Stars Taryn O'Neill, Janna Bossier, and Craig Frank at a New Media Vault Event.

Inspired by Mathieas’ Tubefilter piece on building buzz, and a  shout out to Dialogik Digital and the immense help they did in our pre-launch, I figured I’d blog about Promoting a Web Series. Please note, I am not claiming that the promoting of our show was a complete success, nor am I claiming it to be the right way to promote a show, it’s just the way we chose to do it.

When you’re doing an independent series for the web, one of the big daunting tasks is in the promoting of your web series.  Most people who create shows aren’t promoters, advertisers, or public relations gurus, they are filmmakers and storytellers.

Personally I’m glad to see that the “if you build it, they will come” watch mantra is dying fast. Why? Well the internet is a HUGE place. There are a lot of eyes out there, and you’re never reach them all. That is why you need to guide your target viewers to your show, and you need to find your audience.

I’m going to re-point to Pam Kulik’s, Dialogik Digital post on this because she really has it fleshed out better than I do so take a look. She really covers our Launch Strategy,  Promoting, and Audience Building, so I encourage you to learn from it, I know I did. I remember being on a conference call with them and Dailymotion before our launch and the two P.R. reps just chatted away about all this promotional/press jargon that I had no clue about. -

If you’re a web series creator, if you get anything out of this post, I’d say look into finding/hiring some P.R. representation, it’ll shoot your promotions forward 10 fold.

Anyway, PR rep or not, you’ll always have to do at least a good deal of hustling yourself. Heck even the creators behind shows like The Bannen Way and The Guild have to hustle to get that extra promotional push. So no matter who you got helping you,  I’d like to highlight four things about web series promoting that I feel are vital.

1. TAKE YOUR TIME! – I write this with an exclamation point because I really, really mean it. This also goes for pre-production, production, post-production, as well as crafting your promoting strategies.

Everyone remember the rule of Cheap/Fast/Good, you can only have 2? Well most web series I know don’t have a ton of money so by default you’re gonna be Cheap. So by that rule you’re gonna be either Fast or you’re gonna be Good. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be Good than Fast.

and seriously ask your self “what’s the hurry?” -

As we were dead set on releasing Compulsions in the 2009 calendar year, our original target release date was mid October but we fell behind in post. Then we were ready to go in Mid November, but our team agreed that pushing back and releasing in early December would be the right way to go.  We ended up with more time to finish the show, we had more time to craft our promotion strategy, and we had a nice little window between two major holidays to launch.

2. Promoting to people who watch Web Series. Relative to everything else this is easy (mainly because pretty much everyone in the web series world is so friendly and supportive). This process is pitching/promoting your site on all the forums and websites that cover web series, Tubefilter, Newteevee, Indie Intertube, WebSeriesToday, Slebisodes, SciFinal, 93Studios, The Web Files, and more..

All of these sites (and more), have sections (if not the entire site) dedicated to promoting web series. So yes they will at the very least watch your show at some point. Also please remember that most/if not all these sites have very limited resources dedicated to covering your show so please be patient with them. Many of them are covering web shows solely because they love doing it so lets cut them some slack if they fall behind. – A good set of rules to follow is Liz Shannon Miller’s “How to Pitch Me Your Web Series”. READ IT.

Going for other web series creators is a great core to start with, it’s a pre-conception that everyone knows everyone, but that’s not true. There are too many web series out there for everyone to know everyone, so go out and meet some of them and hopefully they’ll sample your show.

Please Realize: Not everyone is gonna watch your show. Blasphemy you say? – Well let me ask you this? Have you watched everyone else’s show? I know, I haven’t. I have good friends in the community who I know have not watched all of Compulsions, and our entire season runs less than 40 minutes. – So the best you can do is to  tell people about your show. Maybe they’ll watch it, maybe they wont, but hey you got out there.

