TV people like to talk an awful lot about the impact of social on content creation and the viewer experience these days, but what do they actually mean?

Well, if you’re looking for the answer, you might look to Geordie Shore, the hit Viacom series that’s become a phenomenal success for MTV UK over the last three years.

Born from Viacom’s number 1 international series Jersey Shore, and now broaching its sixth series, Geordie Shore is MTV UK’s highest-rating show ever, regularly reaching audiences of 1.5 million each week for all viewers, smashing its slot average six times over. The recent finale of Series 5 even delivered its highest ever ratings and a record audience for MTV in the UK.

And now Geordie Shore has gone global. Based on the unprecedented multi-season success in the UK and initial launches on MTV in Australia, Southern Europe, and mtv.com in the US, Geordie Shore now airs across all MTV networks across Asia, Latin America and Northern Europe – the first time a local MTV commission from anywhere outside the US has achieved this kind of exposure.

The reason for its success? Social engagement from the moment of inception.

Having cast eight vibrant Geordies to spark initial intrigue and engagement with millennials across the UK, we tuned into real conversations that lots of people were having (before the show even went to air). By massively amplifying those conversations, we created something really powerful. On that basis alone, Geordie Shore is a pretty good example of how social media is used to drive the content on our screens.

But it’s important to stress that social media is more than simply a staging post on the road to great content, or a place us TV executives go to plunder ideas. Increasingly, it’s the framework within which everything operates. For us at VIMN, ‘social’ is built into content from the moment of inception, and we start putting down the social media footprint for our shows before they’re even on air.

To see it in action, you only have to look at the Jersey / Geordie format. All the characters in both shows have a social presence; they are interacting in real time with the linear broadcast, and continue to engage with the audience long after the credits have finished rolling, through branded web content and other channels. We’re constantly seeing just how potent this combination can be in amplifying our linear programing and driving the audience back to it.

Meanwhile, the format reveals how show-time itself has been transformed, too. We’ve evolved from making programmes with a single, 24-minute narrative arc, to constructing them in such a way that the audience is rewarded with a series of “peaks” as the storyline unfolds – each providing a heightened opportunity for second and third-screen immersion which, in turn, creates the social buzz that sustains engagement.

Increasingly, our biggest challenge as programme-makers is to keep these peaks rolling in for the duration of a half-hour “format” show; it’s not enough to just sit back and enjoy the ratings. This may all sound quite familiar to anyone who plays video games, and for good reason. Both are built around the same sense of immediacy; of constant, “quick-hit” discovery for the consumer. (The parallel becomes even more striking when you consider the ways in which the two enable real-time social interaction. It’s almost inevitable that the content-technologists of the future will discover how to integrate them).

Programme making has evolved a great deal, even in the last 9 months – social, 2nd and 3rd screen narrative all impact the decisions in each episode, more than ever before, and not just on channels like MTV. Downton Abbey, ITV’s most successful drama of recent years, follows the “multi-peak” model surprisingly closely. Compare an action-packed episode of Downton with a languid episode of ITV’s 1980s equivalent, Brideshead Revisited, and the difference is clear.

At VIMN, we’ve always specialised in making fast-paced content, and leading the way in new formats. Programmes like Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore and now Gandia Shore in Spain, are taking that know-how to new levels.

Just a year ago, when you thought of a TV series, you would probably still look at it in terms of episodes and storylines. Now, you’d be more likely to look at it as a series of moments, each with a social dimension and a continuing narrative in the non-linear world.

Now that’s what we mean when we talk about creating a social experience.

Kerry Taylor is SVP & general kanager, Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN) UK, Australia, Hungary, Russia and Israel; Philip O’Ferrall is SVP Digital, VIMN.

The past decade has seen the video-on-demand landscape change considerably with the arrival of newer technologies such as true streaming VoD, now steadily replacing nVoD. Satellite operators have reacted to an increasingly competitive market, launching DVR-based and broadband-delivered VoD services, allowing them to compete more effectively with cable and IPTV. Competition is not only coming from within the pay TV space though. As IHS Screen Digest says in this exclusive white-paper, “over-the-top services are starting to pose a threat to the pay TV model, although the threat remains nascent, for now“.

Some of the key facts and figures in this review:

- At year-end 2012, less than 350 million households globally were enabled to access on-demand services via their pay TV service (via DVR-based or streaming VoD solutions). By 2017, this number is forecast to increase to nearly 500 million households.

- IHS also estimates that pay TV consumtion has seen a ten fold increase between 2005 and 2012, with approximately 22bn on-demand content views globally in 2012 via pay TV VoD services, forecast to exceed 40bn in 2016. Pay TV VoD revenues are expected to exceed $8bn globally by 2017, growing at an annual rate of 15 per cent.

