|
Beyond
channel surfing, mobile and Internet audiences have fingers that
move much more quickly. It is necessary to somehow catch the
consumer in 10 to 15 seconds. Viral video success is surprising and
getting more than one visionary enthusiastic about. "Comedy and
music is what captivates users the most," says Frank
Chindamo, President and Creative Manager at the North American
company Fun Little Movies and adjunct professor at the
University of South California, where he teaches a course he himself
designed on Viral Mobile and Internet Production and Scriptwriting. |
|
|
We are talking about the future
of television. What’s next for TV? What’s coming for IPTV and
mobile TV? What kind of contents? Comedy, drama, gossip, celebrities,
weather, adult and teen programming… Which will be the original form
of mobile entertainment? There is something called Viral Video. It is
defined by Wikipedia as modern, entertaining and user generated
content that is then distributed among millions of people through the
Internet.
Which is today’s most successful Internet genre?
Music is successful at Youtube site, but the user generated comedy
I am talking about is even more successful. UGC may mean rebellious
cretin with a camera, it may also mean rebellious cretin with a camera
recording girls` underwear collection. Advertisers and companies
such as Dove are venturing and requiring generated commercials in
websites. Isn’t this attractive and original?
Cultural universe language
What makes viral content especially applicable to comedies? It could
be applied to any genre. Expert Chindamo`s answer is that it must have
a good title, since on the net and phones people usually see only the
titles, so it must be ingenious. “At Fun Little Movies we produce a
show called Love Bytes, which can be reached at www.lovebytes.net and
is about rupture and entertaining. It is supposed to be fun, as one of
its tricks is a game on international words at an intuitive level.
Instead of using words with a cultural base, they use words that are
in the cultural universe such as love, fun, small, film, etc.,” he
states.
What must a mobile episode have to be successful?
Great content. It does not matter whether they are dealing with
great works of art or just any topic: one way or another it must have
irresistible content, and that is how they become viral and
extremely profitable. Chindamo says they have thirty different Fun
Little Movies distribution contacts around the world. “We were very
lucky to find a kind of secret source to make comedies that cross
international frontiers and so we got an international audience,
like in the case of Air Game in South Africa, Hungary and India;
Media
Gateway in United Arab Emirates and Israeli audience. Central comedy
is extremely popular here in the US, but most of them have American
cultural referents that cannot be translated and do not go over
frontiers. We have achieved exactly the opposite,” he affirms. A
further issue the expert mentions is the demographic one. “Most of
mobile phone users are mobile TV subscribers, and it is made up of
more men than women. Many of my competitors, such as comedy.com, are
targeted at men between 18 and 24 years old. We target at this group,
but also at their women and children,” he specifies and maintains
they should aim at general audiences.
|
|
