Managing New Media Projects2

Managing new media projects: from concept development to commercial exploitation By: Sofea Zahara June 16, 2003 A white paper about developing and running a new media project from start to finish, and making some money on the way. The lessons introduced cover the range of technologies from web sites to mobile but with special relevance to multi-platform 'hybrid' concepts such as television shows linked to the web or mobile. The paper emphasises the importance of a few key ideas: platform fit, simplicity, revenue and reusability. It is based on over 8 years experience of running such projects on CD-ROM, kiosks, web, TV and mobile and will share some of the mistakes made as well as some of the successful lessons learned. First think up your idea! The most difficult part of concept development is usually the concept. New concepts are hard to imagine and new successful concepts even harder. Actually it is quite easy to have half a good idea but working it into a successful money making venture takes time, teams and imagination. It is worth starting by looking at successful formats that have worked elsewhere and think about changing key components of them. What would happen if you targeted the same idea at a different audience or changed the content or switched platform? Some ideas start by considering the fundamental characteristics of the device that you will be using. Imagine for example that Nokia has released a new phone that takes photographs. What possible web, TV or hybrid concepts could be created that takes advantage of this development? Perhaps a TV show that allows people to show off their best pictures or an online gallery? These are rather weak ideas but could be developed further by considering a specific audience. Perhaps a show for teenagers that allows them to review new clubs, bands and holiday destinations by submitted images and text messages from their mobiles. There are a number of characteristics shared by successful formats: simplicity, revenue, repeatable, viral, multi-platform, self-sustaining and cultural fit. Simple Successful formats are often extremely simple; 12 people live together in a house and are voted out by viewers week by week until the one who is left wins a prize (Big Brother), all the material you see on the TV show is available online in a searchable archive (Delia Online), you can investigate the characters from the drama by reading their diaries on the web (Dawsons Creek), you can buy all the items introduced in the show via an ecommerce store, you can take the role of a detective and carry out experiments to find out who committed the crime (Planet Science Who-dun-it?).

Revenue Even at the beginning of the concept development process you should start thinking about sources of revenue and ideally these should be components of your format. Look at how your audience will actually pay you money: subscriptions (web, TV or email/text alerts), mobile phone revenue (call cost sharing or reverse billing), premium charge telephone lines, ecommerce revenues including books, music, merchandise or introduction fees from other retailers. Of course not every multimedia format has to make money directly. Sponsorship and support from national broadcasters, publishers and other companies play a big role in many projects but in the current climate even these may be more successful where there is a component of self funding. Rights sales on successful formats are also sustaining many of the most successful formats as they are licensed around the world. Repeatable To maximize the licensing revenues and the longevity of your idea, your format should also be repeatable. It is expensive to develop a new show, web site or platform game and the possibilities for further versions of the show need to be considered. Consider how each version of the format will differ and the sorts of embellishments that could be added over time. Will the audience remain interested in second and subsequent versions of the material? Viral In the current new media market your concept will be competing with many others and needs to build recognition if it is to be successful. Ideally your audience will promote it for you by telling their friends about it but your format may contain ‘viral’ elements that make this easier and therefore more likely to happen. Certainly your web and mobile elements should make it easy for your audience to tell their friends about your show. E-cards, free messaging, group prize contests and send page to a friend are all possible tools to facilitate this. Some formats will go further by allowing the audience to contribute material that gets incorporated into the show. This can be extremely successful in building audience loyalty but as many dotcom companies discovered relying on audience contributions as the sole source of your content is unlikely to sustain the concept. Avoid therefore having a format built entirely around reviews, letters, contributions or audience generated music or video. Multi-platform There are strengths and weaknesses in most of the technologies used for delivering new media concepts and your idea should play to the strengths. The web has few revenue models (except ecommerce) with audiences reluctant to pay subscriptions or pay-per-view, television supports limited interactivity and mobile phones are limited in their ability to handle media. But television is fantastic at delivering high quality, high bandwidth material very cheaply to huge audiences, mobile phones are great for low bandwidth interactivity and the web is unrivalled in giving audiences the opportunity to research and respond to information. Your concept will therefore be more likely to succeed if a multi-platform approach is taken using the individual strengths of each medium. Look at combining the