- Broadband penetration growth is expanding the reach of online VoD services. IHS estimates there were nearly 180m active connected devices in Western Europe and North America in 2012 – this is forecast to grow to nearly 500m by year-end 2016.

- With an ever-growing number of connected devices entering the market, IHS predicts PCs will represent less than 20 per cent of total active connected devices globally by the end of 2016.

To download this MIPBlog-exclusive white paper from IHS Screen Digest, click here

IHS Screen Digest is the largest media-focused research firm in the world with more than 50 analysts covering over 65 global territories.

Let me start by assuming something. I’m assuming that as you’re visiting MIPBlog, you have some sort of connection with the media industry. Moreover, you’re interested in where the industry as a whole is heading, what business opportunities lurk around the corner and what new ways of storytelling are on the rise. This leads me to assuming that you’ve also heard the term “transmedia” before.

I’m an avid believer in the powers of transmedia storytelling; fusing stories and story arcs through a common storyworld, to offer new entry points into the stories, new ways of interaction for the audience and new ways to monetise the content. I don’t believe these powers are going away anytime soon. What might be going away though, is the term by which they are called. At MIPTV a month ago I heard several voices from the TV industry confidently dismissing “transmedia” as no longer relevant.

So, is transmedia becoming a redundant term already? Will buyers and sellers and marketers and writers no longer have to care about such extravagances? Perhaps it’s still not really that simple. To be fair, the people I listened to and talked to who were dismissive of the term, were so mostly since they felt the media industry has already moved into a multiplatform territory, and the term, in their mind, was no longer necessary or even relevant for future use.

To get a second – and a third, and a fourth – opinion, I turned to the people who work with transmedia storytelling on a daily basis.

Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment has not observed such a trend, but rather sees a world where there is not nearly enough knowledge about transmedia:

“As Starlight Runner comes into greater contact with the corporate space and as we expand our teaching efforts globally, we are constantly shaken from the false impression that knowledge of transmedia practice is in any way ubiquitous. Though I’d be the first to celebrate mass acceptance, it is clear to me that the skill set [necessary] to do transmedia well is still very rare and that we are still in a phase of precedent setting rather than business as usual.”

Rob Pratten of Transmedia Storyteller and creator of transmedia narrative engine Conducttr is one of the people for whom transmedia actually is business as usual. His outlook is even more positive:

“I think the situation has improved actually. Transmedia is becoming more recognised as a term even if its meaning is different to different people :) I’m using it more rather than less.”

Fresh from the successful Kickstarter campaign for the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD) – an adaption of Pride and Prejudice, rolling out on YouTube in 100 short clips, averaging 300.000 viewers per clip – Jay Bushman thinks we’re in a transitional phase:

“I think transmedia is a transitional term, like kinescope or nickelodeon. It’s going to be replaced at some point. Or maybe it won’t be replaced, but people will come to regard it as a more general term and one that doesn’t necessary need to fit a specific set of criteria.  Right now, there’s too much debate over whether something “is or is not really transmedia.” As if a litmus test for transmedia-ness it important or useful. There’s much less arguement over whether something “is or is not television.” We all recognise television when we see it – even if it comes at us in new ways and new channels. And yet television is a similar word to transmedia, but we’ve come to associate it with a much larger set of things than just “something you can view from far away.”"

Jay is doing his bit to aid the transition along; he acknowledges the strengths of traditional television as well:

“I think constantly about how to tell an LBD style story for traditional television. Everybody is so swept up lately in the Netflix “House Of Cards” model of releasing everything all at once, that I think many are missing the power of serialisation. Those pauses in between episodes or installments are the source of the power of a show, and the way that it can capture your imagination. “

Lizzie Bennet Diaries could serve as one example for the TV industry to look at when wonder whether transmedia storytelling has a value or not. The numbers are pretty impressive, as Jay explains:

“LBD had an average audience of 300k views per episode, and that was maintained all the way through 100 episodes. Even when in order to understand or care about episode 99, you needed to have watched all 98 that came before, we didn’t lose our audience. Anecdotally, we know that they stuck around because of the transmedia engagement in between the epsiodes made the show feel not like a series of individual epsiodes, but a single coherent experience.  But there are no metrics I can use right now to show how much a Twitter conversation between two charatcers on a Tuesday drives people to watch an audience on Thursday. But I know it works, and I’m looking for an opportunity to prove it on a larger scale.  LBD had a total audience of between 35 and 40 million – numbers that networks would kill for.  We can give it to them, if they’re willing to take a chance.”

So, is transmedia dead? Well, not as long as no better term comes along to explain the media world of today and the most complex ways of telling compelling stories using the technologies available. As soon as that happens though…

Photo: Tim Kring: “The ubiquity of the pen doesn’t mean everybody’s Hemingway”

Digital issues weren’t just front and centre at MIPTV and MIPCube 2013: they were buzzing round the sides and sneaking up on delegates from behind, too.

