• We need Better Metrics; Net Neutrality is Dead; and other news

  • Posted on 13th Jun
  • Category: Newsletter

  We Need Better Metrics

  Over the past few months, I’ve become hyper-aware of the need for new metrics of success in the film world. Mainly for documentary film and branded content, because I work a lot in those two spaces, but also because those who work there so clearly need a better way to speak about their success and/or their return on investment (ROI) than just audience numbers, views or sales. 

  

  
  

  As I reported a few weeks ago, when BrandStorytelling interviewed a bunch of C-Suite brand folks, one of their major concerns was the need for a better way to measure ROI. And when I wrote up the Sundance case study of Unrest, I noted the same thing – that while it wasn’t the purview of the report, it would have made a better case for its impact if it had focused more on metrics beyond audience and dollars (not) made.

  Not to pick on Unrest, because no documentary that I know of does a good job of reporting impact, and that wasn’t the goal of this study, but as the report states, the filmmaker’s goals were not to make a lot of money, but to have a fair bit of impact – to raise awareness about ME and chronic fatigue, among many other things. But as I mentioned in my last post, they tout their 300 press write-ups, but don’t say anything about how many people those might have reached. Well, those are earned media. Normally, someone would have to pay someone to get that press written about them, and it has a value. And while you can’t get the NYT to tell you how many people read the review of your film, you can look up its average readership in print and online. If you want to get fancy, you can even make estimates of how many people read it. You can also look at how many people shared the article, or commented on it.

  In fact, if you think about it for a minute, there’s a lot of stuff you can measure to show that your impact went way beyond how many people saw the film, or that 300 outlets reviewed it. Their impact producer reached out to lots of nonprofits and grassroots groups to help spread the word on social media and through email newsletters. Well, you can ask how many subscribers they have, how many followers they have, and how many opens/clicks and retweets they got. You can ask festivals to report back how many people came to your screenings. You can keep track of your own social media postings and how they spread – your audience is not just your Facebook follower count, it’s also your number of posts and how many times they were interacted with, and how many people saw your ads. And as Kenyatta Cheese says, your audience has an audience – and you can track a lot of that as well.

  There’s a lot more you can do, too. When we work with clients, we will often track sentiment on Google analytics, and we can show how search terms change over time. So you may show how searches for ME and chronic fatigue spiked during the Unrest campaign, for example. Heck, I’d argue that they should have even publicized their piracy numbers, which are alluded to in the report, and broken down how many people pirated it, and where, to show how they had such an impact that people bothered to pirate the film.

  There are tools for this, and companies you can hire to run all kinds of fancy metrics for you, but you can do a lot of it for free yourself. But one of the big problems is coming up with some consistency across the field. There’s a lot of work to be done here to codify best practices, build metric-taking tools that are accurate and dependable and replicable, and that go much further than the simplistic examples I am using here.

  In fact, awhile back, there were several groups pushing for more tools for measuring impact, and there was a lot of fear and backlash in the field. A few tools were made, and Britdoc (now DocSociety) even put together a decent Toolkit focused on this back in 2014, which links to many of these resources. Unfortunately, a lot of this work seems to have stalled, or was too complex for many people to understand, so it didn’t get adopted widely. And it’s clear we need more work here as these tools aren’t being used very regularly and/or aren’t being disseminated widely enough.

  Or perhaps the field just didn’t really care about impact and moved on. That’s my cynical thought, because if they did care, there would be a lot more action here. It’s easy to look back at the old case studies and arguments and see a field that really didn’t want to be bothered with measuring their actual impact, and just wanted to make a film.

  I get that – filmmakers want to make films, and I know that we make films for many artistic reasons as well. But in many ways, the film is also just an excuse for all of the things you can do around the film that earn you press and attention, and that also have impact. When you are making a film for entertainment, or for profit or prestige (or just for art), then all the stuff you do around the film is just marketing to get butts in seats and get people to see the film. But for documentary, all of this stuff gets people to hear about the same issues, and can have just as much impact as the film itself. And a lot of these things are measurable, and if measured more often and accurately, these things can help us all make the case for the value of making these films.

  That’s why I think we need to refocus on impact and we need more of these tools – and/or better ones – if we’re going to justify the budgets needed to keep making quality film/video when the distribution landscape can be as tough as that case study showed it to be for so many films. Because the impact of many of these films goes well beyond the numbers we’re currently sharing.

  Perhaps the best thing to do would be to keep it simple and just follow the earned media example of brands. When Netscout sponsored Lo and Behold, by Werner Herzog, they didn’t tout how many people saw the film, or how much it made at the box office. Instead, they spoke about it in trade press and at SXSW as having increased their earned media exposure ten times over to 30 Billion organic media impressions, and how they would have had to run an ad campaign that cost $20-Million to do that, but instead made a movie for less than $2 Million and ran no ads. I’m sure they have lots of other data that isn’t public, but that’s the kind of data/metrics we need to move towards when we speak about the impact of our documentary work, and it’s where brands need to focus their sites when talking about their ROI to their colleagues.

  If brands and foundations and filmmakers can all use better numbers, it seems to me there’s a collaboration to be had here.

  WHAT I’M READING: FILM

  Ava Duvernay on the cover of Adweek, as the star of their Creative 100 issue. Asked about working across formats – something I think every director should consider doing, she says: “As little as even 10 years ago, you were either a film director or a television director, you were either a commercial director or a documentary director or a narrative director. It’s all storytelling. At the end of the day, we’re trying to tell the story and make it as compelling, vibrant and heart-expanding as possible.” Amen.

  Movie Critics are mostly white and men, according to a report from USC Annenberg that was widely reported, but is linked here in Variety. My two cents: Widely reported, but it can’t be talked about enough, me thinks. It’s a problem when fest programmers, critics (and reporters) and nearly every other facet of the industry is dominated by white folks, and mainly men. Silver lining: the best ones (Dargis, Wilmore, etc.) who get the most traction seem to still be women.

  IFC Center’s Expansion Plans: IFC Center has been planning an expansion for awhile, and Curbed reports today that the revised plans include not just more theater space, but also some apartments – which would be a great place to live for any movie lover, and 6 new screens. Sounds great to me.

  What’s Up with Windows these Days? Anthony Kaufman takes a look for Filmmaker Magazine at the current state of windowing a film’s release between theatrical and digital. He reports on some good examples/case-studies of the pros and cons of various windowing strategies, and what seems to be working best for various types of films. I’m interviewed in the article, and we discussed my pet-theory that Netflix is not just cherry-picking the best content, but by using more exclusive contracts for those films, is forcing consumer behavior into SVOD over transactional. This is similar to what we’ve seen in music – and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for them to do this as a business model – but it does mean that as more audiences look for their film choices on SVOD, your indie film will have less opportunity to break through and be discovered for sale/rent. Interesting times.

  WHAT I’M READING: BRANDED CONTENT

  
  

  NYMagazine

  Vice Media is a head-fake. My two cents: Thank god that Reeves Wiedeman at New York Magazine finally wrote this excellent take-down of Vice – A Company Built on Bluff – so I didn’t have to, because I’m not a real journalist. I’ve been telling everyone forever that Shane Smith’s greatest ability has been selling his shit to Rupert Murdoch, Martin Sorrell, Tom Freston and other old media men who wanted to be hip again, and that there was no there, there at Vice. Well, now NYMag, which does finally have a there, there again, has the story. It’s a must read, as it shows just how f-d the entire media business is if they could fall for this story. As someone said in my LinkedIn feed (I can’t believe I just said that phrase…), Vice is the Theranos of the media business. This story could have gone in any one of my subject columns, but I put it under branded content, because without them selling their bullshit to Intel, for the Creator’s series, they wouldn’t probably have made it this far.

