When a gimmick becomes a reality.

“Your brand is in my content…. Now my content is broadcasting your Brand!”  This was the strategy driving our sponsorship model going into production on AnteRockstar Season 2.  ‘Branded Content’ was the hot new thing on the media scene at the time…. And in many ways it still is.  More than product placement, branded content demonstrates in context how a company intersects with the customer, telling the impact of that brand on the outcome of that customer’s story.  What better endorsement of the truth of an advertising platform, slogan, or marketing campaign?  What truer testimonial of a corporation’s collective standard of performance than an actual in situ service demonstration?   Surely such an endorsement would be worth its weight in gold.

From our article originally published Thursday, ‎April ‎19, ‎2007,

‘The future of brand equity will no longer be reach and frequency but rather honesty. With so many consumers exercising their right to an opinion in the ever growing expanse of rhetoric that is the internet, companies will not only need to propagate their brand, but also produce a quality product as an offering to the consumers.”

The article was titled to play on the old marketing gimmick retelling the creation of Reeses peanut butter cups when; inadvertently; a bar of chocolate and a jar of peanut butter collide to produce a new sensation in snacking food.  We hoped Anterockstar would prove to be a sensational demonstration of collaboration...Or so we thought at the time.  We intersected with several “brands” who had a vested interest in the success of the AnteRockstar, series and solicited their collaboration.  Most of these ‘brands’ are bands whose enthusiasm for sharing their art, and keen understanding of their impact on their audience amazed us, and taught us more than we thought was humanly possible about how to impact people on a deep, long, and wide level.  Their intersection with us was the fuel that drove the story forward…they played their ‘rock’n’roll’ role.

Some of these brands are public entities, government agencies, and other bodies politic.  We captured their role too.  The body politic has little interest in understanding its impact on its customer, they’re focused on their metric measure of performance.  Their ‘collective’ understanding of their impact on their customers is limited to a statistical analysis that they buy and pay for.  This wasn’t surprising to us, given our experience in the marketing research field.  There’s an art to telling the truth…. You can only tell as much as people will believe, otherwise you get accused of lying.  Statistics on the other hand;  those are damnable lies.  From the professional researchers perspective, clients only pay to hear what they’re doing right… they largely ignore what they’re doing wrong, unless it blows up on them, then it becomes a fire to put out.

Courting the body politic resulted in more than one fire in the Anterockstar storyline, though being a professional production promoting a reality series, each corporate entity with whom we intersected, who had a demonstrated interest in our success, were contacted and presented with our proposal and advertising model.  They chose their involvement from there.  Some of these ‘brands’ are represented by private individuals who shall remain nameless and faceless to protect their privacy, though their actions on behalf of the Corporations they serve stand as testament to the standards to which those Corporations aspire… or not.

Then there’s the public characters in our story, in all their glory, who knew what they were doing the whole time….or should have cause we told them what we were doing from the beginning….


Some of them just didn’t believe us.

Your Brand is on my Content! Now, My Content is broadcasting you Brand!

Originally Posted On : Thursday, ‎April ‎19, ‎2007

The title of this article is a play on the old marketing gimmick of Reeses peanut butter cups where inadvertently a bar of chocolate and a jar of peanut butter collide to produce a new sensation in snacking food.

In a debate all too reminiscent of the Napster debacle of nearly a decade ago, the record companies, television broadcasters, and other IP copyright and trademark holders are turning up the heat on YouTube and the like, over their proprietary “content” being propagated on the internet without their permission, to the point of involving the courts in an effort to quash the swell...
As in the Napster case, copyright holders are holding media channels accountable for the actions of end users, even though YouTube and their brethren clearly outline in their terms of use that such activities are restricted.

These end users, the very market that the copyright holders are trying to attract, are presumably uploading and broadcasting these materials because they endorse these products, and are simply propagating the content.  In other words advertising.
Unlike the Napster case these materials are not being downloaded for the purposes of personal use and distributed  since downloading on YouTube is difficult at best and not generally accessible to the YouTube audience nor user. Following this line of thought perhaps The shoe should be on the other foot...  In my humble opinion... Google should be sending the copyright holders a bill for advertising and hosting.

This is not a new concept as in the above Recess example used it in one of the most  successful example of Branded Content in history:

Although Viacom reported increased traffic to their websites after they insisted their content be removed from YouTube, traffic is no longer king in this dawning age of user generated life.... CONTENT is king.  Not to mention that neither Viacom nor YouTube (yet) advertise on their sites, so how exactly has Viacom been hurt in all this?

So what if their content is being viewed on YouTube as opposed to their own property, the only difference here is who's footing the storage bill.
Of course copyright and trademark holders will tell you that restricting access to their material on the YouTube scale ensures they retain control over it, and how it is viewed/distributed.  Fair enough.  What they don't realize is that retaining that control, is, well… an illusion.
Consumers have always had the power to control brands and their success, they just don't realize it (and until now, didn’t have the tools to propagate their views on a mass scale).  How many of us have tried a product, liked it and told our friends to try it? How many of us have condemned a brand, for a poor quality or lack of service, propagating our experience to anyone who will listen in general conversations at dinner parties?
YouTube and other social networking sites are simply the next step in this evolution.  They allow consumers to broadcast their opinions on brands, product experiences, music preferences, media viewing habits to a wider audience.