Excitement and arguments around digital disruption for the television industry were everywhere you turned during the conference. Here are some of the key points picked out from MIPBlog’s live coverage.

An excellent place to start is April 7′s MIPCube PLUS session where Somethin’ Else’s Paul Bennun outlined an important discussion for the industry: telling the difference between traditional audiences, and the new generation of ‘users’ of their content.

“Making differentiation between audiences and users is the most important thing we can all do to safeguard the industries we work in,” said Bennun. “Audiences are passive bodies of people. Users are active. Users actively operate systems. Audiences passively consume programmes. For us, this is the fundamental driving idea behind all the projects that we design.”

He went on to note that the challenges posed by this difference extend to the way the industry measures its success. “Audiences are measured by voodoo! Users are measured by numbers,” said Bennun. “Google and YouTube do not measure their users by a 5,000-person sample.”

YouTube, of course, has a lot more than 5,000 people watching videos on its site – it’s up to 1bn monthly active users in 2013, which offers huge scale for producers. Yet there were some interesting discussions during MIPTV about scale, and whether it’s as important as engagement: people subscribing to channels and watching lots of a creator’s videos.

“There are things that matter more than scale, and I believe that engagement is one of the most important metrics today, and in the future,” said Blip CEO Kelly Day at MIPCube PLUS (admittedly while pitching her company’s video site as a valuable alternative to YouTube for brands and ad buyers).

Yet producers are finding this engagement on YouTube too, especially multi-channel networks (MCNs for short) like Machinima. Its CEO Philip DeBevoise outlined some stats during a session on building a loyal audience online: 210m monthly unique users, 1.9bn monthly video views, and viewers who “spend over 100 minutes a month watching our content”.

How about viewers spending over 100 minutes in an evening watching someone’s content? The phenomenon of “binge-viewing” – watching entire series in clumps of episodes, or even in a single weekend – was a big topic at MIPTV this year, fuelled by Netflix’s decision to release all the episodes of series like Hemlock Grove and House of Cards at once for fans to binge on.

“It’s up to the viewer’s discretion how and when they want to watch it,” said actress Famke Janssen during a Hemlock Grove session.

“It’s really nice, and it gives you a flow that you miss in the traditional way of watching television on a weekly basis.” The show’s director Eli Roth agreed, and added that there were creative implications: “It changed the way you could edit things. We didn’t have to have the scare of the week or the monster of the week.”

There has been plenty of discussion in the past about the consumer appeal of binge-viewing, but the knock-on effects for creatives are just as interesting. Former Heroes showrunner Tim Kring has lots to say on this score during his keynote interview at MIPTV, too.

“The idea of watching these shows in a condensed period has almost taken over from the idea of reading a book… people used to say ‘I’m reading this really great book’. Now they say ‘I’m midway through the third season of Breaking Bad’,” he said.

“It’s also changing the length of these series and the way we are thinking about the number of episodes. In the same way that a song is two and a half minutes on the radio, or a movie is two hours in the movie theatre, 10, 12 or 13 episodes seems to be the right length for this binge-viewing that people want to do.”

One of the other trends at MIPTV was the sense of established TV producers trying to make order from the (exciting) chaos of the online video world, learning from the successful multi-channel networks and applying this to their own content.

The keynote from Endemol’s Tim Hincks was very good on this score, as he outlined his company’s approach to YouTube. “It is the Wild West, it’s anarchy. So the idea of treating YouTube – as some people tended to do a year ago – as an alternative to a broadcaster is in my opinion not right, or at least not the whole story,” he said.

Hincks advised TV companies to stop thinking about how many videos or channels they had on Google’s service, but how to forge better links between them and use cross-promotion smartly.

“It’s not how much you’ve got, it’s what you do with them. It’s tying them together and marketing to the consumers and YouTubers on the different channels. One of the things we’re trying to get access to is the advertising dollar, and to do that you have to have scale.” And engagement, of course…

It was clear from Tim Kring’s views, and the separate keynote starring CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker, that individuals within the TV industry are relishing the creative chaos that online is bringing.

“The number one rule in doing content for the web is to make sure the content is specific to the device. You can’t just move television over to the web, and vice versa,” said Zuiker, whose online work is increasingly funded by brands rather than broadcasters.

“Our slate’s about 80% web and technology, and about 20% day-job television. That’s how busy we are in this technology world, because the demand is so huge. Brands are saying ‘we don’t find a lot of value in the 30-second spot any more. ‘Help us find things that have a shelf-life and have scale’.”

Other takeaways from MIPTV’s digital sessions? Mobile loomed large, again, with plenty of talk about second-screen and branded apps. However, MIPCube PLUS attendees were given a stark warning that the world of apps holds just as many pitfalls for content creators as it does potential.