   

  WHAT I’M READING: INTERNET

  

  

  Net Neutrality is Dead. And the Verge has the write-up on what that means, and what’s going on as we move forward. My two cents: It’s been dying for quite awhile – I went back and looked, and I first wrote about the possible death of net neutrality in April and May of 2006 (!), and the issues were much the same then – the FCC, Congress not acting, big corporations taking more control. But while net neutrality has been in danger of dying its slow death for awhile, it’s more serious now, and Ajit Pai somehow wins biggest d-bag of the Trump administration, and that’s quite an accomplishment, for pushing this through. Like the death of our climate via Pruitt and public lands via Zinke (and schools via DeVos, etc. etc.) this will be a slow process, but the short answer is only Congress can do much now, and we can’t hope for much there. I might feel better about this if the activist groups fighting on our behalf weren’t just hitting us up for funds every day like an NPR fundraising drive gone mad, or if anyone seemed to be getting themselves in an uproar about it, but I think we’re f-d.

  WHAT I’M READING: START-UPS & ENTREPRENEURS

  Foresight launches new cap table models: Launching a new start-up or any new business? Foresight is a brilliant little company that has built templates to help you start your business – build financial projections, business models, cap tables, exit waterfall tools, and a bunch of free tools, including a paid media marketing tool that helps you determine where your ad spend is working and where it should be going (this can work for film marketing as well). Taylor Davidson, who owns Foresight, is also an artist/photographer, and he launched a new cap table tool this week. I’ve used his tools and recommend them to any entrepreneur, and marketer.

• En El Septimo Dia, U-2, Mind Control and More

  • Posted on 8th Jun
  • Category: Newsletter

   

  No real op-ed musings this week – I’m just back from vacation and too relaxed to write too much, but lots of news to link to below. But I will use this space to plug a film everyone should see.

  En el Séptimo Día, by Jim McKay, opens in NYC this week and next week in LA. I don’t usually plug film openings, but I’ve long been a fan of every film Jim makes, and will think less of you as a person if you don’t go see this film.

  Go see it: The info:
  Opens Friday, June 8 at IFC CENTER (Manhattan): 12:45pm, 2:50pm, 5:00pm, 7:15pm, 9:25pm
  BAM Rose Cinemas (Brooklyn): 2:00pm, 4:30pm, 7:00pm, 9:30pm
  Q&A w/ director and cast at IFC 7:15pm show FRI and SAT.
  Q&A w/ director and cast at BAM 4:30pm show SUN and 7pm show WED.
  Opening in Los Angeles on June 15 at Laemmle Music Hall

  What I’m Reading: Film

  Atom Tickets has launched a free ticket rewards program, reports Variety, to compete with Fandango. My two cents – anything that rewards movie-goers for sharing films with other friends and fans is a good idea and is much needed in the space. We need more ideas like this to compete alongside MoviePass.

  New festival – Filmmaker and long-time, recently-ousted MountainFilm Telluride Film Fest head, David Holbrooke has partnered with Nancy Shafer, who founded SXSW and also ran the Tribeca Film Festival, to launch the Original Thinkers Festival in Telluride Colorado. The Telluride Daily Planet has more info on the plans. My two cents – two stellar people with great ideas, so this is surely going to be good. I like that it’s not just a film fest, but a festival of ideas, and they only sell as many tickets/passes as there are seats, so everyone gets to attend every event, and everyone will be in the loop on the conversations around the films and speakers – no FOMO. Nice idea.

  Mind Control a Film: That’s right, MIT Technology Review reports that Richard Ramchurn’s latest film, The Moment, lets viewers control what the edits, and what they see, via means of their brain’s sine waves and attention. You wear an EEG headset, and in theory everyone who watches the film sees a different cut. It’s playing on a tour where a group of people can watch it in a special trailer, and also at the Sheffield Doc Fest (even though it’s not a doc, it’s in their tech section). My two cents: While I’m a little skeptical of EEG mind games – people use this in advertising to claim that certain ads work best, for example – and the trailer is atrocious, it’s a super cool experiment, and I can’t wait to hear reports about how it works for the audience.

  Voice Control your TV: Your remote is dead. That’s right, Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube just killed it. My two cents: Like I said before, voice is the future, and it’s coming fast. Now you can use Alexa to order up The American’s via Amazon Prime, and while you’re at it, check the weather, order pizza from Seamless and watch those on your screen (while Alexa narrates them), and tell it to brew your coffee and change your thermostat and lower the lights at the same time (if you’ve connected to the IoT).

  UK Doc Funding Controversy spills into the open – There’s been a fair bit of controversy over the way the BFI has changed its documentary funding this year. There’s a reduction in total funds available, they awarded ownership of the process to Doc Society (formerly BritDoc,), and there is now a cap of £80,000 on grants – where the BFI used to give North of £200,000+ to many projects. Most of the griping about this has been over beers at festivals and in hushed tones, as no one wants to piss off their funders, but Screen Daily has a nice article about it that’s worth a read for anyone in the doc sphere. My two cents: I’m friends with the Doc Society leadership, so I am biased here as to the issue of who should get to manage the award. But I am a firm believer that the notion – prevalent among many grant funders – that you should spread the wealth and give more grants of a smaller amount, should be retired. It’s what’s helping spread a major problem of an under-funded but overstocked field. I’d also like to see BFI increase it’s total dollar support for the sector, and hope that everyone involved listens to the criticisms and improves the program going forward – this discussion should be more transparent.

  
  

  U-2 Photo Michael Phillips, WSJ

   

  U2 still uses Film: Not the band, but the spy-plane. Who knew? The WSJ has a great story and video by Michael Phillips about how the military still uses old-fashioned Kodak film – large gauge, 6 inch long, 2 mile long rolls of film – yes, miles- to film the Earth from 70,000 feet in the sky, 250 miles in any direction. That’s all mind-boggling, so read the article and watch the film. But they still use film because film’s resolution still beats anything you can do with digital. My two cents: While this is some serious pro-military propaganda (kudos Pentagon PR team), it’s pretty thrilling to watch the film. I don’t think anyone’s ever shown the inside of a U-2 spy-plane before, and seeing the Kodak film being analyzed is a cool geek-out experience as well.

  
  

  What I’m Reading: VR

  Storytellers, especially in Hollywood have it wrong – Maybe we shouldn’t try to tell stories in VR at all. That’s the message from Curtis Hickman of The Void. As he says, VR is interactive, and “a VR experience with a narrow story arc does nothing more than allow consumers to be passive observers to someone else’s agenda. “You can do that but you’re really missing out on the whole point,” he said (to The Drum) continuing: “Hickman and his colleagues advocate thinking of VR not as an extension of a TVC, but as a branded version of Dungeons & Dragons. “It’s a form of story where you have this dungeon master who is imparting a framework for a story and you have the players who are actively participating in the story,” he said. “Together, the group creates the story.” Amen.

• News Fri the 13th Edition: HBO vs Netflix and more

  • Posted on 5th Jun
  • Category: Newsletter

  Not much to add this week beyond the comments on the links below. But here’s a little round-up of depressing news for Friday, the 13th.

