Jak Severson Talks About Big Shot Live

The internet is too big we believe for people to have to find you and to make it work and we don’t really believe in trying to engineer viral— Paul Allenger: Welcome to dog and pony, I’m Paul Allenger are you tired of the same old reality shows? You should take a look at Big Shot live, co created by Jack Severson, Big Shot live utilizes user generated content to find new tab on line. Jack, welcome to Dog and Pony. Jack Severson: Thanks Paul, happy to be here. Paul Allenger: So tell us about Big Shot live, what makes it unique? Jack Severson: Other TV market in the country is associated with us, last year we all watched and marveled as Sanjaya sort of captivated American Idol audiences, wasn’t certainly the best singer but managed to obtain a measure of popularity that made him relevant. So we took that and said how do we bottle that, so we took seven categories. The categories that typically are identified with fame and some measure of vanity, we take the top five people in each category each day and we pick a winner for that days category, so on Monday we’ll take a winner from the modeling category and we fly them to Hollywood literally the next day and we give them a chance at real fame. Paul Allenger: So how do you guys make money? Jack Severson: Well this is an ad driven business model; one of our sponsors is DSW shoes which are opening up about 15 new shoe stores this year. The advertisers are fairly integrated in every episode because we don’t just want to sell advertising, want to make sure that it’s more impactful than what they can buy anywhere else. Paul Allenger: So the local affiliates promoting the local people participating— Jack Severson: That they are and some markets are doing a great job at it, Minneapolis, our station there KRES literally done daily web shows about this and as a result of all the promotion they have already two winners and they have got on average the largest amount of traffic. Paul Allenger: And how are your TV affiliate partners being compensated? Jack Severson: As part of our deal with them, they have to promote us over their airwaves, so we’re grabbing into their big existing audience and pulling them into the website that they are trying to promote which is their own. They are—the affiliates are able to sell a sponsorship of their own and put it on the promos themselves so that when they run an ad for Big Shot they can tie to Mark Miller Toyota and make money from that dealership. Paul Allenger: So is the idea that get this on the air at some point and have brought that TV and a web component? Jack Severson: Let’s take prime time broadcast television where the eight ratings have decreased 90% over the last 20 plus years. A good show today is probably pulling in about five million viewers a night. If you take out a property like this, it’s not inconceivable that will be doing better numbers than that in just the next couple of this. A project like this would be reach of this in the internet, the ability for one to call out to ones friend and say watch me is potentially a big application there than it would be on television. Paul Allenger: This is kind of like the best of old and new media, what parts of the old media are you retaining to make this successful? Jack Severson: We decided to get involved with this because we can secure the promotion over the airwaves. Because that’s where audience still exists, now it’s a lot smaller than it used to be. The internet is too big we believe for people to have to find you to make it work and we really believe in trying to engineer viral. We think it has to happen base on solid metrics. So when we got the promotional clearances across the country, we realize that this really could take off and draw a pretty big crowd. Once the users are there though, they’ve got to carry it forward and make it grow by itself. I don’t think that television necessarily is right for this type of thing other than as a promotional vehicle. But if you look at all these TV affiliates today, the only area of pure growth is the internet, so they’re spending on average between seven and ten minutes a day promoting their website. So their often saying if you’d like to see more of what we’ve showed you go to the web. And that is really not what the web is meant to do. Paul Allenger: So people are getting behind each other, their utilizing social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to push their candidacy? Jack Severson: They are and their almost behaving as though their on MySpace or Facebook inside of the site. We gave them some very crude tools to play with where they can find friends inside of—inside of the Big Shot live site because these people actually want to recruit fans from within the other people because they can vote too. We’re going to be expanding some of those social tools to allow them to grow their relationship within the site. Paul Allenger: Jack Severson, executive producer of Big Shot Live, thanks for joining us in Dog and Pony. Jack Severson: My Pleasure thanks. Paul Allenger: And as always if you have comments, questions or suggestions for upcoming guests you can email me paulallenger@paul@dogandpony.com thanks for watching, see you soon.