An attempt to control ones Brand becomes a futile exercise at best.  How do you reconcile a consumer’s opinion after he has purchased your product?
Case in point
Billy buys a bottle of Coke and a bottle of Pepsi. Blindfolded he takes the Pepsi challenge online for his YouTube audience. Neither Pepsi nor Coke can control the outcome of such an experiment, neither can they dictate the impact of the results of said taste test. The truth will be in the pudding as it were, and the brand that Billy likes the best will win out.

Billy’s opinion is propagated to his audience, and Billy’s friends decide to take the challenge themselves and discover which brand they truly prefer.

The future of brand equity will no longer be reach and frequency but rather honesty. With so many consumers exercising their right to an opinion in the ever growing expanse of rhetoric that is the internet, companies will not only need to propagate their brand, but also produce a quality product as an offering to the consumers.

Einstein's "Spooky Action at a Distance"

The more you study history the more you realize that everything moves in cycles, a slow progression, trapped in a back and forth, give and take, wobble all the way.

Much as the universe expands outward from the big bang.  The sun remains trapped in the orbit of the galaxy’s rotation.  The earth revolves around the sun in a slow steady progress through the void.

So too is it with the evolution of mankind.  Throughout history, every conflict demonstrates the battle between our individual points of view, the polar opposites and every opinion in-between   battle it out on this stage of existence. Negative versus positive night and day as the planet revolves. And every action taken by both sides has an equal and opposite reaction, and when the dust settles we as a species have taken one small step forward in the cycle of evolution.

Full Circle.

We started studying Social media in 2003.  At the time the phenomenon consisted mainly of a growing community of bloggers, chronicling their lives on a day to day basis.. Over time the patterns began to emerge. Year over year similar events transposed over periods of time from years past. And it became clear that we were likely to face similar victories or challenges in our lives depending on where we were in the yearly progression around the sun.

When it was first conceived Anterockstar was intended to be a 10 week demo product for a social media platform / “real life” lifestyle webzine we had conceived of in June of 2005. Intended to be a platform for real everyday people, to illustrate the possibility that consumers themselves could become viable media product. Our initial pitches to investors failed, leaving us financial unable to proceed.

However in February of 2006 a local radio station was holding a contest for a guaranteed audition for Rockstar Supernova. The resulting failed attempt to create demo for the contest, served as the perfect vehicle for our concept. Take an average person and chronicle the journey of turning her into a “Rockstar”.

The idea sprouted wings and By that June we were in los Angeles pitching our concept to a panel of media moguls hot to capitalize on the next  lonely girl 15. Having secured a production partner, and joined on stage by our platform partner to develop the site, we premiered the first episode of Anterockstar on June 6, 2006.

666 a bad omen. Enter conflict stage left.

By the end of June Our production partner had quit the series, over a difference of opinion.  Controlling the outcome of the project versus “letting go”.

Real Reality vs. Produced Reality.

And so began a ten year long progress of give and take, back and forth, challenges honed by victories, rolling year over year..

One of many examples of which can be found with the above noted Rockstar Supernova contest.. it reappears in an new form when in 2008 we featured Lukas Rossi (winner of Rockstar Supernova)in an episode of Season 2.

Spooky Action. The universe unfolds.

Fast forward to February 2016 where we began participating in a 10 week workshop that takes amateur musicians, sticks them together to form a band, and ends in a live on stage performance..  sound familiar… Full circle…

My job as an editor and filmmaker is to try and capture and present these subtitle nuances, that we call life, and present them in a way so as to inspire an audience, to take a moment and appreciate our existence and its ever evolving give and take , noting that through every conflict we take one small determined step forward.

Going back to school

This year marks the 10th anniversary of my entry into the entertainment industry.  Prior to 2006, I was a ‘business professional’ trained to analyse and optimize the bottom line.  Boy has alot changed since then.

It has been a traumatic ten years.  The reality webseries documenting this transition, Anterockstar, premiered on (of all days) 6/6/6 in Los Angeles at iHollywood Forum.  I came back from that trip with interest and contacts from AOL.

Then it all went AWOL.

We ploughed through four years of brick walls to produce 3 and a half seasons and a documentary feature called Shwatarded before we put Anterockstar on hiatus for the sake of mine and my family’s mental health.  We didn’t stop producing film; which is our passion and ultimate purpose; we just stopped producing Anterockstar.

In 2010, we took down the site and stopped documenting our struggle to focus on our recovery.  Producing and airing Anterockstar had cost us more than we could ever imagine.  We have always been boostrapped financially, but along the way we suffered devastating losses of friendships, family, and mentors that we could never have anticipated, that decimated us.

We needed to recover and reconstruct our identities.

A friend who has been passively observing since the very beginning recently reflected to me that the story hadn’t exactly turned out the way he imagined.  Me neither.  All I wanted to do was learn to sing and perform.  What I did end up doing was learning so many new skills it makes my head spin.    When I look back on all the things I’ve done, it’s been an incredible journey on which I’ve met some of the most incredibly talented people who have taught me more about life in our short encounters than I would have learned in 90 years in my office cubicle; said passive friend included... They are my heroes.

So back to the editing room we go with a new spin on Anterockstar and an ending in sight.  Although the storyline hasn’t played itself out to the ending I had imagined (yet), I have learned to do the one thing that set the original premise of the series.
Now I can sing.

In the mean time, enjoy a look back at where it started.
“ Not alot of time to turn a 33 year old mother of four office manager who likes to sing in the car into a Rockstar ”

The pic above is a screenshot of what the site looked like when we launched in 2006.
www.anterockstar.com the 10th anniversary edition premieres sometime this month... Anterockstar the series re-boots on my 44th birthday, Easter Sunday, March 27th 2016.

You won’t believe your eyes.