This is Violence

For Kmart, a unit of Sears Holdings Corp., “First Day,” began as a four-page pitch in 2009 from “Gossip Girl” executive producer Alloy Entertainment. For the current season, the show’s second, Alloy pitched a story about a girl who wants to go to the prom with her crush.

The retailer liked the idea, but wanted to use it to hawk its line of back-to-school clothes. So it suggested changing the focus to a fall dance, rather than a prom.

In rounds of back-and-forth story development, Kmart also asked Alloy to shape each of the four main characters to reflect several clothing brands that Kmart wanted to push.

The protagonist, for instance, was written to embody the Dream Out Loud by Selena Gomez brand.

Kmart also pushed Alloy to change the protagonist’s original name, Bree, to which it thought its customers wouldn’t relate. They settled on the name Rosie instead.

So, I’m not sure it really needs to be said, but this is exactly why I think the relationship between studios, content creators, and advertisers is just fundamentally ineffective.

I look at stories like this, or products like Hulu vs. Netflix and I really can’t think of a time when funding creative content through advertising resulted in a better product, a better story, or a better experience.

The problem is: advertising used to be the only way to get content produced so it was a necessary evil. Because it was the only way to get things made, entire industries were developed to support this model. What troubles me though is that right now, when you look at things like News or T.V., there is this fight to maintain this ad based system as though that was the default way of producing content. This mistake is believing something that was necessary is based on a specific set of circumstances is fundamentally necessary. In fact though, while it may feel like the way things are now is they way they’ve always been, ad funded content is a relatively new way of working. There is no reason to act as though no other model could work

In contrast, Jesse Thorn over at Put This On just finished raising $70,000 directly from viewers to produce the a second series of his (really very terrific) web series. Obviously, 70k is a far cry from what it would cost to produce even just one episode of a typical television series, but I think the model is there now in a way it hasn’t been for maybe a century for creators to get paid for their product from the people who actually use it. The model is young, but I think it will become more and more clear which side of the divide people fall on: those looking to create great stories for people will look towards these new models that allow them to work directly for their fans. Those that are in it for the business will continue to fight for the existing model, which, pretty clearly, is NOT about the story or the experience.

(Source: murketing)