Last week it was announced that Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, the creators and producers of lonelygirl15 and KateModern have formed EQAL, a social entertainment company that will launch new Internet dramas and build online communities for the fans. The company will also partner with independent producers and traditional media companies to create the shows and extend them to TV. In this iChat interview, Beckett and Goodfried discuss the evolution of Internet dramas, their plans for new ones at EQAL and the way they will incorporate product placement and other forms of advertising into them.
iSPOT: Can you provide background on the evolution of Internet dramas and where you see them going?
Beckett: One of the things that we have focused on is interactivity, which is the heart of the online shows. From the very beginning with lonelygirl15 interactivity was the core of the storytelling so the idea that Bree would upload a video and people would comment on it and characters would reference those comments was part of the idea of the show. If you go from lonelygirl to KateModern we used a lot of the stuff we had done before but we were able to do it on a more intense scale with a larger budget, like organically weaving puzzles into the narrative that fans have to solve. We also did a lot more on Kate with live events. Fans went to Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco and Leicester Square in London, which was part of the product integration for Cadbury. I think as they evolve and go forward we want to use the financing to develop technology and hire a development team and hone in on being able to do interactivity at a higher level, using Twitter and chat rooms and a lot of third party services and functionality on the site to make live events and interactivity bigger. With our shows and what you’ll see in general is just an incredible amount of interactivity and the way the fans can engage with the shows.
iSPOT: The financing at EQAL provides an opportunity to increase production budgets. You didn’t really have a production budget for lonelygirl15, whereas Quarterlife was a major Hollywood production. How will that change with EQAL?
Goodfried: KateModern had a nice budget to begin with so we worked with really talented people and produced a high quality show and lonelygirl over the course of its evolution had a higher budget. From our perspective it’s not so much about how much is spent per minute but how you shoot the show and the interactivity. The most expensive show in the world can look like it’s been shot with a single camera by a lonely girl. For EQAL, we didn’t raise the money for production budgets but to build a social entertainment company to get the infrastructure to hire the technology teams, programmers, designers, engineers and all the departments you have — sales, accounting and legal and business affairs. The individual shows and budgets will come on a case by case basis depending on how we’re going to do them, who the partners are, who the brands are and how we’re going to distribute them.
iSPOT: Where are the shows playing now and how do they expand beyond YouTube?
Beckett: lonelygirl started on YouTube and early last year we drove the audience to our website, lg15.com. All the interactivity occurs on that site. KateModern is also on lg15.com and we did it in association with Bebo so the interactivity is on Bebo. As we go forward we’re building out the features set of lg15.com and we’re going to be doing versions of the shows in different countries, locally shot and produced in that language that will feed into lg15.com. Future shows that have nothing to do with the lonelygirl properties will be on their own sites and part of their own interactive communities and we’ll do distribution deals with sites like Bebo, MySpace and YouTube.
iSPOT: lonelygirl15 and KateModern used product placement advertising, which is the standard format for Internet dramas. Can you comment on the way you’ve used it and what other kinds of advertising you may use in the future.
Beckett: We found the highest value ad dollars are certainly on product integration and for us we have a lot of creative ideas on the way we can integrate brands in the plots. We treat the characters as real so they can use real products. It was an easy thing for us to start doing. We’ve been selective about the brands we work with and have a close relationship with them. Our writers are pitching ideas and we maintain a lot of autonomy. We have complete control over creative. We allow them to contribute to the concept on how the integration will occur. You’re hiring us to integrate your brand into the show and we know the audience so you have to trust us to do it in a way that’s cool. Going forward there’s a lot of different ways to monetize beyond product integration, such as more traditional banners ads. Since we’re a content company and we own the property we can merchandise it, make movies and TV shows.
iSPOT: For the product integration deals, do you come up with ideas for the products and go to the advertisers?
Beckett: Sometimes when we have ideas for products we reach out, in other cases we pre-sell and figure out ways to integrate it into the plot.
iSPOT: The idea isn’t just to show the product in use but to weave it into the plot.
Beckett: Yes, it does depend on the individual brand. We’ve integrated a lot of brands on KateModern, MSN, Orange mobile, Buena Vista, Cadbury, Toyota and Warner Bros. For the most part we’ve been able to do creative integrations. We did one for the movie Hallam Foe that Buena Vista was distributing where we had the actor from that movie, Jamie Bell, in an episode as himself. It was a movie that came out in the UK and he was in a pub and a female character called Charlie ran into him and he signed an autograph for her that tied into the plot.
iSPOT: You stared a lg15 studio. How will you use it with EQAL?
Goodfriend: lg15 studio was weaved into EQAL. EQAL will do two things. It will continue to produce lg15 universe shows and expand the lg15 universe to other countries. We’ll hire writers and cast actors for the foreign versions and produce localized versions of the shows. We’ll also produce new Internet shows, we have a couple right now that we are working on and starting to plan. We’ll also go to independent studios and small production companies that would like to do shows with EQAL. And we’ll work with traditional media and see how we can take our properties and have them be multi-platform. We’ll tie the shows in organically to TV shows that will enhance the online experience.
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