My ideas for personal shoots tend to get away from me. They always start out as ok, lets do something quick and fun and easy this time — instead of the full circus production my shoots tend to be. Then it snowballs and ends up this as complex elaborate thing. I can’t help myself. But that’s ok because I like the circus.
It used to be that magazines would fund big ambitious creative work, whether it was exploratory photojournalism or over-the-top fashion or whatever it is LaChapelle has been doing all these years. Then print entered its death spiral. But our ambitions for big passion projects never went away.
This decline in accessible financing is affecting all creative mediums: music labels have seen the collapse of their business model and are no longer putting the same money behind their artists. The more indie-oriented branches of film studios have mostly been shut down while the big movie studios have greatly reduced output and have almost abandoned original content creation. And grants for the arts are down with the government and corporations in fiscal hard times.
Amidst all this, perhaps because of all this, two new solutions are gaining momentum: crowdfunding and brand sponsorship. And while not easy to pull off, they each seem to offer benefits over the old regime when one does swing it.
Crowdfunding
We’ve watched this phenomenon grow. The movement based around Kickstarter and IndieGoGo has been getting a lot of attention of late. Artists, documentarians, and activists of all sorts post projects with a financial goal of a few hundred up to $30,000 and offer tiered “perk” levels for various donation amounts. Then if all goes well the public gets behind the project to make it happen. Seems too good to be true, but it does work if one brings the right mix to it.
The big question here is whether the interest and support is a novelty that will wear off over time, or if the desire to be involved in exciting creative projects with some fun (though usually not valuable) perks is a sentiment that will sustain over time. It’s cool to see people passionate about creative endeavors this way, and a successful crowdsourcing campaign can also build a group of advocates with a vested interest to help champion the project when it’s released.
Brand Support
I’m even more closely following and laying the groundwork to integrate brand sponsorship into some large-scale creative endeavors. While this sets off all kinds of red flags, in actuality it is often less of a sellout than being signed to a record label or working for a Hollywood studio ever was. Many kinds of creative endeavors are very expensive (mine tend in this direction), and someone has to pay for it. Labels and studios have always been very controlling, though were the traditional way to finance these things.
I ran across this recent New York Times article about Converse provideing free recording resources for bands while giving them total creative freedom and ownership of their work. Then they promote the bands’ music. The article elaborates on a number of other brands that have done similar things.
In the most recent Sundance Film Festival, Spike Jonze’s 30 minute short film called “I’m Here – A Love Story in An Absolute World” was sponsored (i.e., financed) by Absolut Vodka. The brand gave Spike complete freedom to make and own the film. There isn’t even a scene in the film with the product. Absolut got the tag in the name and some logo placement around the internet postings. But the film is Spike’s (free online to watch, highly recommended). “This is an emotional expression of the brand,” says Anna Malmhake, VP of global marketing at Absolut. “None of us could see what a shot of the vodka would have added.” (Adweek Story)
Increasingly brands need to have content to share to build their own social media audiences, and partnering with artists is a great way to achieve this. And of course, artists need money to be able to work in expensive mediums. Since brands get cache by association and perhaps content for their social media channels, they get a return other than the cash ROI an equity investor would require — cash is often hard to generate from thee kinds of endeavors, but cache and passionate expression is what these projects are all about. In many ways, the creative incentives are better aligned and therefore these deals do not require all the strings and control mechanisms of more traditional financial relationships.
Thoughts
Just as the bottom is falling out of the traditional funding sources, these two new options seem to offer a glimpse of new models evolving. The crowdfunding approach tends to be tailored to the smaller scale projects, while the brand sponsorship does require the potential to achieve some scale — though some of that scale can be provided by the brand itself through its more significant reach (relative to the artist).
My team will be kicking off a very ambitious project early in the new year. We’ll be pursuing the brand strategy in a way that still retains full creative control but offers some unique benefits to associated brands. I intend to share what I learn in the process here in the blog as we go.
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Love what you’re doing and, having chatted about the possibilities with you at PCN Expo going to be really interesting to see how it develops. I do think the Crowdsourcing and the brands fulfil two very different purposes. Crowdfunding is like seed capital and it ought to be used to get you started AND build a small but loyal audience for the work. You can fund big with crowdsourcing but it becomes very quickly completely unmanageable, servicing huge numbers of perks to huge numbers of people. I really believe in showing proof of concept, giving a glimpse of what you intend to do. This is what crowdsourcing models can be really useful for. Once you’ve proved the concept, then attracting brands should be your next step. Finding the right one, courting them and being very clear about just what the relationship will be is a whole different journey. Like you say though, it’s not actually that bad. Brands still have advertising budgets, they’re just not spending them the way they used to. It’s more fragmented and harder to track, but many more smaller pockets of money are finding their way into innovative cross-platform initiatives. We as filmmakers, creatives, photographers, have a unique opportunity to communicate directly to the end user, but in a way that doesn’t reek of the traditional ‘message’ in advertising. We ought to be very attractive, you just need to think about exactly who you’re work is destined for, and the work you’ve put into communicating with that audience. Going to be an interesting six months for the both of us by the sounds of it.
R
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[...] a financial return, which incidentally is how art has work for most of history. Much like the model I recently discussed and am exploring for an ambitious art project, OK Go is finding brand sponsors for each of their [...]