The following are my thoughts about marketing and monetizing the Breaking Cinema podcast.
I didn’t just want to create podcast as a hobby, I wanted to create an engaging digital product that would function as its own business and would fund itself.
My aim was to create a tribe of Breaking Cinema followers who would empower the project to achieve its larger digital product aims.
I wanted to establish honest and transparent goodwill with the followers, appeal to their support for helping me to share the podcast with their netowrks.
I also planed on utilizing a Patreon page to support the product financially.
I also considered including paid product advertising within the podcast itself…
The following is what I wrote out in the Breaking Cinema Vision Document…
Marketing: Ignore the marketing at your peril – IMPORTANT!
“The interesting thing, though, is that we are all marketers. As humans, we are hardwired to want people to agree with our worldview and belong to our groups. We have had to find ways over the centuries to make people understand us, and although we may not view persuasion in the non-work settings of our life as marketing (‘if you eat your greens, you’ll grow up big and strong’), that’s what it is.”
– Bernadette Jiwa, Marketing: A Love Story, 2014:3
“One of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur or innovator has is understanding how to make his ideas resonate. We tend to have no shortage of ideas, but we struggle to tell the story of how they are going to be useful in the world and why they will matter to people. Marketing is the way we communicate how our ideas translate to value for people in the marketplace. ”
– Bernadette Jiwa, Marketing: A Love Story, 2014:4
“A great brand is not a mark burned into a product – it’s something we want to belong to.”
– Bernadette Jiwa, Marketing: A Love Story, 2014:5
In accordance with actually building this project, the marketing is the single most important factor of its existence.
I would actually argue that the marketing is primary, whereas the project and its focus is secondary.
Unless this project is marketed and engaged with by an audience, Breaking Cinema is worthless!
I can not stress this point enough.
The importance of the marketing of this project has always been an issue that I have been aware of, even from the project’s original inception; in fact, it is one of the reasons I decided to go ahead with the project.
I wanted to build something that I could market and which I could add to my overall portfolio as an example of my marketing ability.
It is also for this reason that I have decided to make the Breaking Cinema project a part of my MTA Portfolio, because marketing and branding are a huge part of its focus.
Unlike my personal film blog, Something to do with Film, which exists as a space for personal reflection on my relationship with film (essentially, just a journal I have made available online), I very much want Breaking Cinema to engage other people and to be engaged by other people.
Therefore, in saying that I want build something to market is not enough, really what I want to do with this project is build a community based around its focus.
In short – relationships.
I want Breaking Cinema to be relationship-centric, how else can Breaking Cinema successfully utilise as many points of views as possible?
It’s a hangover of my BA (Hons) degree and the passive style of interaction my Film and Screen Studies major instilled in me
And then hope to God someone comes along and reads it – utterly ridiculous!
It is no good just quietly and safely building something that I put up online and hope that other people discover.
No.
That is the number one mistake all new creators make and which often discourages people from creating anymore content – they put content up, no one engages with it and then the creator bitterly thinks, “What’s the point in doing anymore, I am just wasting my time!”
And the problem, of course, is not in the quality of the content itself; indeed, the quality is irrelevant if nobody actually saw it in the first place!
Monetisation: The money loop of goodwill and self-preservation
“In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. The internet is the most competitive market the world has ever seen, and the marginal costs of the technologies on which it runs – processing, bandwidth, and storage – get closer and closer to zero every year. Free becomes not just an option but an inevitability. Bits want to be free.”
– Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of Radical Price, 2009:241
Breaking Cinema is a digital product.
It’s not a typical “money” product, which is to say that I am not going to put a price on it for the consumer/spectator to access it.
I certainly could do that, as other online creators have done with their products, but I have neither the invested following of spectators to pay me for it or the wish to put it up for sale.
“In the early stages of a company or product, when it’s trying to get traction, Free is the best marketing.”
– Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of Radical Price, 2009:248
The only thing which I will be requesting in return in order to allow the consumer access to the podcast’s content is some of their time.
Time is vastly more valuable than financial capital, because you can always acquire more money, but you can’t acquire more time.
Certainly, this is a fact I been very consciously aware off while I have been undertaking my independent MTA studies and orchestrating the Breaking Cinema podcast and, while I have given myself more time than most others in order to develop myself and my ideas, I don’t have all the time in the world and there is still plenty I would like to do with my life.
Our lifelines are finite and it is this simple fact of each of our mortalities that is the driving force behind my intention to produce the highest quality Breaking Cinema digital product I can in order to validate the consumer’s investment of their time.
Herein lies another reason for why the development of the focus of the Breaking Cinema project has been stretched out for over a year – I did not want to put a digital product out there which I would not be happy investing my own time in.
And the integrity of the overall value and quality is ABSOLUTELY essential to the success of the Breaking Cinema product – If you keep giving the spectator a good show, they will keep coming back for more AND spread the goodwill onto others aswell.
I have no desire to produce a podcast product that will fizzle out after a few poorly made episodes and then disappear into a dark corner of the world wide web.
The whole point of initiating my MTA Portfolio has been to set me on the right footing to create an online identity and entity through which I can proactively support myself in the digital economy while also endeavouring to enact some positive change in the world.
