Introduction and discussion on “engines of engagement” (or enginets!)
SHAHAR: Hello, this is Shahar with Buzzboosters and the Association of Entrepreneurs 3.0 and this is another “Meet the Expert” call. Today we have a very, very special guest. His name is Jim Banister. He is the CEO of SpectrumDNA, a studio that is based here in Park City, Utah. They develop web and wireless “engines of engagement,” and you will soon know what that means. He’s also the author of the book “Word of Mouse: the New Age of Networked Media.“ You can find that book at Amazon.com and I checked and they have only three copies left there, but they’re ordering more, so you can see how much “buzz” this book has generated.
He also donates a lot of his time as an executive creative director for the Center of Applied Media in Park City. It’s a non-profit institute for digital media education and enterprise innovation.
The common thread of Jim’s career is engaging audiences. And that’s why he’s such a special guest here tonight, because if you know anything about Buzzboosters we tell our clients and members always about how important today it is today to engage the consumer in everything you do, and today we have a major expert on this.
His career is a mix of technology and generating revenue doing this. Jim created and managed the Engineering Visualization Center at TRW, producing award winning television and film properties, designed and built the multi-media and post production system for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project. And he created the XQuest cross-media franchise currently being developed in partnership with Ron Howard and Imagine Entertainment.
He also spent five years with Warner Brothers online, where he was one of the prime movers of the company’s digital media strategy and program development; first as VP of production & technology and later as Chief Development Officer.
His formal training includes a BS in physics from San Diego University and an MS Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California. So I want to Welcome Jim Banister. Are you there Jim?
JIM: Yep. I’m here.
SHAHAR: If you don’t mind, I want to go right into the topic of “engines of engagement” and I want you to explain a little bit to everybody exactly what the means. Our audience is usually business owners and entrepreneurs most of the time, so I think it’s going to be really interesting for them. So please go ahead.
JIM: Very good. When I left Warner Brothers in 2000, I had been working in the interactive industry for some time. I had gone to live in London and do a bit of work for the BBC and while there decided to write a book called “Word of Mouse”, I didn’t know that it was going to be called “Word of Mouse” at that time, but I went back and I autopsied what made something a success in what I call “networked media,” which in general means the Web and mobile wireless. I was looking for commonalities between all those sites that got into the top 100 or top 1,000 ranks on the internet—those that grew organically into those ranks. That is, born on the Web. I consistently did tests and I went and I looked at mainstream media companies like ABC and NBC and HBO, as well as big brand companies like Pepsi.com and coke.com and nike.com and go down the list. They were routinely being beat out in terms of popularity on the web. Superficially that’s not surprising, but the question I kept asking was “how do you teach somebody on purpose to build programming the likes of which were appearing organically and climbing up the charts?” Not shoot in the dark. That is, how do you build a web engine that becomes a top-1,000 website or a top-100 or a top-10 for that matter? And so I was looking for commonalities between them as I wanted to teach people how to do that. I’m not talking about Go.com, which is the roll-up for all Disney sites, or the collective Time Warner web properties, or even msn.com, for that matter. I’m talking about sites like the bebo.com and myspace and the hi5.com’s and the EBay’s and so forth—the ones that were born on the web and routinely beat out big, big brands and big names. It took me some time but what I found was these success stories actually had more in common then they didn’t. Much like everybody on this call, 99.9% of our DNA is exactly the same except we smell different, we talk different, we act different and we look different. The same is true of these top web-borne engines. There actually turned out to be an archetypal type of programming that was emerging on the internet that was just a different form of narrative. It’s not a “web site,” which is essentially a clickable kind of brochure, where it might be a little bit interactive. But a website is *not* one of these sites that become a self perpetuating engine. And the term “engine” is the right word for it; or an “engine of engagement.” So I set out to figure out how you can teach to create these engines of engagement.
We’re moving from this age of exposure to an age of engagement, especially in the advertising industry. But the entire advertising industry as well as the media industry, is entrenched in this thing called “storytelling.” Not a good or bad thing… they just are. It’s a fantastic thing [for an audience] to suspend belief, or hear somebody who’s a great orator or a great story teller, or enjoy an exceptional 0:30 television ad. But there’s something else happening in networked media. And it’s not based on storytelling. A video on youtube.com is storytelling, but what is the collective user experience around youtube—not just watching videos, but posting, sharing, commenting, etc.?
[When I teach this subject, I] often ask people what do… say… Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and Ernest Hemmingway have in common? And inevitably somebody will come up with “well, they’re storytellers.” And if you show that group representations of those auteurs’ medium of choice—film, television or print— invariably somebody will say they’re “storytelling forms communication” [or some paraphrased variant]. But then I’ll show the same group of people a chessboard and say “what’s the role of the creator in chess?” That is, the role of a person intent on creating a board game? Well it’s not to tell a story. Instead, the creator’s job is to create a story engine. It’s a different form of narrative and it’s a different skill set. And it goes even further when you say “okay, how do you create a world online?” An Ebay? Or a Facebook? Or a myspace? Or an MMORPG? In those cases, you’re a world creator and a world manager. It’s very different in terms of your literacy than it is to create a 0:30 second television commercial or a print ad, or a radio spot or some other cross-media campaign rooted in linear media. Story engines and manufactured worlds are very different animals. You can call it whatever you want, just don’t call it storytelling. We call these archetypal “engines of engagement”: “web engines,” “networked engines” or “enginets.”
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