Blurring the Lines: Marketing Programs Across Platforms

David Gale – VP of New Media, MTV

"$5Cover" is a story of emerging musicians, people who will live and work in Memphis as musicians, some of whom make a living, but most don't. They're schoolteachers, or they're working as waiters, or they're cleaning houses. And they're making music on the side.

[MUSIC]

The idea is to get immersed in their world and to learn their music and their world through storytelling.

[Clip from $5Cover] Woman #1

Girl, I know you're in the middle of some drama. I will so be there tonight.

[End clip from $5Cover]

David Gale

All the characters are played by real musicians. All of the people in the series are playing characters very much like themselves. So you have this kind of new sort of free-form format, that kind of hybrid of reality television and scripted feature filmmaking. But then from there we realized that, you know, you can get a much deeper experience. Not just like learning about, you know, who these characters are, although that's a big part of it, but being able to experience their music.

[Clip from $5Cover] Woman #2

Is this your band?

Woman #3

Yeah.

Woman #2

It is?

Woman #3

I have a band.

[End clip from $5Cover]

David Gale

"$5 Cover" is seen on the Web. It's seen on a cell phone. It's seen in an Xbox platform. It can be seen on other gaming devices that have Internet connections. But also you could download it onto iTunes. We repackaged it into television format so we had three episodes turned into one-half-hour on television, and we showed that over the course of five weeks. We could break up little parts of the series so music videos could end up on a music programming hour. Episodes about the artist could end up in other formats within the television schedule. And so we intentionally made it very flexible. Most of the time with formats like television and features [films], it's a pretty inflexible format. You have a very specific time when you have to break for commercials. You have a specific time slot. It's very scheduled. Right now the way media works it's veering more and more on demand. And so not only on demand of where you see it, but how you see it, and how you experience it. And the more you then create that from the ground up, the more natural it feels to the audience.

Bedford/St. Martin's Video Transcript