Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

It seems there is a terrible threat on the rampage round Bristol. Our Snowzilla has been destroyed, and only the most formidable snow creature would be able to win a battle with something as “Roar-wsome” as Snowzilla, so this is a hysterical public service announcement to be on your guard…We feel it most likely it is a snow King Kong or a snow Pterodactyl that could have surprised the Snowzilla from above…



Snowzilla Slain...

Only the hard core made it through the snow to our Bristol office today, so we dashed out and made this…

Snowzilla!

The Team Rubber snow crew were: Michaela, Tom, Stan, Richard, James, myself with help from Clare Reddington and the PM Studio crew.

Happy Snow Day!

I’m chairing a panel talk tomorrow with Dan Light (The PPC), Hazel Grian and Ben Dowden at the awesome Encounters film festival. Come along. The talk is titled Pimp Your Story and we’re going to be looking at how short and feature film makers are using the web in innovative ways to distribute and promote their films, and more interestingly, how the web is shaping new forms of narrative storytelling.

Check it out and book tickets here.

Encounters Festival

We’re doing an increasing number of multi-asset web campaigns – working in social media channels (basically making a load of cool assets under some cohesive messaging and getting it to work on the internet). We’re getting better at planning these but I thought we needed a stronger shared understing of how this works, both inside Team Rubber, and with our clients and partner agencies. So I drew a picture of how I think these campaigns work, translated it into Lolcat Speak and called it The Cat Map. Its about how you talk to all the cats out there. What dyou reckon? Useful?

(If you click on the map it will take you to Flickr where you can see it larger)

The horizontal axis shows the difference (which its increasingly important for clients to understand) between destination content (where they try and get us to drive traffic to a website or asset they own) and conversational content (where we make stuff that can exist anywhere). Both are important but they need to be planned right and work together.

The vertical axis shows the difference between your hardcore engaged audience and your more fleeting general interest audience.

Your engaged audience don’t need any fancy creative shenanigans, they just want access to information as they are already interested. They’re all about facts, integrity and long running info (start talking to them 6 months out!).

Your general audience are not ever gonna be that bothered about what you’re talking about so you have to make it relevant to them, interesting to them, short, sharp, engage, entertain, inform. This is classic broad reach viral territory.

We work with loads of types of assets now, either that we make or that partner agencies in the campaigns we work on make, and this map attempts to show where they all fit relative to their audience.

Each campaign should have an audience “shape”, which you can use to work out what assets you need, what distribution strategies you might employ. I mean I’m not implying you get this map out and it solves all your problems. But it might help make some client and inter agency chats a bit simpler.

Yes?

No?

Tell me what you think….

Matt – (I’m the CD at Team Rubber and you can reach me on twitter @mattgolding)

Yesterday at short notice I was asked to provide an opinion on the BBC World Service as to whether the viral marketing for 2012 had gone too far. The campaign around the film, which is based on an implausible disaster-movie scale exaggeration & embellishment of the pretty much instantly dismissable “Mayan 2012 conspiracy theories”, and was made by Roland Emmerich (the Day After Tomorrow – there’s a clue in his back catalogue), features a website claiming to be for the “Institute for Human Continuity“.

Incase you haven’t read any of the massive amount of chat on the internet about 2012, December 21st (or 23rd, there seems to be some debate about how to read the date) 2012 is the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar. I’m not going to claim to be an expert (merely someone who can read and knows how to drive a web browser) but its pretty easy to educate yourself as to some background on this – and if you come to the same conclusion I have – decide that there is absolutely no basis for the claimed theories that the world will end on Dec 21st (or 23rd  – imagine the stress if you were waiting for the end for two days!) 2012. Rather the Mayan’s actually said it was the end of the final of five ages that made up their 5125 long count calendar cycle. The fact they had invented all this calendar stuff in the first place is pretty mind boggling, and there are certain vague and disputably interpreted mentions of things that may happen around this time, but really it seems more likely it was the end of a calendar cycle and the beginning of a new one, rather than the end of the whole world. Its a little like people discovering some relics of our era with reference to someone organising a meeting near the end of the year, and assuming the end of the year was an apocalyptic event.

But conspiracy theorists have leapt on this with glee.

So the question I was asked was, was the website that the movie marketers made irresponsible? It claimed to be created by a team of scientists following 20 years of research into the phenomenon. But it did contain the movie studio’s logo, and a link to “Explore the 2012 movie experience”. So its fairly clearly for a film. In the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of years promoting movies, we’ve enjoyed extending film universes online in increasingly elaborate ways. We’re excited by the possibilities the web offers not only for marketing, but for storytelling in general. And we’ve done a few campaigns that play with reality (only in the same way theatre, TV, books etc play with reality, just using the tools the web offers). So I can see how this website’s come about.

Problem is a fair number of people, especially in America where people seem to be more susceptible to these things (dyou like how subtley I phrased that?) have contacted some poor Nasa scientist Dr David Morrison asking if there is any truth to the films entirely ficticious plot point that a planet from the far reaches of the solar system is on a collision course for Earth. He claims to have fielded 2000 e-mails including some from teenagers so frightened of the end of the world they claim they’d rather commit suicide than experience it.

