Storm Surfers Case Study by Elias Ribeiro

Storm Surfers produced by Firelight and powered by Red Level follows two-time world champion Tom Carroll and big wave tow-in pioneer Ross Clarke-Jones as they hunt down and ride the world’s biggest waves.

The show was originally commissioned by discovery channel, since then it has been translated into multiple platforms. Why? 


To increase ratings for Discovery channel. To create a subscription channel and above all form as much engagement as possible. It is a tricky task, it requires a huge amount of energy and resources to keep talking to an audience. They had to hire webproducer and a freelancer to facilitate the weekly engagement.


Networks such as Facebook have been a huge ally for data mining and collection. As soon as you have a friend, you can look at all of their friends. 9 million Ozzies on FB. They are the nation who spend the biggest avarage of time on FB. Six times more than any other country.


Original package of content was a one hour feature documentary, 6 x 3 minutes micro documentaries, a website, DVD distribution, and they carved out rights for news and current affairs separately  (intentionally to help promote series). 


One million viewers on news story on ABC news, it certainly helped raise finance for the feature. 


They were sponsored Red Bull and Quicksilver.

The website repeats the pitch and the narrative structure of the documentary. The team and crew (heroes), the mission (their goals) and weather (what are their obstacles). The micro documentaries help create the universe around which this story is going to be told. It is important as it starts to give clues on how to turn the doco into a series. They also introduce secondary themes that are explored through the narrative.


The VIP room area. Subscription base. 3000 subscribers, Goal is 10000 subscribers. Photo galery is the most popular thing.


When going for finance pitch, an obstacle is that people still do not know what the internet is. So apart from pitching the story it is important to clarify how and what is going to be done.


Currently Storm Surfers was broadcast to over a million viewers across the world. 190,000 online views from which 130,000 were unique visits data from google analytics. 4.2 million views on TV news publicity. 3.8 million readers on print publicity.

 

Micro documentaries are a completely separate property from the primary property (feature documentary). The latter belongs to Discovery Channel, they sell it to other networks around the world. The producer can exploit the sales of micro documentaries rights separately. Red Lever bought the option in cash to represent Storm Surfers to all-media content to online advertisers. Plus the producer gets 35% of sales before anybody else.

Their goal is to have 10000 FB friends in their group. They have hired a FB specialist to help achieve that. They are concerned about spreading their content too far and would like to draw people back to use their website as the primary space.

There will be 9.5 milion page impressions with expandable banner micro-sites. Each banner with 5 videos, 10 stills, 4 downloadable stills for free and information on the heroes of the show. While downloading you will get the opportunity to also download free ipad, iphone and ipod Storm Surfers app. Anywhere you click on that banner the viewer will be linked to the Storm Surfers Website. This initiative producers expect to generate a million video views. This was largest sale of any of Storm Surfers properties, even  more substantial than television sale. It was achieved in partnership with Red Level.

The apps are used to enlarge engagement with audience. They createded a funny quizz for both ipod, iphone and ipad. There is an extra feature for the ipad app, a link to itunes store where you can download the feature documentary for five dollars. 

A few years back, what one could have done in order to make that diagram look a bit more impressive would be more broadcaster pre-sales. Resulting in reduced investment required from private investors or the government.

To qualify for a rebate the producer must make a one hour documentary with a minimum budget of U$ 250,000 to get 20% rebate. That could be used to borrow money to leverage against, or just make the film and get the rebate.

The main difference fromt he traditional model is the investment component or recoupable component. In other words, the money you have to pay back to people when income comes in, money you are sharing when you get your royalty check. It has been reduced from 50 to 25%. And a big part of that is the online, or all-media pre-sales.

All together very innovative and promising business model. This article was written based on Marcus Gillezeau's from Firelight presentation at Transmedia Victoria in January 2011.