From CreativeBusiness

This is a relatively mature draft, but we are going to add some more information that came to light during the seminars, and would also like to hear from you. Are there any questions you feel are unanswered? What more would you like to know? Please leave your questions at the bottom of the page.

If anyone wants to help tidy up the formatting please be our guest!

Executive Summary

David Bausola is a creative technologist at communications agency Imagination who, together with Rob Myers, developed a commercial media production model based around the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC-BY-SA) licence. The model was successfully deployed in 2007 as Where are the Joneses?, a marketing project for Ford of Europe commissioned by Imagination and realised by TV production company Baby Cow.

Where Are The Joneses? is, from one perspective, a cult situation comedy featuring two characters searching Europe for their siblings. It is a collection of 90 short films, each between two and seven minutes long, which were produced and published direct to the web by a five-person production team that toured Europe during summer 2007. There was no centralised website for the content. Instead there were multiple channels, including a blog, wiki, Facebook group, Flickr photoset, collection of YouTube videos and a Twitter stream.

Users were invited to engage through these channels directly with the production team and could:

• Influence where the Joneses go next • Influence the plot and the dialogue • Appear in the series • Remix the videos and re-upload to YouTube • Make soundtracks for the Joneses • Make animations of the Joneses • Do anything else they can think of

This latter invitation, which called on the audience to express their own creativity, treated them as active participants rather than passive consumers. Scripts were written in collaboration with a community of users. Submissions were handled by a team of tthree moderators who provided feedback to help develop ideas and then passed the polished suggestions onto the production team.

Everything created for Where Are The Joneses? was published under a flexible CC licence which permitted even commercial reuse to foster a new kind of two-way relationship between a brand and its public. The project embodied the shift from a broadcast to a conversational model by enabling “many-to-many” rather than “one-to-many” communication.

The decision to permit commercial exploitation allowed downstream users to incorporate Where Are The Joneses? source material in any project, whether for business or personal use. Counter-intuitively, this hasn’t precluded the creative output of the project from generating income.

Unusually for marketing activity, the project was engineered to directly recover some of its costs: the budget Ford allocated was intended to become self-sustaining. Income is generated not from fees for licensing the copyright, but from charging to re-edit, add artwork and otherwise repurpose the footage and short films.

Ford also benefits by saving on expensive broadcast advertising slots because Where Are The Joneses? was distributed to its global fan-base online via the Internet Archive, which fed YouTube and standalone players like Miro. Although these platforms do not generate per-use royalties, the actors are contracted to receive standard fees if the materials are used for DVD and broadcast purposes.

David sees the technical barriers to realising the project as relatively light. Where Are The Joneses? involved very little bespoke work, and was largely carried out with widely available tools, such as Yahoo! Pipes, wikis and blogs, using the web as a platform to facilitate community participation and then distribute video output. Indeed, the most significant technical hurdles were faced by the production team as they travelled Europe for 90 days, filming everyday then editing and uploading video to the web from a laptop in the back of a car.

No project is risk-free and Ford’s lawyers were concerned that someone would exploit the videos for negative publicity by producing something to deride the brand. This risk was mitigated firstly by Ford owning the domain name so that they could pull the plug if anything went wrong. If they had, anyone looking for the project would find some of the project’s content scattered across the web, but without logos or links back to the brand itself.

Secondly, the most recent CC licences contain a clause that prohibits users of works from degrading the spirit of the project. This gave Ford a firm legal footing to restrain any defamatory use of the work. In reality, there was no need to take either action.

The project also had to overcome significant social barriers. David used a PR agency to secure press coverage of the project, yet many journalists were stumped by the complicated concept and failed to cover the project with any clarity. They found it difficult to understand the fuzzy, but important, concept that Where are the Joneses? means different things to different people.

Commercial practice also caused problems: Companies generally retain different agencies to manage the different aspects of public interaction — from print to TV to retail outlet - which can make cross-media projects very difficult as they require teams from multiple agencies to co-operate in unfamiliar ways.

Where Are The Joneses? is a watershed project. It is a first in this context in terms of wholehearted, open public engagement by a multinational corporation. David feels that, despite having no firm expectations for how the project would run, they “massively over- achieved”, not just in the amount of conversation the project engendered, but also the fact that the assets are to be picked up and reused by Ford for future promotion.

David would have liked to take the experiment further by supporting a larger community through providing more feedback on the submissions. He also would have liked to have created “micro-episodes”, producing 20-second snippets rather than the longer videos.

Brands need public engagement if they are to survive in a global market of ever-cheaper goods and services. The conversational, two-way dialogue at the core of this model represents a genuine effort in this direction.

Full Case Study - coming soon!

Further investigation

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