So, on live radio I tried to give an opinion. But for the record, and having taken onboard the information I learned during the interview from Dr Morrison, my opinion is now that the campaign has made two errors:

1: The film is a massive over-hyping of an already ridiculously overblown conspiracy theory based on misinterpretation of historical facts. They’ve obviously chosen to make a film about this exactly because there is a large and active conspiracy discussing audience online. So its a bit of a no brainer that when you go paying high end hollywood screenwriters and big name directors to make a film based on such twaddle you’re going to get some of those folk already actively chatting even more confused. I’m not even saying the film isn’t going to be good – many films based on twaddle have been perfectly acceptable Saturday night entertainment, but they surely must have expected this. In fact it probably is a sign of success for what they’re trying to achieve. Although suicide threats are always a dubious success to say the least.

2: I have been told by the BBC producer who lined the interview up that the website has been promoted on US TV as a real entity separate from the film. I can’t actually find out if this is true on the interweb, but if it is, that sounds a bit of an error. Its fine playing with a savvy internet audience who can work out for themselves that this is all fiction, but while I don’t make out TV audiences are stupid, they may include less web savvy people who may not be able to read the clues that the website is fictional. I mean you can see that one coming too surely.

Live radio is always a little frustrating as you can’t go back and re-write it. But having reflected the only thing I think the film company have done wrong is not put a number or e-mail address for concerned individuals on the website. The biggest injustice here is the poor guy at Nasa having to console suicidal teenagers. Surely the film studio should be picking up the pieces for the (small) mess they’ve caused themselves?

Here’s a link to an MP3 of the interview

Taken from NewsHour on BBC World Service radio.
Presenter was Mary-Ann Sieghart.
Also featuring Doctor David Morrison, snr scientist in astrobiology with NASA.
Broadcast 21:20 BST October 18th 2009

You might remember that a few weeks ago we offered to make trillionaires of the people who voted for and left the best comments on our SXSW panel proposals. Well. The voting is now closed so thanks to everyone who supported us – we really appreciate your help. We don’t know if any of our panels have got in yet (the schedule is announced in October) but more importantly the intense judging has finished at Team Rubber and we can confirm the following trillionaires:

For her support for Open Source Government: Can Collaborative Methods Save Democracy Nema El-Nahas with her comment “very interesting subject – distributed responsibility – power in the netwroks !!!! hope this panel sessions gets through “. (OK so it was the only comment on that one, but nice one Nema!).

For her support of  Nooks & Grannies: Exploring Older Niches Online Babette Pepaj with her comment “Very interesting topic – we deal with an older crowd daily. I think the key is customer support. They expect more from publishers and appreciate when sites are less about the techie stuff and more about the genuine connections they can make. They are also a heck of a lot more forgiving when it comes to site quirks so make sure you take care of them.. they will always come back, unlike the younger more fickle crowd.”

And for his support of Taking Traditional Narrative Online: Extending Film Worlds Interactively Kevin Chamberlain for his comment “Sounds very very interesting. Would you be interested in coming along to the Appreciative Creativity group at The Pierian Centre?”.

We’re not sure what the Pierian Centre is yet, or what Appreciative Creativity is, but it sounds very nice and we look forward to finding out over a pint or 67,500 when Kevin takes us out on his Zimbabwean Dollar winnings.

Congrats also go to Mike Bennett and Clare Reddington for getting their panels picked for the hotlist. Nice work!

Fancy supporting the world of Rubber and becoming a Trillionaire in the process?

Click on the links below to read and (if you think they sound good) vote + comment for our SXSW festival panel proposals. Best comment on each panel wins a multi Trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill!*

Simply create an account at the SXSW panel picker site, then vote and comment at the links below.

Here they are! Go go go!:

Nooks and Grannies: Exploring Older Niches Online:

Open source government: Can collaborative methods save democracy:

Taking Traditional Narrative Online: Extending Film Worlds Interactively:

While you’re at it, and seeing as you’ve now registered, pop a vote and comment into these fantastic friends too There’s a Trillion Dollars for the best comment on theirs too.

Clare Reddington of the world renowned Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, and queen of everything ever:
Pervasive games and playful experiences: Rendering the real world:
Seeing round corners: Artists as innovators in the corporate world:

Mike Bennett of the UK’s largest media network, Bristol Media, and king of all things entreprenuerial:
How networks will make your business fly:
From the kitchen table to $Million business:

*Literally. For the best comment on each panel, we’ll post you a framed Trillion dollar bill for the wall of your gaff. (NOTE: The note is now out of circulation and in no way supports the questionable power situation in Zimbabwe. But it will make you feel mega rich in these times of financial woe)

SXSW is a fantastic festival held in Austin each spring. Help our panels get picked to by voting for our proposals on the hugely democratic SXSW Panel Picker. You’ll need an account at SXSW.com, then go to the links below and click the THUMBS UP icon under the title:

1: Nooks and Grannies: Exploring Older Niches Online:
2: Open source government: Can collaborative methods save democracy:
3: Taking Traditional Narrative Online: Extending Film Worlds Interactively:

If you’ve got some time left after that, here are some of our nearest and dearest who we’d also like to big up. Give them a vote too. We’ll literally kiss you.

Clare Reddington of the wonderland that is the PM Studio:
Pervasive games and playful experiences: Rendering the real world:
Seeing round corners: Artists as innovators in the corporate world:

Mike Bennett of Bristol Media:
How networks will make your business fly:
From the kitchen table to $Million business:

And if you’re going to be there, let us know. We’d love to take in some of the fine Austin nightlife with you.

Posted by Matt Golding