  The FCC might cut children’s television because the rules are “outdated” (as we get more branded content, which is part of what the rules are meant to stop), and will stop taking public comments in a decent fashion because Ajit Pai can’t handle feedback. The Justice Department just won’t give up on AT&T/Time Warner, as if they have any chance of stopping this thing (although AT&T did raise prices right after the merger was approved, and is doing some evil shit). Women who make science videos get some sickening feedback from men on YouTube. There is one last Blockbuster Video standing, in Bend, Oregon. Who knew?

  Crazy times, but hey – those Thai boys getting rescued was pretty cool. Onwards to the news below.

  
  

  Image via Reuters

  What I’m Reading: Film 

  Gaming is now bigger than film and TV: Reuters reports that gaming is now the world’s favorite form of entertainment.

  WattPad is rewriting the rules for Hollywood: Vulture reports on how smart folks are using WattPad to discover authors and stories for film, and how most people in film are missing out on the trend and what their data can do to help with finding great stories and audiences. Best example: The Kissing Booth. Heard of it? Me neither, but it’s “touted by Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos, in an interview with Vulture, as “one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe the world.””

  Fake Voice and Video is Coming. And it ain’t gonna be pretty says, Daniel Miessler. It’s being used now to insert actors (or your friend’s) faces into porn, but soon it will be used to make all kinds of fake news. It’s also interesting to think about how it will be used creatively in film/video and what that means for actors.

  Nonprofits – and indie filmmakers – can win w/ smarter Facebook ads – so says Daniel Gallant of the Nuyorican Poets Café (and he’s a marketing consultant too) in the WSJ (there may be a pay wall). The key is getting even more targeted in your demographics. Sounds simple, but it’s the subtle differences between a Japanese cultural institution targeting fans of Japanese art, for example, “to focus on audiences whose interests included at least five manifestations of Japanese culture, such as woodblock prints, Ikebana or Kabuki.” My take: Read the article, as it’s a great, short primer on how to do FB ads right, and it’s also a great marketing push for his consulting – use the Facebook ad scandals to push how to market better with his firm – why didn’t I think of that?

  Just how big does Netflix want to be? 250 – 400 Million subscribers, with new additions of interactive entertainment and gaming, but not live sports, according to Matthew Ball in ReDef. Me: I had lunch with a big media exec who thought this was an impossible goal, and I have to say, this person is wrong – this is the first article to nail just how big Netflix wants to be – as the article reminds us, their “only enemy is sleep.” That’s why the entire media business is losing it (sleep) too.

  Just how Stupid is John Stankey, the new head of Warner Entertainment via AT&T?. Very, according to Scott Galloway. As Galloway describes so well, Stankey’s speech to HBO employees was not just tone deaf, but dumb, and shows he will possibly ruin the company. Best quote: “To move HBO to a Netflix strategy is to walk into the Musée d’Orsay and announce, “We need to scale this.”” I say Amen to that. As Netflix moves more towards quantity and shows, HBO needs to double down on quality. Not that I don’t love Netflix or believe what Matthew Ball says in the link above, but HBO needs to remain HBO. They don’t need advice from someone coming over from DirecTV, land of the famous hits…(HB)oops.

  Graph via Galloway’s Newsletter:

  

  WHAT I’M READING: BRANDED CONTENT

  Should brands be thinking bigger about content? Sam Glynne of Freemantle (writing in The Drum) thinks so. He suggests brands should be funding and creating big, long-lasting franchise hits, like his company makes – The Voice, Price is Right and other factual entertainment that lasts a long time and reaches a lot of people. Me: Only for mass-appeal brands and definitely not for anyone wanting to be hip or cool, or have any street cred, but yes, they need to think bigger.

  Shinola Shies a light on Immigration: Nice little campaign in support of immigrants, as they film 100 immigrants coming out of their Naturalization ceremony in NYC and speak about what it means to become an American. We need a few nice immigration stories these days.

  
  

• The Next Marwencol? More MoviePass, Unrest report is out, and more.

  • Posted on 24th May
  • Category: Newsletter

  
  The next Marwencol: Many years ago, David Naugle took some photos of his neighbor in NY, Mark Hogancamp, which were then published in Esopus magazine. Esopus subscriber Jeff Malmberg turned this story into the great film Marwencol, which is now being made into a Hollywood movie with Steve Carell by Robert Zemeckis. Well, now Naugle has taken some photos of his neighbor in Decatur, GA, Randy S. Jones, who is a retired attorney and teacher, and who has been making abstract art in his home for three decades, showing them to no one. David went over, met him and documented the work, which is now in Esopus 25, is hanging in a Pop-Up gallery in NYC til June 2nd, and is featured in Collecteurs Magazine now. David made a great video about it too, which is better than whatever Zemeckis will make about Randy eight years from now, and if any fest programmers are reading this, you should program it now.

  
  

  
  

  Randy Jone 0520 from R&D Studios on Vimeo.
  

  WHAT I’M READING: FILM

  More MoviePass Lessons: Another week, another article on MoviePass, this time from Business Insider on MoviePass Powerusers. When all is said and done and MoviePass fails, it will likely be because of the drunken sailors leading the ship not the actual business model. But they’ve uncovered a few interesting tid-bits about the movie business that Hollywood and theater owners would do well to consider:

  1. “MoviePass is making [sic] indifferent cinema-goers into fanatics”

  Just one example from the article: “Kristie Pyle had not been to the cinema in three years before joined MoviePass at the end of March 2018. The 43-year-old North Carolina finance professional said it “had been so long that I needed to figure out how to use the kiosk.” In the less than two months since then, she’s seen 30 movies.”

  Everyone in the business likes to claim that movies aren’t too expensive (here’s the Hollywood Reporter showing that the 2017 average ticket price of $8.97 is cheaper than prices in 1970 when adjusted for inflation). But there’s a reason most Americans go to just 4-5 movies a year, and MoviePass seems to be showing us that price has something to do with it.

  Perhaps it’s not about how the price compares to a ticket in 1970, but how it compares to other things you want to do today, in a world where Netflix costs you $8-14 a month depending on the plan. But I suspect that in NYC and other major cities, where the average cost is closer to $14.30, it’s just the cost. I am basing this just on the unscientific survey of the workers at my gym, all of whom are movie fanatics- not just Avengers, one quotes Big Lebowski daily – and who all complain about the cost keeping them away.

  Audiences who know about it are in love with MoviePass, and that’s all because of price. Unsustainable? Maybe, but I’ve not heard one person speak about Cinemark’s MovieClub, so there has to be some middle-ground. Since the same article says that 80% of their users go to less than 4 movies a month anyway, it doesn’t take rocket-science to come up with a plan that could work for everyone.

  1. Anyway, BusinessInsider’s survey also showed a strong increase in people watching films multiple times. In fact, MoviePass had to institute a policy stopping people from doing this. Several customers in the article were going to see films 10, 15 or more times on MoviePass. This is another area where if Cinemas and distributors had data about their fans, they could reward these super-fans and encourage them to keep coming back, even without MoviePass existing, by sending them offers for cheap tickets, or giving them a free viewing for every 5, or concession rewards, etc. But right now, only MoviePass even has this data. Any future subscription plan or rewards card needs to think about incentivizing this crowd.
  2. They also found that people with disabilities are starting to use it a lot. One customer was using it as much as five times a week because he’s out of work due to a disability. Again – a target audience that’s underserved and that could be targeted via data.

  With MoviePass’ stock down to 54 cents this week, it likely won’t be around much longer. My fear is that the powers that be will just breath a sigh of relief instead of actually learning anything and doing something smart.

