B&T - A user generated band goes mobile

As previously reported, I recently came in contact with Sydney-based creative director and social technologies expert Chris Simon, and his concept for an all-mobile user-generated virtual 'band' - the Bracket Boys. Simon has a huge amount to say on the concept, but you can pick up the bare bones from my recent Turbulence column on user generated content in the weekly marketing magazine B&T, a slightly updated version of which is pasted below:

The old model of making money from web content meant spending millions of dollars creating it, and then selling ads on it, hopefully at a profit. But why make the content yourself, where there are tens of millions of people who are willing to make it for you?

User-generated content is a central plank of what has become known as Web 2.0 – a collection of web-based technologies that emphasis social and community elements. It has become incredibly popular, and the message has not been lost on marketers and media companies.

MySpace, the blogging community web site that News Limited bought for $US580 million in 2005, was recently declared by the web rankings company Hitwise as the most popular US web site, attracting 4.6% of total internet traffic, ahead of Yahoo’s 4.42%.

Then there is YouTube – the consumer media company that has become the number one site for sharing video content. More than 70 million videos are watched on the site each day, all of them uploaded by third parties. And then there are the photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr, which was bought by Yahoo in March last year. I could go on …

The point is that many of the hottest media properties around today produce no content of their own - they merely provide a concept and the technology to make it work. This ‘build it and they will come’ ethos is drawing millions of eyeballs. Not all of them are monetised yet, but many can be. That means potentially millions of dollars in ad revenue.

As mentioned last week, the principal of user-generated content is being harnessed by Sydney-based creative director and social technologies expert Chris Simon for a new mobile content concept, The Bracket Boys. Simon is hoping that his creations (a group of stick figure-like characters comprised of brackets and slashes that can be sent via simple SMS messages) and their background ‘personalities’ will be able to inspire a wave of creativity, as consumers take the basic concept, add to it, and make it their own (note: Simon says that a plethora of multimedia content has already been developed, including artwork, animation, music, web sites, and retail merchandise, supported by a five year evolutionary program, and preparing a teaser release into the blogosphere). Should The Bracket Boys catch on, they will build value as a brand communication mechanism to be picked up by marketers.

Simon is hoping to tap into various aspects of youth culture, particularly around dance music and mobile phone usage. The four Bracket Boys characters are members of a virtual band (somewhat like Gorillaz), but can just as easily embody other motifs, such as DJs. While Simon says he is developing conceptual material behind their music, it would not be out of the question for consumers themselves to provide what would become the Bracket Boy’s sound. There are parallel’s here too to Blowfly Beer – a company that started with no product at all, but instead asked customers to tell the brewer what sort of beer they wanted. Users can interact with the various elements of multimedia content that come to be associated with The Bracket Boys – evolving them and remixing them as they see fit.

“If I think just about a few of the world’s best blogs or virals, they were ‘picked up’ or ‘passed on’ because there was something infectious about their idea or communication and, sometimes, the content had to be “filled in,” Simon says. “The “purity” of where the blog and user-generated content and community comes from should never be under-estimated. Community, user-generated content and peer-to-peer only need a little help to gather momentum.”

There is no reason for the concept to be limited to Australia either, with Simon in discussion with interested parties in China, Malaysia and Europe.

“It’s an anytime, anywhere application and its killer app is its ubiquity,” Simon says. “It’s fun, it’s community, it’s fashion, it’s music, it’s branding.”

Like many new concepts, there are plenty of hurdles to be cleared, of course. Nothing like this has been attempted on the mobile phone platform before. Simon is also hoping that knowledge of The Bracket Boys will be passed from user to user in viral fashion – always risky given the fickle nature of consumers. But there is nothing inherent in this that indicates that it won’t work.

What is very clear though is that the user-generated content phenomenon is proving itself to be more than just a fad. Blogging and file sharing activities such as YouTube and Flickr may eventually plateau, but they will not go away – at least not until they are superseded by something even more popular.

ENDS