The Entertainment Industry is having a growth spurt. New technology and the Information Age have changed the media landscape. Video and Record Stores are going out of business. The product is now available with the click of a button, and the Postman.

Unless a project has a major name attached, it is no longer enough to put an ad in the Newspaper, and pepper the Television with advertisements. Without that name, there won’t be many interviews on the Talk Show circuit.

On the flip side, it is so much easier to create content. Since the advent of the digital camera, online content has grown to an alarming rate. Networks’ websites, Individual project sites, and sites like Hulu are popping up all over the Interwebs. It’s grown so quickly, that our Unions have had to negotiate new contracts - and no one is sure of the future.

With Independent projects, like ours, there is a reliance on a grass-roots support base to make our product viable in the marketplace. We have stepped up to this challenge by providing a peek at the “man behind the curtain,” as it were.

We have adapted to the landscape and are trying new ways to market our skills. We’ve gone online. But in adopting this new strategy, we may need to look at a new template. The Entertainment Industry’s marketing model doesn’t seem entirely useful to Sam Bailey and Independent Film as a whole.

As I understand it, the current marketing model for a project contains the following:

- Downloads
- Streaming content
- Trailers
- Show times
- Product Store
- Profiles
- Possibly an interview
- Maybe a character blog
- Photos
- The occasional contest

There are many of these elements on our sites as well. The difference between the existing sites and ours is this: our content is not finished. We continue to publish new content. Our fans are able to watch Sam Bailey develop as a film. We are asking them to follow us on our journey.

Who do you follow?

Some of the sites I follow.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bos
(Go Red Sox!)

http://www.pri.org/

Taking the Red Sox site as a model, they contain most of the above list:

- Streaming content
- Show times (it ain’t called “The Show” for nothing)
- Interviews
- Photos
- Contests
- Profiles

With some necessary additions:

- Stats (player, attendance, team standings)
- Voting (All-Star game, etc...)
- Contests
- Highlights
- A sense of Community (especially for those of us living 3,000 miles away from WEEI, NESN, and that hallowed field known as Fenway Park.)

We are going even further with this model by providing:

- A personal look into the hearts and minds of the people involved.
- An invitation to be part of the process.

I don’t really have a concluding thought, just trying to get a discussion started.....

Thoughts?