Old games in new spaces
by Nick Woollard -Business Development Manager - Audio Network
“The World has changed”, “The end is nigh” , “The recovery won’t last” “Beyonce deserved to win ……"
The above comments may or may not be true, but it is certainly clear that for content producers the landscape we inhabit is evolving faster than ever before. Driven by socioeconomic and technological developments the challenge for producers across the various disciplines is to reach out to a potentially exponential and yet highly fragmented audience, in a marketplace so crowded, that it makes Oxford Circus on Christmas Eve look positively serene.
Even the most luddite of us is now adept at consuming content from multiple media sources, if not at once, then certainly within the space of 24 hours; and the challenge is to engage across these various platforms in a compelling, consistent and relevant manner. This is as true for corporate content producers as it is to advertisers and TV producers.
As media journalist Martin Buxton points out, one way of making this work is by employing one big idea that engages on all platforms. He cites the now infamous T-Mobile’s Liverpool Street Station campaign as a prime example of how to do this. The ad featured 350 dancers who ‘spontaneously’ begin to dance amongst the general public in the station. The ad has been watched online, over 15 million times and over 400 versions were posted on YouTube. Within a week of airing, the ad had its’ own Facebook page, which in turn led to thousands of people re-creating the ad at designated times. This campaign has now culminated in an online game that lets people personalise dancers with their own images and distribute them to their friends and beyond.
The rise of converged media no doubt creates greater opportunities for producers, but at the same time, can present other concerns, which need to be considered, such as rights clearances, for this extended distribution. With such issues envisaged over 10 years ago, music publisher Audio Network was founded to offer a complete solution to producers who needed a fully cleared alternative to the traditional music licensing model.
Our vast library of high quality tracks, such as those recorded with World class orchestras like the RPO and with artists such as Nik Kershaw and John Etheridge, are pre-cleared for multiplatform, for the World, forever. This in turn, gives producers the ultimate confidence that they have the freedoms required to work with the flexibility they now require.
When Nokia wanted to set up an internal UGC platform to enable their workforce to share ideas and collaborate, Audio Network partnered the scheme to provide a music resource to support this content. Likewise the recently launched www.seethedifference.org is providing professional mentoring and a web portal for hundreds of charities to promote their work and raise funds through the means of video content. This content will also be embeddable within social media sites, thus enabling potential sponsors to share their interest and promote the charities’ activities to a wider audience. As part of Audio Network’s involvement with the scheme, we will be providing access to our catalogue for the member charities for all content hosted on the site, enabling this work to be disseminated as widely as possible, without incurring music rights issues.
Professional communicators still have a message to get across, but the tools to do this have changed, the boundaries have shifted and the content now reaches out across many strands. The stronger the idea is, or the more compelling the narrative, the more people will inevitably want to share it - By making sure that you hold the flexibility you require from the offset, you are able to sit back and let the story be told.
Find out more about Audio Network at www.audionetworkplc.com
