A few weeks back, I was in New York with Brad Webb, vSocial’s CTO. We were there to meet up with clients, partners and peers. It was a pretty illuminating time. I really love my industry. I love New York, too.
One day, we had lunch with Adam Elend, one of the founders of Wallstrip, and the lunch meeting mostly took the form of us querying him to get the benefit of his experience in doing Wallstrip.
Wallstrip essentially created a new media brand from thin air. They did it quickly, inexpensively and they were intelligent about how they embraced the medium.
Adam’s a great guy and so is Howard Lindzon, one of the other founders (disclosure: Howard is an investor in vSocial), so I am pre-disposed to thinking these guys “get it.” So, apparently, did CBS. They recently bought the company.
In any event, chatting it up over lunch, Adam had a really clarifying point that this medium is all about the brand and character first and then the narrative.
His logic is that figuring out what brand/character resonates with the audience is more important than figuring out the format of the show since if people don’t care about the character, you are dead in the water.
At a base level, this suggests to him that when creating new branded content you essentially can plant a lot of seeds (seeded content like a character oriented video blog) quickly and cheaply and only invest the time and energy in building narrative and programming around the brand/character once you have determined that there is an audience that cares.
Positively sage, the survival of the fittest.