immediate voting power of mobile and premium rate phone lines with the richness of the web and the audience power of TV. Cultural fit A final component of a great concept is its cultural fit. It must work with the audience for whom it is intended and build on prevailing and emerging trends and attitudes. Consider whether you have access to any exclusive content that could form the basis of your idea: an expert on some topic, a collection of artefacts, a place or an author or artist. Steps in the development process Having an idea is only the spark that begins the development process. You will then need to follow a series of steps to get it developed and delivered. These include brainstorming your idea, market testing, financing, rights protection, technology planning, prototyping, construction, testing, delivery and on-going management or maintenance. They are unlikely to proceed in a strict order but will overlap. Many of these tasks are also iterative. Lessons from a later task will feedback and force rethinking of an earlier step. Financing for example may expose a weakness in the idea that will force some changes to your plans. 1. Assemble your core team Before starting the concept development process you will almost certainly have to assemble a small team of people to help you with each stage. It is unlikely that you have all the necessary knowledge or skills yourself and in a process that is similar to creating a film you will need to draw on all sorts of different areas of expertise: money, technology, design, marketing, legal issues and project management for starters. At the OTHER media we assemble a development team of 3-5 people who work on the initial stages of a project. They will include a designer and a technologist to help visualise what we are creating, someone expert in budgeting and costing together with 1 or 2 people to think through the concept in detail. 2. Brainstorming Even with the basics of a concept we will hold a series of brainstorming meetings to develop the concept beyond the initial idea. We are regularly responding to requests for ideas from clients outside the business rather than developing ideas from scratch but the process is the same. Each person at each meeting will have received a brief explaining the opportunity or client that we had identified and some background information on possible ideas. If you are starting with a new team it is important to spend some time getting to know the individuals, their experiences and their expertise before brainstorming about the concept. Although each concept is different we have a set of ideas that we have developed before and inevitably we may start by trying to apply what we have already done to the new problem area. We have a number of checklists that we might use to remind us of things we have done before. Discussing the content opportunities allows us to understand some of the potential for the material while exploring the technologies we have used before lets us think about the concept from a different perspective. Here are a few of the questions we might ask during an initial brainstorming meeting:

Content opportunities 1. What are we starting with? A TV show, a web site, a collection of content items or artefacts, an identified audience need? 2. Are there characters we can create or use to tell a story or explain an issue? 3. What has happened before? Where is the audience starting? Is there a back story that we can tell? 4. Can we find rich detail to tell about the content, characters or idea? 5. How will the story unfold? How important is the order of revealing the ideas? How much will the information change over time? 6. Can we find something that responds to people’s competitive or compulsive nature such as collecting, voting, celebrities, gossip, bargains, gambling or auctions? 7. What visual, audio, music or film material is available? 8. What are other people doing with similar material online, on TV and over phones? 9. Can we take this content and insert it into another format? 10. Who is making money and how in this content area? Technology opportunities 1. Games. Are there simple games, quizzes, “play along” opportunities we can create? 2. Forums. Is there a conversation we can have with the audience through email, forums, chat, instant messenging or bulletin boards? 3. Search. What would people be searching for in a rich database of information around the concept? 4. Ecommerce. What are the ecommerce and merchandising opportunities? 5. Polls. What surveys, polls, questionnaires and voting can be included? 6. Contributiona. What can be ask the audience to contribute, send in or upload? 7. Personalisation. Is there a membership function that can be built upon? Do different visitors receive different experiences? 8. Alerts. Will people want timed information or regular reminders by SMS or email? 9. Content management. How will the content inside the project be updated or discussion moderated? 10. Aggregation and syndication. What information can we pull in from elsewhere? What information can be publish to other sites that will help drive audience to our project? 3. Market testing It is important to test your ideas on a representative audience. For many of our clients this begins with the client themselves who will be paying for our work. We prepare a full presentation including some storyboards to demonstrate our thinking. Storyboards illustrate the flow inside a web site or the interaction sequences between a member of the audience and the TV, mobile or web. We may also create some high quality design visuals to give an idea of the “look and feel” to our project. At this stage we are looking for ways of improving and changing what we are planning to build. The more that can be decided at this stage the less the impact of