Breaking Cinema is my first proper attempt at creating a digital product as a trial run for this… and as a pre-runner for this.
This book was a huge influence on how to go about monetizing digital products
Breaking Cinema is something that is going to stand on its own as a high-quality piece of illuminating entertainment that will stimulate further growth, but most importantly within the spectator themselves.
However, this crucial factor in the building and maintaining the optimum value of the Breaking Cinema digital product will continue to hinge on the investment of my time for as long as I continue to orchestrate the project.
And it is at this point that the issue of monetising the Breaking Cinema product comes into play, because the production of Breaking Cinema is costing me both time AND money.
While the cost of the podcast is basically nothing after the initial set up costs, one of the challenges I have set myself for the podcast is establishing a digital product that can financially support itself.
How can this money loop of self-preservation be brought about?
Simple.
Goodwill.
a : a kindly feeling of approval and support : benevolent interest or concern
b: the favor or advantage that a business has acquired especially through its brands and its good reputation
– Merriam Webster definition of goodwill
Seriously, the ability to monetise goodwill is an inherent quality of basic human psychology that every savvy marketer has exploited since the beginning of commerce.
“Matt Mason, who wrote The Pirate’s Dilemma, used a name-your-own-price model (with zero being an option) for ebooks. When you go through the checkout process, the default price Is $5 via PayPal. Of the nearly 8,000 people who downloaded the book, about 6 percent paid, with an average price of $4.20. That adds up to only a couple thousand dollars of direct revenues, but he estimates that the attention he got from the exercise earned him another $50,000 in lecture fees.”
– Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of Radical Price, 2009:233
I have observed it happen with other digital and podcast products; it is something I have even actively participated in.
I am now contributing a monthly fee of $5 towards The Secret History of Hollywood podcast, I also contribute another monthly $2 towards Oliver Harper’s Retrospective Reviews and another $5 towards Lady Parts Productions and the forty-four crowdfunding projects I have made contributions towards…
- SCORE: A Film Music Documentary – $25.00
- The “My Basic Income” Project – $2.00
- INVINCIBLE: The only bike 100% guaranteed against theft – $5.00
- Rooftop Films: 20 Years of Underground Movies Outdoors – $5.00
- Blackout | A virtual glimpse into the lives of strangers – $20.00
- The Atomic Brain: 4K Restoration – $35.00
- BFI – Film is Fragile – £5.00
- No. 2: Story of the Pencil Documentary – $10 Pencil Novice
- The Film Foundation – 1 Frame, 1 Dollar – The Road Back – $1.00
- Young Women of Cinema – $5.00
- Perch – A Revolutionary Sit-to-Stand Desk – $1.00
- ENTER RALPH: An experimental 360 degree play produced for virtual reality – £5.00 (project was unsuccessful)
- Slash – a teen comedy about erotic fan fiction – $5.00
- Reboot the Suit: Bring Back Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit $1.00
- Made with Creative Commons: A book on open business models – $10.00
- Solar Paper, the world’s thinnest and lightest solar charger project – $1.00
- The Bill Nye Film project – $5.00
- Turning Point: A documentary about homelessness & soccer – $5.00
- #OwnTheMedia – Positive News community shares – £50 for fifty shares
- Other Side of the Wind – Orson Welles Last Film – $10.00
- LightSail: A Revolutionary Solar Sailing Spacecraft – $5.00
- Back in Time – a Back to the Future Documentary – $12.00
- OUT OF TIME: Saving the DeLorean Time Machine – $10.00
- Bring Cool Movies to Indywood – $3.00
- Fight for Space: NASA & Space Exploration Doc – $15.00
- 20th Century Flicks: The Future – £5.00
- Talk is Cheap – $6.00 (project was discontinued)
- Lady Parts: The Web Series – $5.00
- All or Nothing – Web series – $5.00
- App: The Human Story – $5.00
- The Bat Faced Boy – A psychological horror – £10.00
- The Film That Buys the Cinema – £25.00 for a Producer credit
- Film in a Year: Harker’s The Awakening – $15.00
- Potato Salad $1.00
- Park and Slide in Bristol – £5.00
- The British Film Industry: Elitist, Deluded or Dormant – £10.00 (project was unsuccessful)
- Something Terrible – $5.00
- A Restoration of the Odyssey Cinema, St. Albans – £10.00 (project was discontinued)
- Trace – short film – $5.00
- Tuning the Student Mind – $10.00
- LONG LIVE THE KING – The Legacy Of Kong! – $10.00
- A Finger Slip: Web Series $1.00
- MA- a modern day silent film – $10.00
- I AM THE PRIZE – the Comedy Feature about Pick-Up Artists! £150.00 for an Executive Producer credit
“Free is not a magic bullet. Giving away what you do will not make you rich by itself. You have to think creatively about how to convert the reputation and attention you get from Free into cash. Every person and every project will require a different answer to that challenge, and sometimes it won’t work at all. This is just like everything else in life – the only mystery is why people blame Free for their own poverty of imagination and intolerance for possible failure.”
– Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of Radical Price, 2009:233