marketing

Socializing Your Media

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The last two posts were pretty heavy ones on the nature of creativity.  So I'd like to go back to the idea that spawned them all – the idea that people use media to socialize and that's why originality is not always a factor in their choice of media.  With that conclusion, I want to close up this not-quite series with a look of ways people can make their media more "socializable."

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The Production Revolution Isn’t For All: Marketing

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You're hoping to leverage the Production Revolution to get out your novel, your music, your comic, what have you.  I've been covering the reasons that the new tools for media creation and distribution aren't going to turn everyone into a potential media success (such as time and technical skill) and I'm going to continue to rain on the parade by noting another factor: marketing ability.

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Virtual Stars Part 2: The Advantages

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So last column I explored just why someone would want to make a Virtual Star, that star being defined by the following traits:

  1. The creation of a completely artificial media figure whose image, behavior, story, and personality are made up.
  2. This entity has no single component traceable as a contribution of an actual human being – no single voice actor, artist, etc.  The Virtual Star is an entirely artistic creation that cannot be rendered down to being identified with a single person, unlike an animated character with a popular voice actor or being distinctly modeled on a single human being.
  3. The entity is treated as real in most media produced around it, but it is acknowledged that the entity is completely virtual.

I then explored why I thought that the creation of a virtual star was a viable venture due to culture and resources:

  1. There have always been virtual stars or creations like virtual stars, especially for the youth.
  2. Regular stars have often been fictionalized.  People have come to accept some fictionalization of celebrities.
  3. Reality Television creates stars by mixing real-life and fiction.  This further blurs the fiction-fact boundary.
  4. Games have people used to using technology to produce memorable characters and fans have responded.
  5. Technology allows for creation of the elements needed to create a Virtual Star easily.

So the question then comes: what is the reason to create a Virtual Star?  Frankly I can think of a lot:

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