There are some out there that think promoting within the “community” is a waste, but I find that false. I think it’s important to do so, but it’s not an all in. I just feel it’s a strong core to grow from. As we’ve discussed internally, this is where you’ll get your first 1,000 views, then if the show resonates your audience will grow naturally.

3. Promoting to your Niche/Audience – This is absolutely vital, and this comes from knowing your audience, and promoting to it.

Now with Compulsions, it’s kind of a hard show to niche. It’s more a thriller than a horror, but even with that classification it gave us a direction to go towards. Though hard to classify, it was easy to know what audience we’re not. Put it this way, my own Mother has yet to watch even an episode of my show. Why? Because it’s too violent, she doesn’t deal with violence, but violence is a niche audience and that’s what we started with.

In thinking violence and horror, we reached out to many online publications that cover horror/thriller type content. You have to be crafty with your pitch. Did every horror blog cover us? no, but some did and that helped us reach a strong audience of thriller fans that we wouldn’t have reached otherwise.

Another niche audience that began to arise that we never saw coming was the Soap audience. In making the show, we never thought to be classified as a ‘soap’, but after thinking about it, the core of a soap opera is (usually heavy) “character drama”. Well looking at the core of our show, I’d say we have a lot of heavy character drama so we went with it.  That devoted and supportive audience found us and in turn we began to promote towards it.

Speaking of character drama/soaps, if you want to see a well watched show that knows its audience, check out the Streamy and Indie Soap Award winning Anyone But Me. Whether or not the show is for you is up to you. But really look at what the show is about, and all the great core niche audiences you can promote towards.

4. Make the Best Show You Can - This is related to number 1, but really just go out and make the best show you can.

They say that ‘Word of Mouth’ is the most powerful form of marketing. Well Word of Mouth only happens when the show you make resonates with your audience and they pass it around to their peers, this gives your show its longevity.

In my opinion, most of our press coverage and our long period of  ”buzz” wasn’t because of how well we marketed the show, it was because of how well the show resonated amongst the audience and the press. All of our main stream press coverage didn’t come because we were a thriller. It came because the person writing the coverage really liked our show.

As Peter Drucker once said

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

Thanks for reading.

Annemarie Pazmino in the IT Room set.

One of the big phases of Pre-Production is settling your locations, and one of the first knee jerk reactions is to go with the cheapest (read: FREE) available. Looking at our Season 1, you can see an array of locales but two that really stand out as challenging finds were the Warehouse and the Computer Repair Room. Early on in our pooling of resources we found two such locations that would have cost us nothing… “Great!” we thought, but we soon realized how they were both “Traps.”

The term “Traps”, was spoken often by Producer Robert Grand in Pre-production. In his vast experience in line producing (and it is VAST) he’s come across many such experiences and warned us about falling into them. He described them as Traps because on the surface they appeared great, economical, the easy path, but in reality crossing them would result in more problems and more money in the long run.

Trap #1: The Computer Repair Room – From Day 1, Producer :Michaeltohl:  spoke about a Computer Repair shop that he was friendly with. Quickly into planning we managed to secure a deal with them to shoot at their working storefront for free but with one big restriction; we could only shoot there at night when they were closed for business.

So what’s wrong with only shooting at night? Well for one you’re doing 7pm to 7am shoot days, and those of you who have been on shoots like these know they are NOT FUN. They are draining for everyone, people move slower, and they are tough to recover from. Also specific to us, we’d have to shoot night for day, which meant not only slowing us down but also we would have to o rent more lighting gear. Thus in reality shooting at the “free” location would have in reality ballooned our budget with extra gear and extra crew time. Thus… a trap.

The Compulsions Crew onset at the Warehouse Location

Trap #2: The Warehouse – Let’s take away from the fact that this was the make or break location of our series, we were willing to put some money into this. The story here starts similar to the IT room, we found a serviceable empty commercial space right away. By commercial space I mean like a store front.  You see a space in a mini-mall open it and it’s just bare, plenty of room to stick poor Seth Caskey in a chair and mess him up right? Sure, but again there was big caveat, it’s a mini-mall store front.

