01 October 2006•Excerpted from “Nets harness kid creator impulses and encourage expansion of user generated content” by Gary Rusak page 108. KidScreen Magazine MIPCOM 2006
Proven UGC Success
Canada’s CBC and Australia’s ABC have shown necessary caution in entering the UGC arena; both have stringent controls and vetting processes. While ABC prefers to deal with material that is not copyrighted to avoid ownership issues altogether, CBC allows the copyrighted material from its shows to be manipulated, but ultimately controls what goes on the site and reaches the airwaves.
While both pubcasters have just started engaging with UGC to promote their traditional broadcast portals, Canada’s 24/7 animation net Teletoon is blazing the trail with the Zimmer Twins.
Toronto-based production company zinc Roe approached the network a couple of years ago with the idea of using animated characters Edgar and Eva in an interactive format. Teletoon jumped at the idea. The result is zimmertwins.teletoon.com, which launched in March 2005, followed by a second run in July 2006. Visitors are given the opportunity to manipulate the title characters and create endings to shorts already produced by the network. With an eye to accessibility and user-friendliness, the audience can create the endings of the short films by inputting simple directions such as “run”, “celebrate”, “agree” and “disagree” into the on-line program. The Flash capability makes it possible for the users to manipulate approximately 80 different scenes.
For the first round that ended in the latter half of ‘05, the net chose the best clips and readied them for broadcast - turning speech bubbles into voices and crediting the kid creators. The spots, 60 from season one and 120 from season two, are currently used as one-minute interstitials and commercials that serve to promote the network and the production.
According to Teletoon’s numbers, the Zimmer Twins website drew more than 195,000 unique visitors from across Canada in July 2006 alone, hitting the nine- to 12-year-old demo the heaviest. The site has received more than 290,000 separate entries since the launch of season one, even crossing linguistic lines - 39.8% of all entries were created in French.
Although Steve Szigeti, director of online media for Teletoon, deems the project an unqualified success, he says it is difficult to gauge whether the website ended up driving viewers to the linear net or not - ratings for one-minute spots are difficult to track. However, the site is sticky and is most likely engendering viewer loyalty. Creator Jason Krogh of zinc Roe points out that a full 30% of visits to the Zimmer Twins site last for more than 10 minutes. Krogh sees the project as a nice synthesis of UGC with the traditional creative process.”In our project we have animators, and writers, and we brainstorm ideas and then we add kids to that mix.”