  MORE FILM READINGS

  

  Sundance Creative Distribution’s Report on Unrest is finally out, and it’s a must read. It’s also a long-read, and I’ll save most of my thoughts on it for later, except to say that if you are making documentaries and/or thinking about film distribution in any way, shape or form, this study is pure gold. It covers everything from motivation to hard costs, and even gives you hints at the numbers it can’t share (thanks for nothin’, Netflix…).

  Studying Impact – But their report leads me to one more thing – I’ll delve into this more later, but I still find it shocking that filmmakers who are distributing for impact aren’t measuring and reporting much more about impact – which is the one and only thing this report is missing (they report on impact screenings, but are missing a lot about their actual reach and impact). But this is the case with every other film, so I’m not placing blame on them.

  Just one example – they list 300 great press outlets that covered the film. Well, in my world (brands), we’d count those as earned media, and they come with both audience metrics and demographic metrics that are measurable and could show how many people heard your message. And you’d have to buy ads to reach those people usually, so you just accomplished something amazing, for a relatively cheap price. Which is much more important than how few people watched the film on Google Video. That study may be for another report, so for now, read this one and learn how they got the film out there.

  Facebook Video is “a fun adventure not a business” says the Weather Channel to DigiDay, as they stop publishing video to the platform. Over time, they noticed they were “being paid in all types of currencies — followers, shares, views — that did not feel like money” said Neil Katz of Weather Channel in the quote of the year, for sure. While this is a business story, I think it’s relevant for film and other “content” publishers as they try to figure out what to do as Facebook takes over the world. Translating fans into dollars ain’t as easy as it seems.

  INTERNET/CULTURE

  Amazon has funded an Alexa Storytelling App: It’s called Novel Effect, and it follows along as you tell a story – for now, to your kids, and adds sound effects. It’s kinda cool, and is a great example of just one more way voice is taking over our future. Watch the video at the link.

  Congress is trying to extend Copyright again ­– and it’s a bad idea. Larry Lessig has all of the reasons this idea still sucks over at Wired. Considering he argued this case to the Supreme Court the last time Congress did this – and they essentially said, oh this can’t be bad because we can’t imagine Congress would ever do this again – he’s worth reading.

  BRANDED CONTENT

  Top 3 Opportunities for Branded Content: BrandStorytelling is back at it with another great one: a survey of C-Suite execs on what they see as the top 3 opportunities, and I’m not surprised that they align with what I’m hearing from my clients:

  1. Diversity and Advocacy – especially in regards to closing the gender gap behind the camera; reflecting more diversity and more LGBTQ perspectives;
  2. Making stuff that lasts – whether that’s pushing for better budgets, making better stuff with the budgets they have, or spending more to make feature films, it’s all about investing in making things better;
  3. Partnerships – between brands and agencies, creative and even between brands.

  These are all needed, but my take is that they all tie together. Brands can have a much better impact and make better films if they work with diverse directors and cast/subjects, and if they work together to make and market the work- that will be content that lasts.

  Memorial Day

  I’ll be taking off next week for Memorial Day, so enjoy a little break from my missives.

  Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  Randy S. Jones at Esopus Space NYC | David Naugle Projects

  
  

• Artificially Intelligent: musings on AI, Voice, DA’s and Film

  • Posted on 16th May
  • Category: Newsletter

  Remember when you used to go to conferences and people would talk about the future of media, and someone would hold up their flip-phone and say that the future was all about the cellphone, and you thought they were crazy? Admit it, sure you do, even if it’s so obvious and old school now.

  Well, that’s what’s happening now around Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice (Alexa, Siri) and DA – Digital Assistants – and if you speak with anyone in marketing or tech, it’s all they can talk about, but if you speak with anyone in media, much less film, well…crickets, of the non-virtual kind.

  How does this possibly impact the film business? A quick detour/tour of the utmost in simplicity is needed:

  1. Voice is taking over the world. Alexa, Siri, etc. – It seems like a novelty now, but just think of 2001: A Space Odyssey or HER or many other science fiction films for 30 seconds, and you should get it. Almost everything you do will somehow interface with voice, and that has huge implications for brands, content, how things get discovered, etc.
  2. Artificial Intelligence is also taking over the world. Read this to see how people freaked out about Google’s new AI platform, Duplex, at the recent I/O conference where their robots made reservations from real people who didn’t know they were speaking to a robot, and generally creeped everyone out. Or read how Stephen Hawking predicted AI will essentially wipe us out. Regardless, AI is getting smarter, and if you think Netflix is good at finding what you want to watch next, it’s only getting much better;
  3. Digital Assistants are also the next big thing. And they are tied to both AI and Voice. Daniel Miessler has a great article on this subject called The Future of Content Destroys the Middleman, and by that he doesn’t mean sales agents or the usual middle-men of our content world – film and video – he means Google, or Medium and maybe (just maybe) Netflix if they don’t start taking this space seriously, although I bet they already are. Read his article for the best break-down out there.

  Think of your Digital Assistant as your best friend, but in your brain and also in your computer, and because it’s tied to AI and voice, it gets smarter by the minute, and over time, it knows what you want to ask about or say, or schedule, before you do. So my DA will know that I am coming home and turn down the AC, warm up my food, chill my beer and maybe even tell my robot to turn down my sheets.

  But it will also know that when I hang out with my wife tonight we both probably want to watch the next episode of Atlanta, but when I see my friend Paul, we want to start back on that exact moment we left off in our favorite video game, and when I see my Mom, our DA’s talk to one another and order her a wine, me a whiskey and suggest Haji as a mutual interest family film that we always seem to like, and makes sure that Amazon restocked the tissues, because we’ll be crying a lot.

  You can already see how this overlaps a bit with film. The film business has been built around blunt force marketing, where you throw a ton of money at something and hope people show up. And that will still work for blockbusters. And for the last decade, it’s been built around getting smarter with search and recommendations via a graphic interface (GUI) essentially tied to movie posters.

  But the future of content discovery and viewing (or consumption as they like to say) is going to be around voice, AI and DA (and maybe Blockchain, but the jury is still out on that one). And if your delivery service – be it Netflix, FilmStruck or HBO isn’t built for this world, things won’t be pretty. How will voice interact with that? I have no idea. But I think it will be more than just “Hey Alexa, show me The Avengers.” It’s going to be a combo of that, plus knowing what I want before I know I want it, plus knowing the wants of who I’m with, and it will definitely be better at remembering which SVOD service has my favorite show and which episode I fell asleep in last night.

  Now, people will still want great content, so HBO as a producer is fine. But HBO as a skinny bundle is probably not. I think this coming world – like so many other things – favors Amazon, where your subscription to Prime, coupled with the best AI/DA and Alexa gets me not just video but also text and diapers. I’m not sure that even Netflix can survive in that world, but they have a much better chance than anyone who hasn’t aggregated a lot of stuff under a lot of data and intelligence.

  Having one place that knows what I like to watch and can pull it from ANY provider, while also re-ordering my coffee and suggesting a book for my book club tomorrow night is infinitely more interesting to me than just having a service that offers me the films they have but not others. And if that place also owns the newspaper…

  Or maybe not. Maybe it will be a new DA company that just pulls from the APIs of the various Netflix’s and Amazon’s of the world, and they are reduced to suppliers.

  Or maybe I’ll just be stuck in my living room yelling “No Netflix, that’s not the show I wanted” or be stuck arguing in circles with a chat-bot all night for a refund from iTunes for the film that never streamed.

  Given that we were promised jet packs, the latter is just as likely, but it’s more fun to think about the former ideas when dreaming about the future. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure this all out.