changes later in the process. It is, however, often very difficult to tie down all the details until the prototyping starts. 4. Financing, budgeting and revenue A full treatment of financing is beyond the scope of this paper but it is important to include some of the budgetary issues at this point. Our first aim at the OTHER media is to be very realistic about the amount of money the project will require. We create a budget with all the tasks that will need to be completed to get the project into production and all the other costs such as hosting, servers, SMS sending costs, rights acquisition. Of course exact figures are hard to define especially if new software is going to have to be developed. It is rare however for either an external financier or client to agree to an unspecified investment. They may agree to a budgetary range or cap their investment at a clearly defined limit. We based our budgets largely on the cost of time to perform each task and this has proved to be increasingly accurate. Reusing ideas from previous projects has the huge advantage of being a known cost unless radical reimplementation is necessary. We present our budgets with as many assumptions articulated as possible. If, for example, we are building an ecommerce site with 25,000 products we would state this and expect the client to pay extra if 50,000 products were later to be included. For some of our projects the clients are increasingly interested in paying via a revenue sharing option dependent on the success of the project. We would recommend a nonrefundable advance against these royalties and very clear agreement on the basis on which further payments will be made. Take care not to limit the royalties to a specific time period and then to discover that the client delays the launch of the project. You may be able to obtain partial support for your project through local, national or EU development funding particularly if it has a cross-European or strong cultural angle. 5. Legal and rights issues Rights will normally cost you or your client money. You need to make sure that an agreement is in place before your project is fully developed or funded. This is especially true for video and music rights. What else could you use if the material you want is not available? It is a good idea to have alternatives for some of the content. Make sure that when acquiring rights you get the full set you need. Video clips of a performer dancing on a TV show will require both video and music rights. Also ensure that you have the rights for all the places and formats where you want to use the material. Internet and television rights are often agreed separately and having worldwide rights for one and French rights for the other may make your project impossible to sell. Seek professional advice to negotiate rights and also to protect your rights in the format you are creating and prevent someone else simply copying your successful idea.

There are other legal issues that you will have to consider including trademark protection and emerging privacy and data protection laws. Take care for example to make sure that when you invite mobile phone users to receive regular alerts using SMS or email that you require them to opt-in rather than opt-out as this is soon to become law in the EU. You must also make it clear how to stop receiving such alerts by allowing them to unsubscribe easily. A final legal aspect that needs to be considered is the contractual relationships between all the parties involved in the project. It is likely that you will enter into Service Level Agreements with third party services such as payment, hosting and mobile messaging. It is vital that these are written in your favour and this needs professional advice and support. 6. Technology planning This is a hard area and once again specialist help should be sought. It is possible to both over specify and under specify the technology you need particularly for a multi platform project. There are a number of interlocking factors to consider: platforms, levels of service, bandwidth, hosting, loading and scalability. Your first choice is the platform or platforms that you will be using. Make sure that you understand the availability and functionality of each device you will use. This is particularly true if you are proposing to use interactive TV as most countries have several generations of incompatible set-top boxes. Find out what is really possible in your target countries; talk to the operator themselves to check that there are not high access or bandwidth fees to allow you to do what you want. The same applies for mobile devices. Each manufacturer will be keen for your format to drive usage of their latest handset but what is the real audience who have already invested in each device and know how to use it. In particular you should investigate bandwidth realities of all the devices. Of course it is possible to stream video over the web but if demand becomes high the quality degrades for your whole audience and the costs of scaling up can be considerable. The commonest mistake in planning an interactive TV project is to imagine that each viewer has access to an individual stream of controllable video. Although technically feasible, the bandwidth requirements would make this impossibly expensive. Instead your audience is sharing the video experience; you can switch stream but this requires a second channel. Payment and voting systems are a second area where scalability needs to be thought through very carefully. Make sure that your mobile or premium rate supplier can handle thousands or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous calls if your interactivity is linked to a TV show. Even large broadcasters have had problems servicing the popularity of some of their voting systems. Ideally you need to find a technology partner who can demonstrate a proven record of scalability. You don’t want to have to pay for 100,000 simultaneous users until this becomes necessary but you do want to be able to handle this number if and when they arrive.

Explore your payment options before selecting the most appropriate for your application. Remember that most have a set-up cost and you will have to predict the sort of levels of traffic before being able to make an informed choice. There are many to choose from in most countries: a. Subscription Requires a payment site with secure credit card clearance. b. Reverse billing on mobiles. Subscriber agrees to accept text messages and pays a higher than normal fee per message. You receive part of the fee. c. Scratch cards Expnsive to distribute without a media partner. Card holder buys the card and scratches off an area to reveal account number and password. Requires a full payment site to validate card numbers. d. Advertising Possible if you can guarantee high volume traffic to a web site. Disliked on mobile devices. e. Sponsorship Needs high visibility project. f. Ecommerce Needs full ecommerce site and high quality merchandise. g. Premium rate telephone numbers These are relatively cheap to set-up although some audiences (such as children) are reluctant to use them. 7. Prototyping Almost every project will require a prototype, pilot or “proof of concept” to be created to show potential investors, broadcasters, rights holders or simply to iron out all of the technology pitfalls and issues before the main construction phase. As an estimate 10-15% of the budget should be spent on this task although it is often necessary to invest this before the project budget is secured. The secret of good prototyping is to illuminate all the features of the project without having to build everything. For a web site, the OTHER media would build the main core page, specify the full navigation/site map and build (at least in storyboard form) any particularly complex functionality. This would ensure that there are no surprises later. For a mobile application we would create a functional mock-up using existing components to show the sequence of events that the viewer would perform. An interactive TV prototype would probably follow the web site model as above. During prototyping the project manager’s priority is to prevent too much detail being implemented instead of the big picture being explored. You should also use this phase

