the better part of my working life involved with the internet. I have built and sold two successful internet start-up companies and I have worked as a senior executive for some great companies, including Real Networks, that gave the internet a voice and brought digital video to the masses for the first time. More recently I worked at Google where the ethos is about democratising access to information and making it accessible and useful to people around the world.

Yet today we’re seeing what I perceive to be the most dramatic shift in the power and potential of the internet so far. For many of us here, the web is a place where we go to search and find information. But for an emerging generation, the internet – and its social networking sites in particular – is the place where they actually go to live.

Social networking has become “the lifestyle of the internet”, especially for young people in Britain who spend more time on Bebo than any other website – upwards of 40 minutes a day. As a consequence, they are reducing their consumption of other media such as television.

The young audience has shifted; depending on where you stand this is presenting both huge dilemmas and huge opportunities.

How do you adjust to a world where businesses that create no content whatsoever (that are merely a destination for others to congregate) are more highly valued than companies that create content? Take ITV for example, with its tremendously rich heritage and a library of 35,000 hours of programming. But its market capitalisation is 3% of the value of Google. It all sounds a bit distressing, doesn’t it?

Or at least it would, if any of us believed that TV and the web were two mutually exclusive media. Broadcasters and producers recognise that the broadband-enabled internet that advertisers and audiences like so much is also a fantastic distribution channel for TV content.

The exciting thing about a site such as YouTube is that it can expose programming to a far wider potential audience than traditional television transmission ever could. So the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky are spending a lot of time and effort repackaging their content for YouTube and developing their media players and IPTV services.

What’s driving 35 million people to sign up to a social networking service like Bebo is the way it lets people build relationships and express themselves in blogs, photos, video and music – in other words, with content, much of which originates from companies such as yours.

But getting TV content online is only the start. However compelling a piece of programming may be, it’s still linear, designed for consumption by a passive viewer. The challenge, therefore, for producers in the age of web 2.0 is going to be how well you’re able to capture the attention of engaged, active, online audiences.

There are many factors to take into account. Among them, the changes in user behaviour brought about by the likes of YouTube: not the question of copyright or the flourishing of user-generated material, but the form content on YouTube takes.

Each clip is a bite-sized chunk designed with distraction in mind rather than deep audience engagement. A hundred million of these short-form clips are being watched every day. How’s that going to impact upon our capacity to absorb complex, narrative drama like The Sopranos or Desperate Housewives, and advertisers’ willingness to fund them?

Listen to the internet breathing

There is something else to consider and that is the capabilities that high-speed broadband offers for developing a two-way relationship between producers and the audience. All of a sudden your audience can answer back. This can have huge implications for narrative development.

This summer at Bebo we’re about to unveil a very exciting piece of programming that will see the convergence of social-networking users and content creators.

Social networks differ not only from older media such as television. They are also markedly different from that first generation of static websites. Social networks don’t just display information; they are living, breathing organisms, of which their users are an integral part.

Bebo is less than two years old but it’s already one of the most popular websites in the English language. It’s bigger than the BBC online and bigger than Amazon. We currently have twice the traffic of Yahoo! in the UK. Last month Bebo passed Microsoft and eBay in terms of page views. In the UK we are second only to Google. In Ireland we are the number one website by a landslide.

How then are you, as creators of linear content, able to attract the attention of this young, hyper-engaged audience? This was a question that consumed me for much of last year. At the time I was second in command at Google, running the advertising syndication network and all of the content initiatives across Europe.

About this time last summer, people started talking about an engaging young girl who was uploading her video blog to YouTube. Her name was Bree. She was 15 years old. She shared all the same angst as other teenagers. But she wasn’t expressing her thoughts in her diary. She was sharing them with the world.

From just a few hundred viewers at the start, very soon more than a million people were tuning in every week. We at Google were blown away. We watched this phenomenon propel YouTube (at the time a major competitor in the user-generated video space) further and further into the stratosphere in terms of page views. We knew at that point that something unprecedented was happening.

Amidst all the hype of web 2.0, here was a new way for people to express themselves and interact and co-create with the world around them.