“App stores are an unrelenting torrent of absolute crap that you have to navigate to find what you want,” said Ian Wharton from British developer Zolmo, who didn’t mince his words. “Anyone can make an app and submit it, and millions of people can download it. And the quality is not premium, by and large.”

The app stores are haystacks, and your TV apps are just yet more needles trying to be found by users, in short. Yet there was also positive (yet realistic) talk about the growing importance of mobile viewing from Anne de Kerckhove, managing director for France and Southern Europe at Collider, in her Maximising digital and TV content value across platforms session.

“We don’t talk enough about mobile probably yet at MIPTV, because it’s not a medium we’re particularly comfortable with yet, but it’s extremely powerful,” she said. “Smartphone penetration is immense, and we use our phones to watch content all the time.”

Thankfully, there are still plenty of startups and developers thinking creatively about how to help people discover and watch TV shows and video content.

The MIPCube TV Hack threw up some excellent ideas, including Metricator – a slick way to watch the most popular current videos on YouTube – and Twitter Timelord, which rolled back people’s Twitter timelines when watching shows on catch-up, so they could see tweets posted at the time they originally aired.

Social teletext, a teddy bear-shaped TV companion for kids also starred, along with the TV Hack winner: Reactive Video Player from Andrei Gheorghe and Audrey Martel, which was a way to control multi-camera footage through gestures.

Meanwhile, Israeli startup Stevie, whose apps turn online video and social graphs into a “beautiful broadcast TV experience” through apps, won the MIPCube Lab startups contest, and is certainly one to watch.

It’s fun, interesting and important to talk technology at shows like MIPTV, but I was taken with BSkyB’s Sophie Turner Laing’s reminder that it’s just as vital not to forget about the actual shows and videos we’re watching on these apps and digital services.

“I always hear a lot about disruptive technology, but is that really the right word? Do customers want disruption? That sounds uncomfortable! Do they want to binge constantly? Sounds life-threatening! Or do they want convenience, flexibility and simplicity? Those are all much better words in my experience,” she said.

“Let’s stop talking about the bloody pipes. Let’s talk about the shows, because that’s what we’re all here for.”

Tim Kring offered his own gentle warning about getting too carried away with suggestions that digital distribution is throwing down the traditional barriers to entry in the TV market, too. “The ubiquity of the pen doesn’t mean everybody’s Hemingway. You still need to tell a great story,” he said.

For all the digital fun and frolics at MIPTV 2013, Kring’s words were a healthy reminder that the most exciting thing about all these technologies is the fact that they’re helping great storytelling (and storytellers) find their audiences.

Or, indeed, users.

Stuart Dredge is an official MIPTV/MIPCOM liveblogger (read all his posts here) and tech blogger (The Guardian Apps Blog, MusicAlly, The Appside). Be sure to follow him on Twitter here!

Love in the End, a feature film made for chocolate brand Lacta, was a box office hit and transmedia sensation in Greece

This year’s MIPTV was packed with great content for brands, in part because TV producers and networks are beginning to take them more seriously as collaborative partners, not just as “ATM machines”, as Shine 360′s Ben Liebmann commented at MIPFormats April 6.

I want to kick you off with Ogilvy’s Best of Brands & Content Screenings, simply because it was packed with clear case studies of how brands are contributing to today’s entertainment — including in the longer-form. Here you’ll see how Coke Zero started a dance craze, how Renault developed one of the coolest live music concepts since Daft Punk’s first helmets, how The Creators Project “redefined” everyday cultural moments, and how Lacta, a chocolate company, launched a promotional film that dominated Greece’s box office on Valentine’s Day. Here’s the case study for the latter:

I was also deeply interested by how brands are changing news media. Gen-Y site Vice announced the launch of Vice News during a “New Media Moguls” session. Among other things, this youth-oriented news site will work closely with brands to produce content more relevant to a jaded market. Instead of shaping news to what brands want, they’ll have to work hard to meet Vice’s standards for relevance and quality. Case in point: Vice’s collab with Intel for the aforementioned “The Creators Project“, for which Vice won the Brand of the Year award. Full presentation below.

The United Nations Global Education First session, featuring Gordon Brown and Ziauddin Yousafzai, also made an enormous splash. In addition to hearing about their goal to ensure all children be in school by 2015, as well as touching stories about Malala’s continued fight for girls’ education in Pakistan, we met brands like Gucci, TV network Discovery and ONG Room to Read, who are working on closing the gap between less-fortunate folks and educational tools.

Specifically, Gucci’s Chime for Change campaign is production-heavy and celebrity-rich. Its goal: to support the empowerment of girls and women.

