From Frontrunners to Showrunners, @radical.media Still Sets the Pace

 

Since opening its doors in 1993, @radical.media has continually re-invented what it means to be a production company. This includes being one of the first production houses to actively design and produce content for the web (and for the early days of the CD-ROM trend, which preceded widespread broadband access) to trailblazing the nascent world of branded content with series for Nike and Honda to expanding into the video on demand and entertainment spaces with things like the video on demand service driverTV and a host of feature documentaries. All along it has continued to produce dozens of commercials annually for agencies and brands around the globe, working with an impressive roster of directors. SourceEcreative recently caught up with company President and Executive Producer Frank Scherma, a native New Yorker who started the company in partnership with Chairman and CEO Jon Kamen and manages it's commercial and branded content efforts globally. What's business been like, we asked? "We're busy in every aspect of our company," across all platforms,” Scherma says. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

How has the branded content world changed from your perspective? Radical was involved in some of the earliest of these projects, from "Battlegrounds" for MTV to "The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman" for American Express to "Gamekillers" for Axe all the way up to more recent things like "Summit on the Summit." What's different about the genre?

Right now, it's more about how to tell a story and engage the consumer/audience in multiple platforms. Today, brands have multiple choices because consumers and audiences are even more fragmented with their attention span-whether it's from the television screen, smart phones, the web or even live events.

How does radical define it? What do you consider to be prerequisites for a really good branded content project?

Well, I think the definition of the form is continuing to evolve. When we started looking at what branded content was-or defining it for ourselves--the phrase that came to mind was that it was 'back to the future.' It was like the Texaco Star Theatre, or the Philip Morris Hour--it was entertainment brought to you by a sponsor. In our minds, a lot of what defined great branded content was that brands were bringing to the viewer smart, engaging and entertaining pieces that you as the viewer appreciated. I mean, if you go back to our parents, they were very grateful for advertising, because it was advertising that brought them these TV shows they never had. Now, everyone says they interrupt our lives with their messages. The simple reality is they're bringing you that show-without them, you don't have a show, or you'd be paying for it.

There's this entire generation out there--my kids, for example--who see advertising as this intrusive thing that they don't want. A lot of that has to do with the internet, and with their belief that everything should be free. Even my 17-year old came in the other day to tell me, 'Dad, I heard they're going to start charging for Hulu.' I've been telling him this for years, that free content on the web can't sustain itself as a business model and that you need advertisers to bring you the stuff-that's how you get that entertainment.

So the idea of branded content for us is basically, how do we tell a story that integrates the brand's message into the DNA of the content we create in a transmedia landscape? What it boils down to is that it needs to be an entertaining piece of content, so entertaining that the network it's running on would have run it anyway, aside from the fact that an advertiser is paying for it. And so maybe there is an element of that advertiser's brand in the show, but it's done in a subtle way. It's not like the actors are saying, 'Let's go drink a Coke because we love the taste!'

What has radical been up to most recently in the branded content space?

We produced a major special for MTV that ran last spring called “Summit on the Summit.” It featured Kenna, the musician and producer, along with people like Jessica Biel, Izizabel Lukus, Elizabeth Gore, Santigold, Lupe Fiasco and others taking part in this effort to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to raise global awareness of the need for fresh water. Kenna is from Ethiopia, and members of his family died from illnesses they contracted through unsanitary water. So he wanted to bring awareness to this problem, and to the fact that in some cases it's easily remedied. He got HP to be a sponsor, as well as Procter & Gamble, which makes the PUR Packet, which is a system that essentially makes dirty water safe to drink. (For more on this product, click here.) Kenna remembered his dad pointing out that Mt. Kilimanjaro was the highest place in Africa, so we wanted to scale that as a way of making people aware of this problem. The special ran on MTV and was covered extensively by social media networks and blogs and was rated the number one cause on Facebook. The project drew a total of two billion media impression in total. This was an interesting piece of branded content, because yes, P&G was involved and so was HP and other brands, but it was really about a pro-social initiative for a good cause.

We're also going into our fifth season of "Iconoclasts," which we produce with Grey Goose Entertainment for the Sundance Channel. This year we have Hugh Jackman, Charlize Theron, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten on the series, along with a few other surprises I can't mention just yet. So that's still thriving.

What's your take on some of the major hot button issues facing the commercial production industry right now, things like sequential liability and the influence of corporate procurement officers on the bidding process?

Look, every element of the industry is dealing with procurement types these days; we're all dealing with the reality of clients trying to get the best value for the money that they can. We all do that. You buy a car, that's what you're doing. I don't have problems with people trying to negotiate with me to get the best bottom-line price they can. But I don't like people telling me how to do something. We all have to be smart about how we're doing business these days, and about how we're going to get the best for the least.

Where I think the problems come in are when people don't fully understand things that we in production have to deal with, such as union contracts. There's a group of people in our industry who understand production, and there are people who need to learn about production. You need to know how this business works, so you can intelligently represent your client or your brand.

Sequential liability is a whole other thing. I think its fine if the client is taking responsibility for the payments-if the agency is saying, 'If our client doesn't pay us then we don't pay you and you can go after our client.' Again, that's fine, as long as the client knows about that. But what we find is that agencies are saying, 'Here's our sequential liability policy, and by the way, you can't talk to our client about it.'

What's on the horizon? What's your outlook for the future?

I think what's pretty astounding is that, while there's less money for commercials, there are more screens, both big and small, needing content right now than you could imagine in anyone's lifetime. When I walk into my son's or my daughter's rooms at home, and they've got an iPad over here and they're texting over there, their computers are on with three things running on YouTube and they've got Netflix streaming movies to their Xbox, well, it's all content! I mean, they sold two million iPads in no time, and there's a million apps that have been downloaded, and this all represents content to me. And we are content providers. When you look at that, you realize our business is metamorphosing into the next thing. And who better to provide content for this next phase than companies like ours? That's what we do. We're doing all the stuff that makes the future look very exciting in the transmedia landscape.

Entertainment is a multi-billion dollar industry. Within that, advertisers are still spending money-they just need to figure out how they're going to get to consumer the way they need to get to them. As a company, we're trying to provide them, and their agencies, with solutions, with everything a brand needs. You want to put something on the web? We can help you. You need to do a TV show? We can do that, too. Jon and I have spent the last ten years turning our company into an established show-runner with the networks. No one else in our business can say that. We can call any network or cable programmer and tell them we have an idea for a show and we'll get a meeting. The networks don't say to us, 'Who's going to produce it?' That's the question most other brands or agencies will get when they meet with programmers, because they're going to want to deal with someone that has produced for broadcast before, knows how to deliver it and how to deliver it on time. And making ads is a great training ground for that-it's not like you can deliver a spot after the air date. It's imperative that the networks and cable channels feel confident with the producers, and we've achieved that.

Published July 27, 2010