as an opportunity to create a full set of questions to be answered before the construction phase. 8. Construction and testing Assuming that the planning in the previous phases has been done properly then the construction and testing should be relatively straightforward. There are however many things that can and do go wrong and is worth anticipating some of them and forming a strategy for dealing with them. 9. Quality control Take care to monitor quality throughout the production process. It is often hard for developers to check their own work successfully. •

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Implementation takes longer than expected. - Software development is notorious for taking longer than predicted. Make sure that additional features are not being added to slow down the process. Check that the development team really understands what is wanted. Functional changes during construction. - Small changes are inevitable as you see the finished project coming together but keep bigger changes to a second phase. Unavailability of content. - Ask for content and be clear about formats etc as early as possible. Make sure that everyone understands what will happen if the content does not arrive Delayed sign-off - Agree timescale for sign-off approval at the start of the project and try to make sure that few people need to be involved. Staffing problems. - Prepare for team members being ill or taking holidays by planning in some slack into your project plans. Conflicts with other projects. - Again, don’t plan your team’s time down to the last minute. It is inevitable that they will be needed for other activities. Testing time gets squeezed. - Start the testing before everything is finished and have a separate team with a clear set of tests to make this happen. Design your project so that some of it can be tested before everything is complete. Testing will highlight problems that need fixing and then testing again· Building everything yourself - Find external agencies and contractors that can help you complete things on time. Outsource the unfamiliar. Platform difficulties - Recognise that technology will let you down. Make sure that you have a full set of deployment hardware to test the work as you are proceeding.

10. Delivery and marketing One vital part of the project is knowing when development is finished and the project ready to launch. It is easy to want to go back and redo some aspects instead of facing the audience but this should be resisted. Deliver and then improve. This is not a film and most new media projects evolve after launch as some things are successful and others not. Make sure that you have planned a proper strategy for marketing your work particularly if it is mainly online. Many web projects produce disappointing initial results because no one knows they are there. Marketing online is an art rather than a science and will take weeks or months of effort (and results don’t show immediately).

the OTHER media has a specialist team to help clients get exposure for their work online. 11. On-going management or maintenance Few new media projects stop with delivery. They need constant attention, moderation and feeding with content. A good content management system will allow a team of non technical staff to make this happen. These tools allow new content to be added along with images, video and music. the OTHER media’s content management system, OTHER objects also allows the timetabling of future content changes allowing for example a whole month’s daily fresh content to be prepared in one go and released every day as required. If you have allowed contributions from your audience then this will normally require editing and approval before it is published. This helps keep quality high and can avoid legal repercussions such as libel. A well known British TV show became the target of a sustained attempt to beat the moderators by a group of people texting their comments into a linked chat area. The cost of moderating every contribution was a significant drain on the resources for this show. There are technical maintenance and planning costs that need to be considered postlaunch too. You will need to keep a close watch on the levels of traffic you are achieving and respond to increases by scheduling upgrading of both hardware and bandwidth. Conclusions Running a successful multiplatform new media project is a major undertaking requiring many different skills and the avoidance of many pitfalls. It can however be very rewarding particularly if you can develop a reusable format or reusable components that can be applied to a variety of different projects. The key is a mixture of luck, simplicity and good planning. Over several projects you will learn what works and be able to use these ideas as a platform for future work. Don’t be over ambitious for your early projects, select the easiest technologies and make sure that you understand what is and isn’t possible. There are a number of interesting avenues to follow out there that may provide the basis for new formats and creative ideas. Two that we are watching at the OTHER media are Multimedia Messaging for mobile phones (MMS) and location-based services. Multimedia Messaging allows images to be captured and transmitted via the phone and this allows new forms of contribution and involvement for both web and TV projects. The next generation of mobiles are also likely to be location aware; able to compute where they are in a town or building. This can form the basis for delivering information based on location or as the foundations for some highly addictive games. the OTHER media has been in this business for nearly nine years and we are often asked whether it has become repetitive and predictable. While it has become easier to cost and plan some sorts of projects the really creative mixes of television, web and mobile are as exciting and chaotic as ever.