Dan Biddle, the head of UK broadcast partnerships at Twitter, provided helpful tips on amplifying second-screen engagement, much of which are invaluable for brands. He clearly demonstrated how brands can use Twitter to engage people in immediate ways that more resemble play than marketing. For racy British documentary “Dogging Tales“, Lynx leapt in on the conversation, depicting its team holding “crisis meetings” while wearing masks similar to the “doggers”.

‘Crisis meetings’ all morning thanks to Les in #DoggingTales last night… We’ve concluded there is no crisis twitter.com/lynxeffect/sta…

— The Lynx Effect (@lynxeffect) 5 avril 2013

But one of my favourite examples of coherent brand integration was Intel and Toshiba’s “The Beauty Inside”, an ongoing web series that recounts the life of a lovesick man who wakes up every morning in the body of a different person. With this format, users were able to add to the story with their own faces and imagery. The tale is as magical as the telling is innovative.

This is just a tiny portion of the pluck and imagination brands demonstrated at MIPTV this year. I can’t wait for what’s to come.

Angela Natividad is an official MIPTV/MIPCOM liveblogger (read all her posts here), social media strategist for leading brands, and contributor to brands blog Adverve. Be sure to follow her on Twitter here!

The US-based streaming service is once again all over the headlines, as it announced that Hemlock Grove, the Eli Roth-produced horror series presented at MIPTV and third Netflix original series, was more watched on its opening night than House of Cards, the Kevin Spacey-led political thriller and the service’s second original series.

The approach of producing its own shows definitely seems to be paying off for Netflix: its turnover just hit the billion-dollar mark, and shares were up 19% April 22, just after Hemlock Grove’s opening weekend, reported AllThingsD. Fresh from this success, the company’s once-beleaguered CEO Reed Hastings penned a 13-page manifesto on how he sees the future: “Netflix Wins, Apps Win and So Do HBO, ESPN and the Cable Guys“, as AllThingsD resumed it. The reality is somewhat less egalitarian: as QZ pointed out, Netflix is now bigger than HBO in the US, in subscriber terms…

More innovation came from Amazon, whose own original series’ pilots – including the Sony-produced Zombieland and Alpha House, a political comedy starring John Goodman – went live April 19, so that US and UK viewers can vote for which should become full series. None, according to The Verge, who complained that “almost all of Amazon’s new shows are terrible“… Perhaps the company’s hardware efforts will be better-received? April 24, Business Week reported that Amazon was working on its own set-top box, “according to three people familiar with the project who aren’t authorised to discuss it. They say the box will plug into TVs and give users access to Amazon’s expanding video offerings.”

Either way, binge viewing, the notion of viewers watching all they want, whenever they want – as with Netflix, where all of a series’ episodes are made available at once – was a key discussion topic at MIPTV, and still is now. Especially since a Harris Interactive survey found 62% of (US) repondents have watched multiple episodes of a TV show at a time.

In branded entertainment, Coca-Cola put its money where its mouth is, launching its first-ever all-digital effort, in a mobile-focused attempt to grab teens’ attention. Reported AdWeek, Coke “believes it knows what those kids want from the brand—fun, “snackable” digital experiences that center on mobile consumption over desktops.” Full report here.

Another giant, this time of the media variety, continued its de-consolidation as Bertelsman sold off a minority stake in RTL Group, Europe’s largest commercial broadcaster and owner of production giant FremantleMedia, reported THR: a move that should bring in over $2bn, it hopes. Meanwhile, ITV said it was to acquired indie producer The Garden for over $27 million, reported THR. The Garden’s shows include The Audience, where viewers follow people for a week, then help them to resolve their dilemmas.

More industry news, as curated by the MIP Markets team, right here!

A new UK broadcast show called The Fox Problem is looking to leverage the power of social media by connecting with fans in realtime throughout each episode. But not on television. Instead, the show will stream exclusively via Google+, making it one of the first video series to broadcast live over a social network.

The programme, which will have an initial run of 6 shows, features three hosts in front of a studio audience, in a loose talk show format. The hosts, who come from more traditional media channels (Gemma Cairney from BBC Radio 1, Georgia L.A. from SB:TV, and Georgie Okell from Channel 4′s T4) call themselves the 3 Gs. Throughout the programme, they bounce from topic to topic around a general theme in each episode, incorporating musical guests and featured participants, who can chime in via Google Hangout (Google+’s super-simple group videoconferencing service).

The Fox Problem isn’t solely on Google+, either. The show’s website also includes links to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr. The programme describes itself as ‘social TV that answers back’ and viewers are encouraged to use social media to influence the show. For example, each week viewers can tweet to save their favourite presenter from completing a humiliating dare and the show features a character called The Ridler who sings viewers’ tweets live in the studio.

No matter what the medium, it’s clear that the show is meant to shake things up from the traditional TV ecosystem. A promo for the show includes the three hosts symbolically beating a TV with baseball bats.

