Last night I was invited as a speaker by the Flemish Scenarist Guild, together with Tom De Bruyne, planner for i-Merge (who talked about web 2.0 without calling it 2.0, hurray!) and Jan Dheedene who works for Alcatel and who give us a glimp on what the future of (IP)TV has in store for us.
I was asked to talk about the way advertising and TV advertising in particular is evolving and the role scenarists could play in this. Programmed to be first speaker I obviously forgot the DVI-VGA cable to connect my Powerbook to the projector so Jan and Tom went on first while some of the organisers went looking for a replacement Mac or the cable I needed so badly...
Anyway, this gave me a chance to measure up the mood: since both Jan and Tom were talking (and rightly so) quite a bit about consumer generated content I felt some of the professional writers behind me cringe in their seats. Everything turned out alright during their Q&A sessions but I could not shake the feeling that some of them were indeed having a hard time pitching stuff and that this was just another threat added to an already hard profession.
And that gave me a bit of a headstart. First of all by stating that I refuse to believe that consumer content will take over the world. Not that Tom or Jan ever stated something like that, but a bit of conflict always makes for a better story...
More importantly, part of my speech was about the renewed value of stories in general and in advertising and new forms of branded entertainment in particular, where storywriters could play a role.
But when we started discussing, it soon became apparent that there still is some perceived barrier between brands and marketers on the one side, creatives and, in this case, script writers on the other. Much like the Orange spots we all know by now, of which this was one of the last ones:
The general consensus was that this could be avoided by getting together sooner in the process. A lot of the writers that were present explicitly stated that they did not have a problem writing for a commercial purpose. The problem was that they were often asked to come and tell something about projects they were working on, and then asked to change them in a direction that would suit the brand, business objective or whatever was needed by an organisation at the time.
So while we were talking we got the idea for a platform where agencies, script writers and brands interested in cooperations could get toghether and see if they can find occasions to work together.
The idea probably isn't new, so if anyone has got any idea if similar things are being organised already and can point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful.
Oh, and thanks to Tom for the praise on the i-Wisdom blog!
You're very welcome. About the platform: I'm a little bit involved in a project in which exactly this platform is being built. We'll talk about it later ;-)
Posted by: Tom De Bruyne | 30 March 2006 at 17:27