  But it gets even more interesting when you start thinking about how this all combines to impact story-telling as opposed to story-delivery. Because in theory, a really smart AI coupled with a DA that knows your every wish could combine with a few other technologies and just maybe make the movie you want to see or write the book you want to read for you. Robot’s already compose symphonies, so is that a stretch?

  Yeah, I know, that’s pure crazy. But I find it funny that no one believes that a computer can be a great filmmaker or author, but we all have a sneaking suspicion we might be living in the Matrix.

  STUFF I’M READING: FILM

  Blockchain takes Cannes by storm: I swear I’m going to just have to stop linking to Blockchain articles soon because people are launching new projects in this space almost every day. . Screen has a nice little article about several of the new players in the space who launched at Cannes. Note to start-ups – Cannes is not the new SXSW. Fests are terrible places to get traction, attention and/or explain complex technology, but good luck with that.

  Will Spotify be the next Netflix? Scott Galloway thinks so. He has an interesting argument that basically says Spotify has mastered mobile and social, the two things Netflix is not good at, and if you envision a video Playlist curated by your friends, easily accessible via mobile, you might have a real competitor to Netflix. Me: I hope he’s right, because we need more than five players (FAANG) in this space.

  But…maybe Microsoft will buy Netflix? That’s what a smart media analyst named Porter Bibb thinks. He makes a compelling case and Microsoft has the money and needs something to do with itself, but dear god, I can’t imagine a better way to ruin a good thing, and I’d really feel bad for my few friends over there. Let’s hope this one is just conjecture.

  INTERNET/CULTURE

  I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore. This article by Dan Nosowitz in NYMag sums up my daily problem with the web for the last year or two – it’s not fun anymore. Can’t put it any better than he did here.

  BRANDED CONTENT

  TMOBILE Social Conscious Spend Increase – Ok, this is advertising, and a little confusing, but buried in the news about the Fox Upfronts was this tidbit from Joe Marchese: “A T-Mobile campaign during the World Series highlighting the company’s support of hurricane relief efforts…was deemed a success…So much so, he said, that T-Mobile has increased its budget for socially conscious spending (a quality that 80% of consumers expect from brands) from 5% of its overall marketing spend last year to 30% this year.” (emphasis mine). Ok, so that’s big. A – 80% of consumers want socially conscious spending from brands; B – the new ad formats from Fox, where there are less ads, but more strategically placed, are working; and C – they’re working so well that a brand is increasing it’s spend six times over in one year. Seems to me that’s a place that Foundations and others who support socially conscious media should also be looking, and we should all look for more news in this space soon.

  Question Your Answers. Sometimes branded content comes from two platform brands, making an ad for themselves. That’s the case with the new Question Your Answers series from The Atlantic and HBO, where HBO talent will star in shorts to air online, on the Atlantic’s OTT channels, on HBO before their shows and on their YouTube channels. The first of the series are with Jeffrey Wright and another with Michael K. Williams and they’re fun to watch, and a clever way to remind you to subscribe to HBO, or the Atlantic, instead of someone else.

  REI Presents: Women in Fire: REI has been doing some great outdoor content, all focused on women in sports, and their newest video is about women fire-fighters, which make up just 10% of firefighters. Reading the comments can make you sad, but a great branded content effort. Full disclosure: REI is a client, but this was made prior to my involvement and I still like it.

• Cannes, Patagonia Sues Trump, and other news

  • Posted on 11th May
  • Category: Newsletter

  The entire film business and its various hangers-on, except for me, are over in France for the Cannes Film Fest and it promises to be an interesting year. Tons of business will surely get done – this is always the case, it’s one of the biggest markets, and right now thanks to a good economy, there’s a lot of free money running around looking to be spent; there seem to be several great movies there and no one is expecting any kind of disaster. But on the other hand…things look shaky.

  Behind the scenes, there’s a gigantic freak-out happening in the market – no Harvey (that’s a good thing for many reasons, but he purchased a lot of good foreign films to bring to American audiences, and no one has taken that place yet); no Netflix making major deals or any real acquisitions (or will they?); a bottoming out of the electronic sell-through market all around; a super-abundance of content where only the same titles rise to the top; and a general lack of fuck-all knowledge of WTF to do in this situation by anyone behind the wheels of the various cars.

  Will this mean new opportunities for the old stalwarts like Sony Classics? Will Hulu fill the doc buying gap from Netflix? Will Netflix buy a ton of films even though it didn’t premiere any? Will Amazon make any moves? Will any of the gazillion new Blockchain companies show a compelling business argument (See below)? How many new film funds can launch in one Summer? We’ll learn this and more.

  But the number one question is: after all this pizzazz, will audiences show up to watch any of it in theaters six months from now, or should we be begging Netflix to just take it all and put it on SVOD?

  What I’m Reading:

  FILM

  Sinemia launches plans for as low as $4.99 a month. MoviePass-like system, Sinemia, based in Europe, has launched a bevy of new plans, with one as low as low as $4.99 for one ticket per month and various plans up to $14.99 a month for 3 films per month including 3D, 4D and IMAX.

  Another day, another blockchain-based film delivery system. This one is called TaTaTu and it aims to offer free content, rewards to users for sharing, and hopes to reach a billion users in six years. Meanwhile, Hollywood Reporter sums up some of the hype around ICOs and Bitcoin in Hollywood, Sitges Film Fest starts accepting a digital currency for tickets and the Oracle of Omaha thinks crypto-currencies are rat-poison squared. I think my money would follow the brains in Omaha over those in Cannes, Catalonia or California…

  Apple Prime? What’s Apple going to do with video? That’s the question on everyone’s mind, and Redef takes a stab at answering the question, coming down kinda in the middle of every possible answer and saying it will probably be a mix of ho-hum strategies that add up to an Apple Prime service with video alongside music, magazines, cloud storage and maybe even cellular service in the future. Maybe.

  The Holodome is open. Not film, exactly, but in the content world, Paul Allen’s Vulcan and MoPop in Seattle have opened the Holodome, a 360 experiential, immersive reality experience in a room without headsets. Geekwire has a couple of reports from inside the rooms. I’m headed to Seattle soon, and will have to check it out and report back on whether it’s any better than the (crap) experience of 360 video headsets.

  SOCIETY

  Patagonia is suing Drumpf over public lands and National Monuments, and the NYT has the full story. Full disclosure: Patagonia has been a client for about five years, but this is why – because they stand up for what they believe in and do the right thing. They’ve been dedicated activists since the beginning, and you can see this in their messaging and their films, but this lawsuit takes it to a whole new level – which is needed. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen this kind of leadership in this space – not even from the nonprofit sector or the foundation world, where you should expect it. Makes you think a little differently about the power of brands.

  BRANDED CONTENT

  Refinery29 is launching an OTT Channel. Variety reports that the web platform, which already features a lot of video, will launch the channel soon, with a mix of documentary and narrative series and features. Seems like a new OTT channel launches every day, but Refinery29 has a sizeable audience, so this might have a chance.

  Brands and Marketers are increasing their budgets for original video, says the IAB. With 81% increasing their budgets after the 2017 Upfronts. The IAB is biased here, but there’s no doubt that the money is flowing to video content. Check out their nice infographic and video at the link as well.

• The Doc I want to See: Michelle Wolf Thoughts

  • Posted on 3rd May
  • Category: Newsletter

  The Doc I want to See: I avoid political posts, because that’s what Facebook was made for, and I left if already, but I can’t resist, and do think this should be a film so bear with me.

