FANSFORMATION.COM USE WEBISODES TO TAP SNACK CULTURE
Football Federation Australia (FFA) recently launched an online series of webisodes called Fansformation in a campaign to raise the profile of A-League football domestically. The short web based televisual episodes follow Con & Leon – two blokes from ‘The Cove’ who have undertaken the job of converting a bagpipe-playing barrister from the Sydney ‘burbs to love the game.
The humorous short videos average around 5 minutes in duration and attempt to appeal to the ’snack culture’ of Gen-Yers. In snack culture, according to Trendwatching, “people are becoming accustomed to consuming large amounts of ‘bite-size’ content rather than the longer-form stuff of traditional media. Online video clips, the iPod Nano, pay-per-view TV shows on iTunes, short games played on handheld devices, etc”.
This form of digital media is being utilised best with news websites, preying on this habit of younger readers who ’snack’ on media more than their elder peers, to gain new audiences for their advertisers. Some more successfully than others.
A fine example of this is CNN’s I-Report that allows user-generated news reports to be published on their website; the most provocative of which are then broadcast over the satellite networks to TV screens across the world. This feature of their site became an important news source during the recent uprising in Myanmar when CNN’s professional reporters were banned by the military junta from entering the country and the network relied on UGC eye-witness reports for their global news bulletin.
However, for every shining example of UGC/snack content by an online publisher or advertiser there is twenty failures. There are obvious advantages (production savings/interation) and disadvatages (audience fickleness/brand-backlash) to this medium and whether the FFA will be able to pull what is a good idea off remain to be seen. The launch a slightly beefed up TV series on SBS later in the year to coincide with the existing web-based characters will definitely be a positive.
Further reading:
Snack Attack! Wired 15.3.07
Trendwatching (latest briefing)
Media Snackers
www.fansformation.com
