TECHNOLOGY
Where The Bodies Are Buried
It has been almost two years since The Sopranos darkened our TV sets so in
preparation for a new season of shows beginning March 12 HBO has turned to
the internet – in a big way.
If you look on the HBO website this coming Monday, you can find all things Soprano including Meadow’s webcast confessions from college, an invitation to join Big Pussy’s Poker Heaven tournament, storylines and cast interviews, sreensavers and ringtones for your cellphone, and, my favorite, a Google Earth map showing where all the bodies are buried from the previous season.
Yes, zoom into New Jersey from Google Earth’s planetary perspective (now available on both Macs and PC’s) and, suddenly, 15 little gun sight crosshairs will appear marking key moments in the Soprano story so far. Check out the forest where Adriana got whacked, the waterfront development project, The Butcher Shop, Camilla’s new house, and, of course, the Bada Bing club.
If you click on the gun sight, a bubble appears with detail information and a video clip (compressed in Flash 7) plays the incident that occurred there. The Google Earth feature is a fun, fast and smooth way to see clips from last season, and it can be navigated in three ways: in chronological order, along a guided tour or by randomly clicking around.
“It’s been a year and a half since the last season, so the key is to get people’s memories refreshed,” said Ian Schafer, the founder and CEO of Deep Focus, which developed the Google feature. “I suppose HBO could have just put up clips like everyone else, but they wanted this to be an engaging experience people will enjoy and want to share with their friends.” So Deep Focus worked with Google on integrating HBO's promo clips with Google's mapping technology.
“It’s not just a curiosity. It’s the only way to see clips from last season,” he added. "When I see it, it's everything we wanted and more."
Schafer describes his 40-person agency as a “full service digital marketing and advertising agency serving the entertainment and lifestyle industry.” It’s quite a mouthful but seems like an apt description of this new media space being created as television shows move off the TV screen and out of the usual channels to become, ahem, “brands.”
For almost a decade, we have waited for the great “convergence” of television and the internet. Now that it is here, it seems to be more like a mash-up of TV episodes, online games, telephone ringtones and water cooler gossip. The great battle of the media giants for eyeballs has escalated into a fight for mind share and, as The Soprano internet promotion demonstrates, the best way to gain mind share is to give people experiences they enjoy.
It is still necessary for a new show to crack the public consciousness and the best way to do that remains broadcast television, or equivalently popular cable outlets with a lifestyle focus like HBO, ESPN or MTV.Traditional print and broadcast advertising are like artillery barrages lobbed out ahead of the attack to soften up the territory.
But once a show has a certain amount of success (i.e. an audience) the tactics are changing to spread that success into other channels where the show becomes, in fact, a brand. That’s why there is not only an HBO cable channel (actually nine) now, but whole new divisions like HBO Online, HBO Mobile and the HBO Store.
The challenge for HBO this season was to rekindle interest in a series that has been off the air for 18 months. It has met that challenge with a Sopranos website that is “sticky” – fun to explore and play with even as you are refreshing your memories of the show. It not only rekindles my interest in the show, it rekindles my interest in internet entertainment.
For too long now, internet innovation has been defined as either sassy political blogs or teen sites like MySpace that are supposed to create communities large enough to advertise to. How nice it is to visit a website that is smart, funny, informative and -- what’s the right word for an entertainment site? Enjoyable.
The critical reviews in the coming weeks will highlight the Google Earth innovation from Deep Focus. I am not the first nor will I be the last person to title my article “Where the Bodies are Buried.” But Deep Focus was not the only company that worked on the site. Other segments, equally as entertaining, came out of HBO’s own web development department.
For instance:
"Big Pussy’s Poker Heaven" is one of the smoothest interactive games I’ve seen on the internet. Yes, you have to fill out a user survey to get your FREE password to play. But once you are in, Big Pussy gives you $10,000 large and five ways to play poker against a variety of fun characters.
The game is programmed in what we used to call “Shockwave” back in the early 90’s. But the seamless integration of animation, audio and interactivity – not to mention the speedy response to mouse clicks – is just another sign of how far multimedia has come.
There’s an intelligence operating behind the conceptual framework of the game and a graphic style that’s everything we wanted to do in our younger internet days, but didn’t have the bandwidth, software or – let’s face it – money to execute.
Because I love the Soprano’s opening so much, I appreciate the scene-by-scene identification of landmarks along the New Jersey turnpike. There’s no special technical magic behind this feature, only a producer who recognizes his audience might actually enjoy easy-to-access facts about the location of many by now well-known shots.
As is growing common now, The Sopranos also offers downloadable ringtones (at a small price) of famous lines from past shows. The best is Paulie saying, “This phone is bugged. Don’t say nothing about the place, or the other place either, or the guy from the other place. Now pick up!”
I wish I could give you more information on Meadow’s college “Confession cam” but HBO was not allowing previews before Monday’s unveiling. The short segments appear to be an internet diary of her thoughts from the dorm room at Columbia. They can be found under a straight-forward video section with other clips from the current season that HBO apparently believes will become memorable moments.
There’s another example of the convergence/mash-up of media this February that should be mentioned here: The Winter Olympics in Torino. NBC purchased the rights for around $900 million and it is splitting out its coverage between four cable channels, a mobile phone network, internet websites and God knows how many sponsorship deals.
The Olympics are everywhere. But no one is watching.
I guess there’s a difference between being ubiquitous and focused, between
force-feeding the public your content and inviting them into the experience.
I guess you’d call it the difference between dumb and smart.