  After several days of nausea brought on by reading the collected nonsense of supposed responses to Michelle Wolf’s performance at the Correspondent’s Dinner, I am pretty sure that the doc we need now is one about the shit show that is the creepy and democracy-destroying relationship between our Washington press-corps and those they supposedly report about.

  That any journalist, from any side of the political spectrum, could say her routine was anything less than the minimum requirement of the job shows just how much these two classes sleep in the same bed and eat from the same trough and pretend to do otherwise. True, some of the jokes weren’t funny, but neither is having these corrupt liars in the executive office, and all of her political commentary was spot-on and if anything, mild.

  You can’t pretend to hold people to account all day and then be surprised when someone calls the press secretary/liar-in-chief out for being a liar and then you (the supposed journalists) as well for not doing much more than fanning the flames. Anything less wouldn’t be ‘Merican. And for the record, while this routine was required for this regime, it wasn’t too far off what was needed for any other.

  Simply put – those covering our government elites are acting as if they’re Variety covering Hollywood – like it’s all an insider’s game governed by a press release, and we’re all part of the same system, we’re all “bro’s” at the end of the day, and no one needs to report too hard. But this is a democracy, not a trifling entertainment, and none of the people in that room should pretend to be friends, and none of them are doing their jobs.

  Please, some filmmaker, work on this subject, because it’s rich for the mining and we deserve to see how this sausage grinder turns. I don’t need a doc about how the NYT covers the news. I don’t need one about the last year of Obama, or even an episode about how Trump is a crook. I need one about the complete failure of this entire sector of our democracy.

  WHAT I’M READING

  FILM

  Black Media Story Summit – Black Public Media convened a “day-long, invitation-only gathering brought more than 100 black creatives and thought leaders together with media technologists, funders, investors and distributors in a series of conversations designed to get strategic black content into the distribution pipeline.” The full guest list wasn’t published, but it’s interesting (to me at least) that no mention was made of attendance from some of the more important folks in the media space- Netflix, Amazon, Facebook or even Macro. But it looks like it was a great convening, and I look forward to hearing more about it – a white paper will be released soon.

  IDA Getting Real Summit – Care about docs? Of course you do. So the IDA’s Getting Real Summit (Sept 25-27) should be near the top of your must-attend list, and apparently, they’ll be hosting an event on their Facebook page on May 8 at 1pm pst (4pm est) where you can learn more about it and presumably ask questions and suggest ideas for the conference. My suggestion – a closed door session with high level reps from brands making docs and foundations supporting them brainstorming how they could work together to have a bigger impact by working together, with 2-3 filmmakers keeping them “real” and Joe Marchese of Fox telling what they’re both doing wrong and could do better.

  Godard’s Sales Agent is the only person with a brain in the Cannes/Netflix/theater debates. Wow. Vincent Maraval tells IndieWire that “I would’ve liked to have the Godard film on Netflix for 10 days during Cannes, and on the day of its screening, release it theatrically in France,” continuing, ““I don’t think it would’ve stolen one audience member away to have a Godard film for 10 days on Netflix,” Maraval said. “We would still do the same number in theaters that we have had with Godard before.” Amen, brother. That’s the simple truth. I wish everyone else would wake up to it.

  Culture/Tech

  Could Apple Buy Conde Nast? That’s the juicy tid-bit dropped in this article from the Guardian. The idea is that Apple is moving more and more into being a luxury brand, and you can’t get much more luxury in the publishing world than the Conde Nast brands. My take: It makes sense, and as Apple moves more into original content, the best way to distinguish themselves from everyone else doing it is to focus on brand building, the upper-end and essentially shit that rich, dying boomers care about. So expect their film moves to include more docs about Dylan, Clapton and films by Scorsese.

  What’s going on with Net Neutrality? It’s probably still dead. But people are trying to do something in Congress about it on May 9th, and you can read all about it here.

  BRANDED CONTENT

  Conde Nast OTT – But until Apple comes knocking, Conde Nast is joining the hordes of those launching OTT channels, announcing new OTT offerings for WIRED, Bon Appetit and GQ. And if you didn’t think we had enough content in the world already, they’ve got 35 returning series and 60 new pilots launching. Hear them knocking on your door for films, indie filmmakers? Nope, neither do I…

  Brand Storyteller’s Top Headaches: Strategy, Distribution and Determining ROI. That’s what the survey says according to BrandStorytelling in their latest newsletter, and based on my experience, those are definitely the headaches I hear about most (and it’s why I’ve concentrated my business on the first of those two and am trying to help solve the third). Without a doubt, ROI is the hardest. How do you really measure impact, cost-effectiveness, reach and how do you show the direct connection to what matters for most brands – sales – when most content is a long-term proposition? In the indie world, the funders are mainly foundations, and they essentially have given up measuring the ROI of their investment. Let’s hope brands don’t, and give us a standard we can all find useful someday.

• If I were MoviePass: what MoviePass Should Do Next

  • Posted on 26th Apr
  • Category: Newsletter

  Everyone’s going crazy about MoviePass. Will they survive? Will AMC and the others just launch their own (more expensive versions)? Have they already disrupted the industry beyond repair, to where if they shut down, they’ve devalued the theatrical experience? Even I’ve written about them in the past.

  If you’re getting people to ask this many questions, you’re doing something right, which is rare in this staid industry, so kudos to them. I am not a fan of any service whose basic business model relies on you being too lazy to use it enough to realize its full value – for them to survive they basically have to rip you off. But I’ve gotta hand it to Mitch Lowe (CEO) – he realized what its previous owners didn’t – that when you have a subscription business, only two things matter: subscriber acquisition rate (cost to get a new subscriber) and churn rate (how fast you lose them). Supposedly he’s gotten them both close to zero, and it has become the fastest growing subscription service ever.

  But seriously, MoviePass is a great idea that has a window of about 12-18 months to either become a colossus or disappear. In addition to adding subscribers, it needs to start getting serious and get even more visionary. Here’s just a few ideas it could try out:

  1. Stop fucking around. First things first. No more screwing your customers by turning on and off the ability to go to a particular AMC. No more not hiring real customer service and then hiring a crisis team because you don’t want to act like a real business. No more changing pricing plans every other day. Either you want to be a real business, with real customers, or you want to keep acting like you got kicked out from clown school. Grow up and be a business and do things right. Be a brand people love and you will crush the field. People so want to love you, so let them, and then take over the world (did anyone there even go to brand school???). update: after I wrote this post, they started f-n w/ customers again, getting rid of the unlimited option and going w/ a 4 movies a month plan. jeesh…
  2. Buy Landmark Theaters. Rumor has it that Netflix almost did this before Mark Cuban jacked up the price. Yes, it would raise operating costs even more, but how awesome would it be to be able to offer 54 some odd theaters where you could not only guarantee seating for your members, but also run all kinds of special gimmicks to get traffic on off-nights, offer concession tie-ins and really put that data to use.
  3. Launch an SVOD service, included in the same low MoviePass price (for now, you can raise it later). I’d buy FilmStruck away from Turner and grow it exponentially. This is probably impossible as I doubt Turner would sell FilmStruck, but it has the best brand and the best titles right now. So if that wouldn’t work, I’d buy Fandor (they already share investors) and merge it with the MoviePass membership. Then I’d invest another $100 Million or so, maybe a lot more, into licensing a lot more high-end and first-run SVOD titles, so that I could offer a MoviePass membership that lets people watch films online or in theaters day and date anytime they want. But this only works if they dramatically increase the quality and quantity of titles available. Fandor and FilmStruck are both too specialized right now for anyone but the most obsessed film buffs, and definitely not for the masses. You need classics, arthouse and Hollywood – you need to be what Netflix used to be about five-ten years ago, but with theaters added on instead of DVDs.
  4. Double-Down on P&A – Invest more in the P&A fund they’ve been messing around with. They’ve already invested in several acquisitions, under the premise that they can push MoviePass subscribers to go see films, and share in the profits from the release of select films. I’d ramp this up via a substantial P&A fund and start rolling-out those member offers.
  5. Darden Restaurant partnership– I don’t eat there, but Middle America does, and MoviePass needs to break into Middle America and away from the Coasts to break big. And the way to do that is dinner and a movie, and that can be done by offering deals to people to go to Red Lobster, Olive Garden and others via MoviePass coupons. They can add deals later with Yelp, OpenTable and others, but Darden is the place to start, and offering a deal that gets their customers a discount on MoviePass, while also getting you a discount at Darden when you show you went to a movie is a win-win.
  6. Data Based Deals. Don’t back down from offering deals based on data. Don’t be creepy – like you were when you said you track my every move. But if you don’t become Facebook and you are transparent with what you do with my data, I am more than happy to let you offer me deals based on my data. If you know I love Wonder Woman – offer me a discount to the next movie in the franchise. If you know I always go to theater Z, offer me a discount to the restaurant across the street. Just ask me to opt in to these deal alerts and all will be ok. And you’ll make a fortune while I save a few bucks. This data is gold to you and me. I’d love to stop seeing a million ads for a movie I already know I want to see someday, and with your data and ability to retarget me a year later to see the film I want to see, that day is just around the corner, so use that data smartly.
  7. Watchlists – I used to run this little failed app called Flicklist. We failed for a few reasons, but not because we saw a need for watchlists. Other’s in this space have this now as well (even IMDB has this now), but MoviePass needs to add a Watchlist and remind you when films you want to see are available near you (or online, once they add that service).
  8. Friends – Another Flicklist idea that would still work, was getting recommendations from friends. MoviePass has hinted already that they want to add ratings that are different than RottenTomatoes. At the risk of de-simplifying their clean interface, they should integrate more closely with your Facebook friends and allow you to follow the ratings of your friends. That’s the crucial missing link in the film world today – people care about their friend’s recommendations for films, not the critics or anything else. It’s word of mouth, but make it electronic.
  9. Hoover up The Data Companies. They already bought MovieFone, which gives them a ton of data. Next, I’d start looking at the other folks who have some great data – many are not technically for sale, but I’d be looking at Atom Tickets; Cinelytics; Letterboxd; Movio (VistaGroup) and anyone else with good audience data analytics.
  10. Film Festival partnerships. Ok, this one isn’t going to make MoviePass a ton of money, and dealing with thousands of film fests isn’t easy, but I’d love to see a day when film fests could offer unsold tickets at a discount – or for free – through MoviePass. They’d fill up a possibly empty theater, promote their overall festival, and possibly gain a future patron. MoviePass would gain a little more street-cred…ok, I can’t pretend MoviePass gains much here, but it would be cool.

  WHAT I’M READING

  FILM

  Doc Cinema is doing just fine in Toronto. Well, duh. Toronto’s citizens drink the cinema pixie-dust, showing up in droves for all things cinema. But while this article doesn’t state it, rumor has it that Hot Doc’s Bloor St cinema is actually kicking the Lightbox’s ass when it comes to actual revenue and success. Whatever the case may be, they’re doing a great job with their festival and cinema, and this article from the Globe breaks down their numbers and their programming strategies. A great read for anyone interested in the state of docs in theaters or arthouse theaters generally.

  EyeSlicer Kickstarter. I haven’t supported a Kickstarter for a film in awhile, but I’m a big fan of the team behind the EyeSlicer and they have a new campaign for Season 2 going on now. In addition to making great content and touring it around the country, they’re making a ‘zine and launching a small film fund to help fund radical short films. Gotta respect that. Give em some loot, so they can give it away.

  BRANDED CONTENT

  Branded Content is growing faster than advertising, but it’s still a small subset of brand’s overall marketing spend. Approximately $16 Billion dollars is being spent on branded entertainment (versus $550B on advertising more broadly).While this is a small percentage of the overall spend, it’s growing twice as fast as advertising is generally, and much faster than GDP. The report doesn’t seem to break-down exactly where it’s being spent, but my guess is a fair bit if that is in video content.

  This Newsletter/Blog:

  As I keep mentioning, I’ve begun a process to move over to MailChimp. If you were a Google/Feedburner Subscriber, you’ve been migrated to Mailchimp, and you can unsubscribe if you don’t want this newsletter any longer. The Feedburner will shut down in the next two weeks, or you can unsubscribe from that email separately. Sorry for the hassle during this process.

  
  

  Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. “I’ve gotta hand it to Mitch Lowe – he realized what its previous owners didn’t – that when you have a subscription business, only two things matter: subscriber acquisition rate (cost to get a new subscriber) and churn rate (how fast you los

• Subgenre news: open letter to Joe Beyer/Traverse City

  • Posted on 18th Apr
  • Category: Newsletter

  Joseph Beyer, formerly of Sundance, is now running the Traverse City Film Festival, founded by Michael Moore. Well hot-damn, that’s a cool person, going from one cool place (with some interim steps) to another. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Joe on some projects at Sundance, and he’s the real deal. Can’t wait to see what he does there. But while he figures out what to do, I will take this moment to give him a whacky idea, unsolicited and public, no less!

  Dear Joe

  Congrats on the new job. You’ve got a lot on your plate, with some big ideas already announced, but what would life be without Brian Newman giving you some other idea to think about? Here’s an idea I just had today while thinking about Tribeca launching and you getting your new gig, and I think you’re just the guy to launch it.

  Every year when film festivals send out their rejection letters – some of them on Fridays, which earns them a special place in Hell as far as I’m concerned, but that’s another article – they always send a handful with genuine, heartfelt notes of regret, saying something like: “ you made it down to the very last cut, and we really wanted to program your film, but we just couldn’t find a place for it. Please send us your future work as we really do like you.”

  When you get this letter as a filmmaker, you aren’t sure whether to slit your wrists or be proud, but being a filmmaker means being a glutton for punishment, so you take a deep breath and frame the damn letter (er, print out of the email) and hope they’ll like your next film.

  And guess what – the festival programmers who send these letters really do mean it. They send lots of form letters to the rest of the rejects, and even some nice notes to others, but there’s always those 1 or 2 films they just couldn’t find a place for, but they wished they could.

  I want to see those films. And I bet they’d sell out at any festival that programmed them and advertised them as such.

  So here’s the idea, Joe, and only you have the connections, friendships and chutzpah to do it – contact every film festival programmer in the Film Festival Alliance and ask them to anonymously submit the one film they most wish they could have programmed. This can be computerized of course, and there will be overlap. Select the ten (or five, or even one) films mentioned the most, and program them as a special sidebar at the festival. Voilà! A festival program that no one has ever done, that will sell-out fast, and that will put a smile on the face of some very lucky filmmakers.