Airing on Tuesday nights, The Fox Problem has broadcast four shows thus far. The show was developed by Telegraph Hill and All That Good Stuff.

Contagious Insight

Though it claims to be the first live TV show on Google+, The Fox Problem isn’t the first show to broadcast live online. It’s difficult to figure out where to draw the line between talk shows, scripted shows, and things like UStream and Justin.TV live shows, but the path to The Fox Problem has been paved by entertainment like the Chris Gethard Show, a New York-based, bizarro-comedy talk show that airs live on both public access TV and online, simultaneously, on a weekly basis. In fact, The Fox Problem seems to share some characteristics with the Gethard Show, using a live studio audience, musical interludes, and fan interaction via Twitter, chatroom, and more. Honeyshed was another live web experiment, undertaken by Droga5 and Publicis in 2008, which hoped to become a sort of interactive QVC for the web. Though the Gethard show continues to go strong, Honeyshed closed up shop after just five months.

The Fox Problem will certainly avoid Honeyshed’s fate, with a more editorial slant and a shorter, pre-determined run. That’s why it makes sense that the show is less about pushing products and more about implicitly pushing the Google+ platform. Whereas the Chris Gethard show broadcasts via YouTube, which has gradually been getting into the live video game, The Fox Problem’s delivery method of choice is Google+. Specifically, the show broadcasts via Hangout, letting selected participants chime in at any time throughout the broadcast. Although it’s not entirely clear what Google’s involvement in the show is, the company’s UK Google+ account did introduce the ‘social TV show’ on its official account in early March, suggesting the brand is somehow associated with the show’s production. Hangout is one of the differentiating features of Google+, and one Google would love to see catch on as an interactive content delivery platform.

To that end, the ladies of The Fox Problem are quick to extol the virtues of live, online television. In an interview with Glamour UK, they noted, “Streaming live on Google+ means we only have ourselves and the audience to answer to. This is the next generation of programming, talking about what matters right now and ultimately having a genuine laugh with our mates in the pub.” True though it may be, that sounds like the statement of someone shilling for a platform.

The Fox Problem, and Google+’s move toward live, original programming, plays into the Digital Live trend Contagious identified in February of last year. That trend, in which brands are increasingly streaming content online and engaging fans in realtime around those broadcasts, emerged mainly around live events like concerts. With consumers increasingly showing that they are willing to eschew television and watch original content online (see: Netflix’s move to original programming, HBOGo, Hulu) the launch of a show like The Fox Problem is a savvy move. Whether undertaken by Google+ or just coincidentally leveraging that platform, it’s a smart, low-cost experiment that will show off Google’s livestreaming technology. We think The Fox Problem won’t be the only such experiment of this kind we see this year.

This is the latest in a series of blog posts from Contagious Feed, a database of the most creative and effective marketing campaigns around. Contagious – a MIP Markets content partner – guides and advises brands and their agencies on competitor activity and future opportunities. More information here.

Photo: Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi in “Vicious”, a sitcom sold to Seven Australia by Shine, at MIPTV 2013.

MIPTV 2013 saw a wide range of deals across scripted, non-scripted, entertainment and kids.

Every part of the world was active, and there was clear evidence that digital and on-demand dealmaking is now a robust moneymaking business.

A+E Networks was quick out of the blocks, announcing a slew of sales for its record-breaking factual entertainment series Duck Dynasty. The show, which recently attracted 8.6 million viewers for the US launch of season three, has sold to the likes of TV3 Denmark, Pro4 Hungary, Veronica Netherlands, MediaCorp Singapore and OLN Canada. A+E also finished the MIPTV market strongly by unveiling a production, distribution and acquisition partnership with Canal+-owned Planete+.

Canal+ was also active in drama, acquiring two of the year’s most high-profile series. The first, Vikings, has been a hit for A+E-owned History in the US, while the second, Banshee, is a highly anticipated series from Alan Ball (Six Feet Under).

British crime drama continued to be “a staple of broadcasters’ schedules around the world,” according to Tobi de Graaff, ITV Studios Global Entertainment’s director of global television distribution. Deals that illustrated this point included the sale of Agatha Christie’s Marple to 10 broadcasters including France 2, ABC Australia, United Media (China and Tibet) and Chungwa Taiwan. There was also strong interest in Lewis and Vera, the latter selling to markets including Japan.

All3Media International also flew the flag of British crime drama, selling Foyle’s War to Scandinavian networks, including YLE in Finland. Korea’s KBS Media continues to be one of the leading exporters of programming in Asia. At MIPTV, its headline show was Queen Of Office, which it sold to Pony Canyon in Japan.

More deals included the sale of factual series Food Planet to TVB Hong Kong. Other Asian companies having sales success included China’s CCTV, which sold the Spanish- language rights for China’s Mega Projects to Venevision International.

