Bud Melman's Mad Men Report
Monday, December 8, 2008
Last night, I received a copy of Bud Melman's big memo. As Bud writes, it's "an inside look into the recent Mad Men on Twitter phenomenon, and what it means for the future of media and entertainment." The report is comprehensive (11 pages), filling in the back-story of how these fictional online identities came into being, the drama between the content owners, AMC, their digital marketing agency, Deep Focus (where I used to work, but never did anything with Mad Men), and among the fans who were authoring these various Twitter accounts. I believe there will be a copy posted on the fan site wearesterlingcooper.com later today (UPDATE: Download the PDF here).
The man behind Bud Melman, is Bud Caddell, a fellow strategist with me at Undercurrent.
One thing that's interesting about this particular chapter in the ongoing saga between fans and content owners, is that most of the people who authored these fictional online personas were marketing professionals. They recognized a marketing opportunity for the brand, and actively sought to put their fan labor to work for the show.
They argued (rightly in my opinion) that their activity on Twitter was raising awareness for the show, introducing the story to tens of thousands of potential new viewers, and giving existing fans a new way to engage with the narrative of the TV show in between episodes. It seemed like a brilliant and progressive new media marketing strategy. But, alas, AMC didn't see it like that. After first forcing the accounts to be suspended, they begrudgingly changed their mind and allowed them to continue posting messages.
As more fans begin to recognize their importance and value to content owners as marketing partners, I think we'll begin to see more friction like what we saw with Mad Men. As, I wrote a couple weeks ago, the roles and relationships are getting complicated. Some fans will want to embrace this marketing role, and some will reject it. On the brand and agency side, I believe we'll start to see more positions like Community Manager or even Fan Liaison pop up.
I'd love to hear some thoughts from people with personal experience on both the fan (Flourish) and content owner (Mica) sides of this discussion.
The man behind Bud Melman, is Bud Caddell, a fellow strategist with me at Undercurrent.
One thing that's interesting about this particular chapter in the ongoing saga between fans and content owners, is that most of the people who authored these fictional online personas were marketing professionals. They recognized a marketing opportunity for the brand, and actively sought to put their fan labor to work for the show.
They argued (rightly in my opinion) that their activity on Twitter was raising awareness for the show, introducing the story to tens of thousands of potential new viewers, and giving existing fans a new way to engage with the narrative of the TV show in between episodes. It seemed like a brilliant and progressive new media marketing strategy. But, alas, AMC didn't see it like that. After first forcing the accounts to be suspended, they begrudgingly changed their mind and allowed them to continue posting messages.
As more fans begin to recognize their importance and value to content owners as marketing partners, I think we'll begin to see more friction like what we saw with Mad Men. As, I wrote a couple weeks ago, the roles and relationships are getting complicated. Some fans will want to embrace this marketing role, and some will reject it. On the brand and agency side, I believe we'll start to see more positions like Community Manager or even Fan Liaison pop up.
I'd love to hear some thoughts from people with personal experience on both the fan (Flourish) and content owner (Mica) sides of this discussion.
2 Comments:
I often use Fan Advocate to describe my work at Showtime but I hesitate to use that as job a title because to do that well, you also need to have equal allegiance to the brand/show. You can't alienate the creatives behind a project or risk the funding they are dependent on to make it.
I am so glad Bud posted his accounting of what went down. It is a great opportunity bring this discussion out in the open. I will weigh in on the subject with more depth, later this week.
As a fan of and a participant in the Mad Men on Twitter experiment, it's easy to say/think AMC should have played along more, especially as most of the people participating were doing a great job. But before long it started getting out of hand (the xerox machine and the Draper's dog had accounts).
As a brand you can't simply just say, "Yeah, go for it fans, spread the gospel." You've got to work closely to make sure the quality of *YOUR* brand stays high, which in a case like Mad Men is VERY high.
The other take-away for me, as Bud mentioned, was that it was tough to get the 'players' to organize. As much potential as something like this has, it will take a herculean effort to maintain quality when working with independent actors (actors in the political sense not theatrical sense).
It was great and I'm glad to have participated, albeit in a small way, but there is still some ways to go for this as a channel that brands can utilize.
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