  Sincerely – yes, that’s a sincere idea – me

   WHAT I’M READING

  FILM

  Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood. Ok, I haven’t read this yet, but it’s on my Goodreads list to read next, after reading this great review in the WSJ (paywall). J.E. Smyth argues that contrary to popular myth, the studio era from the 20s-50s was “an important and empowering chapter in women’s employment in the film industry;” and that women held numerous jobs at all levels of the business. She also argues against the auteur theory (which is quite male centric) and in favor of the communal nature of filmmaking, and argues against the notion that “female employees did not support the networks of other women necessary for other women in the profession.” Sounds like a lot of myth-busting and potentially awesome re-visioning of the history of women in Hollywood, and it couldn’t come at a better time. I can’t wait to read it.

  Netflix ain’t buyin’ docs – I think anyone who reads my blog knows that, and also reads IndieWire already, but just in case you missed it, check out Anthony Kaufman’s great little story on what’s happening in the doc marketplace now that Netflix and Amazon are sitting on the sidelines. My take: Good article, but methinks the interviewees are putting a positive spin on the sheer terror floating through their veins as the biggest buyers shift gears from acquisitions to original content. But it’s good news for the smaller buyers, and as long as the economy holds up (ahem…) doc producers will survive.

  INTERNET/SOCIETY

  Jaron Lanier, we need to remake the internet. Jaron’s recent TED Talk made the rounds quite a bit, so this may be old news to many, but if not, check out the 14 minute talk over at TED, where he succinctly breaks down the not-novel, but timely idea that we need to rethink the business model of most of the web, where we get free stuff, supported by ads. As he points out to those who say, “who would ever pay,” well, Netflix has made a tidy profit on a subscription business, and it doesn’t take much imagination to think of how much better a social network could become if it was forced to get better/stronger/more-trustworthy, to keep adding subscribers.

  Best quote was his next to last:

  “We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them”

  The Internet Apologizes: NYMag has a surprisingly interesting long-read set of interviews with many net-founders on what’s gone wrong with the internet. It covers everything from advertising to click-bait to, well, Zuckerberg and even Lanier shows up again here. My take: We all knew the internet as we know it would get broken some-day, and that time has come. You mix the all-too-real toxic culture that has arisen on social media with the fact it may have elected Drumpf, scare the advertisers, awaken the politicians, and pretty soon everyone will conspire to ruin a pretty good thing.

  Best quote in the article (that shows where we’re headed as well): “If email were being invented now and Mark Zuckerberg had concocted it, it would be a vertically integrated, proprietary thing that nobody could build on.” Antonio García Martínez

  BRANDED CONTENT

  Words Matter: P&G and Great Big Story made a pretty decent brand doc about the history of P&G adding sexual orientation to its diversity policy in the early 90’s becoming one of the first Fortune 500 companies to do so. This is a very brand centric doc, but in some ways, perfect branded content – it tells an awesome story of one employee leading the charge, starting in the 80’s when coming out in Cleveland was not an easy thing to do, and it was also intimately, and truthfully, tied to one of their products at the time, Peridex, which was primarily used by people with HIV/AIDS to help with symptoms of Thrush. Employee Michael Chanak worked hard, at first alone and then with a few others to slowly convince the company that they had to walk the talk, and the film ends up being a great story because it doesn’t hide it’s branded origins at all – in fact, they’re central to its interest and power. (H/T to Brand StoryTelling)

  Once again, I’m teaching a Branded Doc workshop at UnionDocs in early May, and we still have a few slots left.
  

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• Facebook Sucks: news for April 12th and more

  • Posted on 12th Apr
  • Category: Newsletter

  Facebook Sucks. Okay, that’s not the headline, or even the gist of this article, but with Zuckerberg being grilled by Congress as I write this, I couldn’t resist.  Actually, the linked article is a pretty good in-depth story by IndieWire (from a week ago or so, but this seems to be bash Facebook week) about how the many recent changes to Facebook’s algorithms are impacting indie filmmakers. In short – you have to pay more to reach your fans, and even then you can’t count on your fans seeing your posts. So what used to be a helpful resource for artists isn’t much help anymore, and as Facebook moves more into video, it’s algorithms seem even more arbitrary making it hard for any indie artist to turn it into a revenue source or even a creative venue.
  My QuickTake: Well, I left Facebook a few months ago and haven’t looked back, and I feel so much better about the world. I didn’t leave because of Cambridge Analytica but because it’s just become such a caustic place that I don’t need it sucking away my soul, and my creative energy, anymore. Everyone in the article seems to be saying: well, yeah, but we have nowhere else to advertise. And… that’s true. But Facebook won’t survive from you selling a ticket to an indie film; it survives from selling a Chevy truck (or really, by selling all of us to Chevy to sell us a truck).Like TV, Facebook isn’t made to help you or me be creative, so we need to find another platform, and if we can’t figure out a way to do that because we don’t want to miss out on someone’s latest post about Trump, well, we deserve our demise.

  WHAT I’M READING

  FILM

  MoviePass buys MovieFone – Score two for MoviePass, after last week’s deal announcement with Landmark.

  My QuickTake: While 777-numbers and Mr.MovieFone won’t come back, the nostalgia factor works well with the only people reliably going to see movies in theaters – Boomers and older, who remember anything about what I just said. And MovieFone brings some 6MM+ customers a month, a lot of data, and for those in the know, a surprising amount of forward-thinking plans about the possibilities for the future of connecting fans with films, which is what MoviePass is really all about. If MoviePass can keep this up – and quit f-n up with shitty customer service (driven by their desire to prove to AMC that they can send traffic to other theaters), then they have a chance to live past December of this year, which is what I – and almost everyone else – gives them as of now.

  How many non-English language films get a US theatrical release? Not a lot. According to Stephen Follows it’s just 18.8% of all releases, and only 1.1% of total US box office. My Quicktake: as someone noted in the comments to Stephen’s post – it begs the question of why all the hoopla around banning Netflix from Cannes? If we want these films to be seen, and they aren’t landing in theaters, then we should applaud Netflix or anyone else who will showcase them online. Sarandos is right to pull his films out of Cannes – why get booed when you’re spending millions of your billions to bring these films to audiences that just aren’t showing up in theaters?

  Sow the oats. Indiewire and others report on OatsStudios – Fuel Oats campaign- Watch the video for all the details, but Neil Blomkamp’s idea is to crowdfund a studio one film at a time, but say fuck it to all the hard work – no perks, no rewards, save getting the film when it’s done. As he says: every dollar ends up on the screen. My Quicktake: Well, he actually has a few rewards- behind the scenes footage, and those downloads, so I’m not sure he couldn’t do this via one of the existing platforms. But it’s been a slow-news year from the crowd-funding platforms, so it’s good to see someone doing somerhing in the space, and I’d love to see him raise enough to make more than just a cat video.

   

  BRANDED CONTENT

  Conde Nast’s Video Efforts – The NYT has a nice little article about Conde Nast’s efforts to shift just about everything to video in hopes of capturing more eyeballs and thus advertising dollars.

  My QuickTake: If nothing else, this article is worth it for the deep-link to the (PDF) of the CondeNast ad-sales guide, used to pitch advertisers on why they should, well, advertise with one of the CondeNast brands. Lots of interesting, if biased and possibly falsified, data there. Is the web moving to video because that’s where consumers are going? Or is it because that’s where the platforms and brands want them to go (because of ever elusive ad dollars)? Is the whole thing just a big Ponzi-scheme that’s not much better than television? You decide, but this article will have you wondering all that and more.

  I mentioned last week that I’m teaching a Branded Doc workshop at UnionDocs in early May, but right after I posted, they launched this cool little video for the class – check it out.

  
  

  Friday, May 4 – Sunday, May 6 BRANDED DOCUMENTARIES: An Intensive 3-day Seminar on Creative Content from UnionDocs on Vimeo.

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