BBC Worldwide announced it has joined forces with CCTV-9 to co-produce natural history series Hidden Kingdoms; Austria’s ORF and CCTV signed a co-production agreement on nature and wildlife titles, the first of which will be Triumph Of The Tomato; and CCTV and Guinness World Records signed a two-year extension to their eight-year co-production deal for entertainment show Guinness World Record China Nights.

Recent markets have been characterised by growing interest in Scandinavian drama. There’s now some indication that Spanish content is attracting interest. Antena 3 hit Gran Hotel, for example, was sold to Austria’s ORF, Sony’s German PayTV channel SET and US VOD service Hulu by Beta Film.

The growth in digital channels means MIP Markets have seen a growing number of volume deals in recent years. An example at MIPTV was BBC Worldwide’s sale of 220 hours of lifestyle content to Foxtel Australia. Also noteworthy was Prime Entertainment Group’s package deal with Sky UK, headlined by the series Hollywood’s Best Film Directors.

Deal making has become more complex in the digital era, thanks to the number of windows opening up. At MIPTV, this was evident in the range of VOD deals being done. BBC Worldwide sold Doctor Who and A Young Doctor’s Notebook to Spanish VOD platform Wuaki; HanWay Films secured deals with VOD plays such as Yota Play and IVI in Russia, Filmin in Spain, Soho in China and BoxTV in India; and Australia’s ABC sold library shows to Cinedigm for VOD use in the Americas.

Zodiak Kids, meanwhile, secured VOD deals with companies like Ace Entertainment

in France, ProSieben- Sat.1’s maxdome in Germany and Turkish pay-TV channel Smart Cocuk. Karen Vermeulen, senior vice-president global sales and coproduction, Zodiak Kids, said: “The online viewing experience is increasingly important to us and our audience as demand for these services grows.” 

Kids content owners reported numerous deals. Platinum Films sold Matt Hatter Chronicles to networks such as KidsCo, Teletoon Canada and JCC Middle East; Silvergate Media sold Peter Rabbit to France Televisions and Japanese anime house ADK is close to selling Victory Kick Off!! to markets including Italy and Spain. DHX Media sold She- Zow to Lagardere Active TV and Discovery’s Italian channel Frisbee while Viacom International Media Networks reported good sales business on the return of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

One of the biggest kids stories of the market was the news that FremantleMedia Kids & Family Entertainment and Mattel have greenlit a second season of animated series Max Steel.

There were deals right across the factual spectrum. DRG sold factual series Never Ever Do This to Spike TV, Electric Sky sold The Sex Clinic to Prime TV NZ, PBS International sold a JFK documentary to SBS Australia and Content Television sold Facing The Atlantic to broadcasters including National Geographic Channel and France TV.

Highlights in other genres included the sale of Shine sitcom Vicious to Seven Australia.

Experts increasingly note that the gap in quality between film and TV drama is narrowing. So it was also exciting to see that Beta Film’s epic historic drama Generation War has been sold to Music Box, a theatrical distributor based in the US.

As the market closed, Endemol Worldwide Distribution (EWD) struck a deal to represent some of US cable channel AMC’s factual shows. AMC, best known for its drama (Mad Men, The Walking Dead), has made expansion into non-scripted content a priority for its own schedule. So EWD’s role will be to take series like Immortalized, Comic Book Men and Small Town Security to the international market. EWD already reps AMC’s series Freakshow.

This and more in the MIPTV 2013 Quick Review, available online here

Who watches those ‘making of the ad’ videos on YouTube?  Come on, own up. It can’t just be the brand team looking for their faces in the montage. You know the sort of thing I mean -  the fast edit of agency faces and lots of laughing production assistants all having ‘spontaneous fun’ behind the scenes at the shoot.

I bet that few among you ever get past the first 20 seconds of these videos. And you switch off because there’s just no reason to watch on. No characters to care about, no journeys of transformation, no plot to discern and no conflict or sense of jeopardy. In short, there’s just no story.

Which is a real shame, because the ‘making of’ video – be that a story of an ad campaign, an event or an innovative product development – is often a brand’s first foray into video content marketing. And equally often, due to its poor execution, the video turns out to be a dismal waste of everyone’s time, thereby dampening the client’s future enthusiasm for more inventive and rewarding content.

But all of that sorry mess can be avoided with a little bit of thought about one essential ingredient for video content – narrative.

What is narrative for brands?

Now, the term ‘narrative’ is in danger of becoming a bit trendy, and thereby damaged through frequent misuse. I’ve recently seen plenty of blogs and papers from all sorts of bandwagon jumpers advocating some airy-fairy notion of a brand having a cross-media ‘narrative’ over the course of its marketing year. I get it. But that’s not narrative.  That’s just agencies trying to invent a shiny new (and therefore more saleable) word for a ‘marketing plan’.