If you emailed Bree and her friends, they – the characters, not the actors – would email you back. Suddenly there was a piece of narrative fiction that captured the essence of a two-way communications medium. The boundaries between fiction and reality, and between brands and individuals, had become a lot more elastic.

At Bebo, we want to take this new form of programming a step further.

What we’ve done is come up with the first purely native social media entertainment experience, carefully designed with the Bebo platform itself playing a central role in the action. As they pioneered the genre, we’ve asked the creators of LoneyGirl15 to co-produce a British spin-off called KateModern.

The makers of LonelyGirl15 understand better than anyone how to interact with this audience, and how to work with advertisers and brands in the social network environment to target users in a uniquely viral way.

Brands line up against the new Order

KateModern is about a young university student in London, her friends and a dark, mythical force called the Order that shadows them. The characters will become part of the Bebo experience in a viral, multilayered way that has never been done before.

You’ll be able to watch the videos that will be uploaded at a rate of four or five a week. You’ll also be able to strike up friendships with the characters. They’ll all have their own Bebo profiles. The character of Kate therefore becomes part of the Bebo experience but she also becomes part of your own social sphere. You’ll have your fictional friends and your real friends and the lines will start to blur and they’ll start to interact.

At every stage that a user is involved with the story – whether they’re blogging, uploading photos or simply watching the latest episode – there will also be the chance to be involved with the brands that take part in the story.

No, I’m not talking about traditional product placement but the integration of brands from P&G such as Gilette and Pantene, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Disney and Orange into the plot in a way that gives users a reason not only to remember the brand, but creates a long-term relationship with that brand.

The end result is a far more immersive experience than conventional TV and even more engaging and interactive than the “TV on the web”/”broadcast yourself” opportunity that YouTube represents.

The convergence of social networking and short-form content is one of the most significant opportunities for producers, creators, advertisers and brands.

With producers and broadcasters now using the web as an incubator for talent, how long will it be before a programme that originated online transfers to TV? Can we assume that it will come from within the media industry? Well, maybe… but maybe not.

The creators of LG15 and KateModern don’t come from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. One was a rights lawyer and the other a trainee plastic surgeon.

That’s not to say that traditional content companies cannot do something similar. Some, of course, are already thinking about how a format can fare across a vast multitude of platforms. The BBC has a term for it: “360º commissioning”, which I think is a rather apt description.

Take the game show Deal or No Deal. It’s an unbelievably successful format for Endemol across 45 countries. There are also some 26 versions of the game on other platforms: IPTV, mobile, online games, and so on, where the user can play along.

In the markets where it’s legal, there’s also an online betting version of the game. It turns over millions of dollars per week precisely because viewers want to immerse themselves in the experience that they can only consume passively when sitting in front of the box.

Then there’s Big Brother, a cultural phenomenon that transcends television. Why? In part because you can watch the content on the device of your choosing, but also because viewers can discuss and dissect every twist and turn in real time on message boards and social networking sites. When that happens television and the internet start complementing one another rather than competing with one another.

Dramatic consequences of an attention-deficit audience

As Peter Bazalgette of Endemol told a Google conference a few weeks ago, leveraging the unique attributes of each different platform is beginning to create real incremental value. User engagement with the content, not the technology, will allow producers and broadcasters to flourish.

So formatted entertainment is adapting very well to these changes in audience behaviour. Over the longer term it might be less easy for other genres to do the same. The genius of comedy and drama lies in the ability of talented authors to tell compelling (and oftentimes complex) stories.

Indeed, narrative storytelling is one of the cornerstones of our cultural tradition. But as short-form content grows in popularity will there still be an incentive to invest in written, narrative entertainment?

There might just come a time when media owners decide that the upfront cost of nurturing a 22-week drama series is no longer economical, particularly for a complex piece of work that demands complete attention.

But that will be a long way down the road and there are some interesting experiments already underway. Steve Coogan’s production company, for example, is collaborating on an interactive sitcom, Where Are the Joneses?, that encourages the public to influence the storyline.

I have every confidence that you in this room will rise to the challenge of making compelling content for existing new media and for those that are yet to come.

 
[This speech was originally published in the RTS Television Magazine, August 2007]

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