Many of us go to mini-malls every day, they’re great, but are they great to film at? This particular mini-mall is busy; you have a gym upstairs and dry cleaners adjacent. Add the fact that the mall faced a major Hollywood street and you have sound issues all day and pretty much all night.  Plus with big storefront windows it meant lighting problems as well.  Thus again, blocking out all the windows with light and sound would mean more needed gear and a slower pace for our crew so again it would mean more money and again… a Trap.

As a result in both cases we ended up with other locations that we sunk some money into. Both locations were better, easier to work with, required less gear, and thus cheaper in the long run. In indie Web Production nothing is ever truly “free”, so beware of traps.

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During the greeting hour, the attendees were treated to the tunes of DJ Srsly as well as a photo/red carpet booth managed by J Regan Huston Photography and sponsored by [M] Consulting. At 7:30pm, the crowd was ushered into the screening space where the night started off with Aimee Carlson, Director of Programming, announcing Dailymotion.com as the exclusive online distributor for the series, which transitioned to Writer/Creator Bernie Su welcoming the crowd and introducing the show.

More after the Jump… 

After the screening of four intense episodes. Kristyn Burtt moderated a panel featuring Bernie, Director Nathan Atkinson, and the entire cast of the series. Topics included casting, preparation, and pulling the lid off of Annemarie Pazmino‘s Cassandra Morrissey’s voyeurism. – (Episode 5, airs Tuesday)

Post panel guests were welcome to mingle, take photos, or mosey into the Fangirls Guide livestream of the series where Cricket Lee was asking cast, crew, and fans about the shows and the other work on the web. It was a memorable night for the web tv community with guests representing shows and organizations like Blue Movies, Eqal, Harper’s Globe, Tubefilter, Sorority Forever, Big Fantastic, Vuguru, A Comicbook Orange, Hurtling Through Space, The Crew, With the Angels, NewTeeVee, Coin-Op TV, Solo the Series, Gold: The Series, Brevity TV, Elevator, Fury of Solace, Fall of Kaden and more.

Photos from the night are below. You can also head over to our Facebook Fan Page and see/tag the photos.

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When you’re in the final steps in finishing a series Fridays aren’t the relief that most 9-5ers get. They’re just the start of yet another working weekend! Anyway, lets get to today’s topic.

Annemarie Pazmino looks over her lines.

In the early stages of the project I remember having a conversation with Tubefilter’s Marc Hustvedt about the show. He asked me if we were going to cast a bunch of web TV actors for our ensemble. At the time I told him that I didn’t think so, it’s not because we didn’t want to cast Web TV actors, it’s just that we were ‘casting’ a pretty wide net and were going to pick the best person available, web star or not.  So naturally with the sheer number of people that we were having come in to read that weren’t part of the web TV community, I figured the Web Actors would get dwarfed out simply by statistics. It turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We found out pretty quickly in the process that a lot of the web actors were “bringing it” during the auditions. Am I playing favorites? No, cause I wasn’t even there to witness this first hand. Remember it was Director Nathan Atkinson and Producer Michael Tohl who were seeing everyone, they didn’t care what web series each actor had in their resume cause at the time, they hadn’t seen anything. Well at the end of each day, I’d notice more and more of the “highlighted” auditions being web actors.  I was both surprised and ecstatic because it really validated the web space to me and my fellow crew members as having legitimate talent.

We saw actors from shows across the web, Sorority Forever, Lonelygirl15, Safety Geeks: SVI, The Crew, Gold, and After Judgment to name a few, and with that we saw eye opening auditions being represented from each of those shows. So what happened at the end? Well one quarter of our ensemble are web veterans (including Taryn O’Neill) as well as two of the three leads (Craig Frank  and Annemarie Pazmino ).

In a later post, I’ll get into the specific stories of casting each of the roles, but until then you shouldn’t let the negative stigma of web series affect your judgment of the actors because Web Series actors can Act!

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