What I mean by narrative is drawn from the centuries-old tradition of proper storytelling: the application of a structure that runs from ‘once upon a time’ to the rolling of the end credits. That structure is present in every good story ever told from the Greek Tragedies to Star Wars and from The X Factor to Senna. So if brands – or producers – are serious about attracting and gripping an audience with their video content, they’d do very well to follow the basic principles of constructing a good narrative.

The Three Cs of narrative structure

Generally, narratives have a three-point structure. Over the years various terms have been applied to articulate that structure by distinguished academics ranging from Aristotle to Robert McKee, but broadly all adhere to the same theory.  For the purposes of memorability, we’re going to refer to the three-point structure as the three Cs: Catalyst, Conflict and Conclusion.

1. Catalyst

A story starts with a catalyst. It’s the thing that disrupts a status quo. In the world of screenplays, it’s often referred to as the inciting incident. This might be the laying down of a challenge or the expression of a specific question, which needs an answer.

2. Conflict

Screenwriting lecturer and consultant Robert McKee states: “Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict”.  Conflict drives plot and action, and it’s this concept that keeps audiences hooked.  It can be the physical conflict of racing against an immovable deadline, or battling to climb a mountain. It can be the interpersonal conflict of fighting against another character (think heroes and villains). Or it can be inner personal conflicts, typified by a character with self-doubt or a fatal flaw that leads to his potential destruction. Truly great stories exhibit all three.  But whichever is most prominent, the conflict provides the jeopardy audiences crave, the doubt about which side will win that keeps us watching and guessing.

3. Conclusion

The resolution we must see to be satisfied, be that the final showdown, an attainment of a goal or the reinstatement of equilibrium. It’s the detective exposing the murder or it’s the grand reveal of the makeover, with before and after images for comparison.

Narrative isn’t just for fiction

“All this talk of stories and narrative structure may be alright for novels and drama, but what’s it got to do with me telling people about Brand X’s new SuperGizmo?”, I hear you chorus. Well, here’s the really important bit. Narrative structure is essential for factual content too. It works as well on the audience for your video showing how to fit the SuperGizmoPlus upgrade to the SuperGizmoClassic as it does on toddlers listening to Red Riding Hood. Good stories don’t have to be made up. All documentary makers tell stories, they just happen to be stories about real events. But they are stories nonetheless and therefore use a narrative structure to grip the audience.

The three Cs in action

An episode of the Channel 4 factual-entertainment show Grand Designs is a good illustration of how the three Cs can be used to enliven any factual video content. A typical episode might start with a catalyst: a young family is growing out of their home and needs to move into their dream home before a new baby arrives. There is always plenty of conflict during the show. Will they get the roof on before winter and inevitable rain? Will the German-engineered windows fit the frames from Yorkshire? Will Kevin McCloud like it? (Spoiler alert. Yes. He always does in the end). Sometimes the sense of jeopardy is manufactured by the programme producers. For example, the viewers will be left to fret about whether the intrepid home builders will run out of money, when in fact it becomes apparent later in the show that wealthy family members have always been on standby with emergency suitcases stuffed with bail-out cash. The essential finale gives the audience a satisfying tour of the completed house and a concluding thought or endorsement from (presenter) our Kevin.

The narrative opportunity

The Grand Designs example proves that with the application of a narrative structure any real-life occurrence can become a gripping story. After all, all people are doing in Grand Designs is building a house.  It’s not like nobody’s ever done that before. In contrast, many brands have a veritable arsenal of tales to tell about the history of their products, their ethos, the making of great ads or theme tunes, or the minor challenges of dropping a man from space.

So, it’s time brands considered video and TV not as medium with which to deliver a message, but a medium with which to tell a story.  And as everyone knows, a good story is all in the telling.

Michael Reeves is business development director, content, at Red Bee Media.

Dorota Smaggia, MD France for Unruly Media, took to the stage last week for an ultra-instructive MIPCube Talk. She pointed out that generation Y watches 3 billion hours of video per month right now; but that content isn’t always what you’d expect.

The myths she went on to debunk were:

Myth #1 – Content has to be funny? NO!
Myth #2 – The shorter the better? NO!
Myth #3 – Only big brands can make a big splash? NO!
Myth #4 – Social videos should only evoke obvious emotions such as happiness: NO!
Myth #5 – Emotive ads cannot be also information? NO!

Smaggia screened a number of videos to illustrate her points, including this – hilarious – most-watched UGC (user-generated content) video of 2013 so far:

And here’s a bonus for MIPBlog readers: Unruly’s rolling chart of the most-shared advertising/brand videos of the month. Enjoy!

46 MIPTV, MIPCube, MIPFormats & MIPDoc conference videos here