Commercial production house Pandemonium and digital production and design studio Western Images, both based in San Francisco, have launched Mekanism, a joint venture geared toward the production of integrated advertising campaigns for broadcast TV, the Internet and interactive television (iTV) platforms such as WebTV.
Headed by director of business development Ken Solomon and executive producer Tommy Means, Mekanism will provide services ranging from broadcast image acquisition to interactive TV design and programming, Flash animation, Web development, media consultation and back end tracking. Mekanism is based on the Western premises.
"Down the road we’ll see the entertainment and information flows merge, but for now we need to use both [television and the Web] to engage the viewer," said Solomon, who also serves as director of business development for Western. "Our thinking is that if you start earlier [in the creative process], you can create a campaign that’s as effective in interactive forms as it is in the broadcast medium, rather than the interactive part being an afterthought."
Prior to joining Western a year-and-a-half ago, Solomon was a founding partner at Hollywood-based Ring of Fire, a design/visual effects/postproduction company. Means joined Pandemonium a year ago and continues to serve as an executive producer there. His background is in streaming media and production, and he previously served as director of business development at San Francisco-based corporate and commercial production company Spellbound Productions.
"We have four directors that have very impressive [technical] pedigrees," said Means. "I knew that we needed to refocus the company on convergent production, and I wanted to get the directors involved with Flash and streaming video…and to try to figure how to translate that into something creative. We have a long standing relationship with Western, and they have all these in-house technical resources, so [broadening the relationship via Mekanism] really made sense."
While it can draw on talent from within the Western and Pandemonium rosters, Mekanism will also service other production companies as well as advertising agencies. "Mekanism is its own entity," said Solomon. "Neither [Western nor Pandemonium] has to be involved [in a given project]."
Pandemonium, which is headed by principal/executive producer Stelio Kitrilakis, represents directors Jerry Casale, Mark Dippé, Richard Kizu-Blair and Steve "Spaz" Williams. Key Western personnel involved with Mekanism include creative director/designer Tuesday McGowan, editor Lee Gardner, iTV technical director Jerry Castro, systems administrator Brett Weston and Flash developer Jimi Simmons. Additionally, Western CEO Jim Bartel oversees interactive technology development for Mekanism. Western is headed by president Mike Cunningham.
According to Means, Mekanism is in the process of bringing in additional staff with technical expertise in back end tracking methodologies as well as media buys. Working in conjunction with programmers and Web designers from KNI, San Francisco, Mekanism has developed its own proprietary tracking software.
Mekanism has forged strategic relationships with several additional new media and technology firms, including Real Networks, Launch.com, Infect. com, WebTV and Unicast. Seattle-based Real Networks specializes in streaming audio and video technologies. Music and entertainment portal Launch. com is headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. E-mail marketing firm Infect.com is based in Seattle. Mountain View, Calif.-based WebTV, a subsidiary of Microsoft, provides enhanced TV services using Internet and digital technologies. New York-based interactive marketing firm Unicast specializes in large-scale Flash file delivery technologies and "Superstitials," or an interstitial that streams when users are navigating from one Web page to another.
Mekanism’s first project was for Rock the Vote out of San Francisco agency Collaborate. The campaign involves broadcast and iTV ads, Flash animated Superstitials, Internet-based streaming video and E-mail-based Flash animated "viral postcards." Kizu-Blair directed the live action footage, working in tandem with McGowan.
The campaign, which broke on the Web September 25 and on television October 7, uses prominent political issues such as the death penalty and homelessness to motivate people to vote. Simple but powerful images of an electric chair and a person sleeping on a city sidewalk are then supered with two blank voting boxes and the words "Yes" and "No." The campaign also informs Americans that for the first time they can register to vote online.
"A key aspect in creating the campaign was securing the media buy first, then sitting down with the creatives and having a storyboard for each application, to custom tailor the ads for each medium," said Means. "That’s because each one requires a different set of technologies that determine what sort of activity you can create. It made for a very, very complex preproduction meeting, but we knew we had the potential to break new ground."
According to Means, Rock the Vote Superstitials running on Alta Vista.com have yielded a 17.84-percent click through rate, while the viral postcards that were E-mailed to 5 million people have generated a 35-percent click through rate. Thus far, more than 20,000 new voters have registered online.
