Today’s post is an interview with three guys from OASIS Multimedia. I met them at the Interfilm shortfilm festival in Berlin and we had a chat about their experiences with social media marketing. They have an animated series in development called Punks’n’Banters and have been quite successful in creating a small dedicated tribe around it.
The concept for Punks’n’Banters is a mixture of animation and comics. It’s about three punks: Bastard, Coffee and Sweetie, who live in a squat house called “Chaos central”. They have lots of R-rated adventures involving drugs, sex and violence, while just trying to cope with everyday life.
The OASIS team consists of Donald (Benedikt Rietzel), a punk, all-round designer and the creative head behind the project, Tego (Tobias Gessner), media manager and communicator and Olle (Oliver Lentz), owner of OASIS Multimedia, producer and supporter.
How do you use social media for your advantage?
Unfortunately we didn’t invent social media, but we use all possibilities provided by this form of marketing very intentionally. Not least by connecting different platforms in order to acquire and reach the largest possible fan base.
What do you want to achieve with your social media campaign?
First of all we want to create awareness. We want to expose our idea, our product, our little punk friends to as many people as possible. To those who’re looking for something different online, those who dig comics or punk, or those who just want to enjoy how our punks go about their everyday lives and speak their minds without being censored.
Tell us about how you started out.
A lot is done via word of mouth. We have a good relationship with Matias Roskos from Visualblog.de (whom we’d like to greet here by saying: „Hi!“). He wrote a blog post which sparked interest in other bloggers and was eventually read by the folks from Interfilm Berlin, who then invited us to the festival.
Then somehow Nix Gut (a big German mail-order company for punk merchandise) found us, probably through our Facebook page. We developed a small partnership that is slowly growing. They sell t-shirts with our PnB imagery in their catalogue and online store, and we provide them with comics for their newsletter.
We also have a few true fans already, who are promoting our characters, for example in online forums.
Last but not least we try to get exposure in relevant media through interviews or getting written about, to slowly but surely grow our fan tribe. This is the way our punks are taking over the world. And talking about the world, our first long form episode, which is being produced right now, will also be available in English, so we can reach our non-German fans as well.
What kinds of interactions with the tribe have you tested?
We try to include our fans in all stages of development. They can participate and bring ideas to the table. They can vote for or against planned merchandise and/or participate in small contests we are holding. Things we’ve done are drawing contests, photo postings or interaction tasks.
What are your TOP 3 tips for social marketing for an animated project?
Generally: 1., 2. and 3.: Passion, 4. and 5. post, post, post and 6. be active on Youtube and 7. on Facebook.
Naturally, nothing will work if you’re not having fun and only want to sell your series or film. Online marketing works well with Youtube, even if you have to work hard to get noticed. For us Facebook has also worked well. On FB you just get better interaction with the fans and some of them can even help you.
And what would be your 3 Don’ts?
I don’t think there are any don’ts. You just have to have the courage to try everything. If you just go through tried and tested methods recommended by some marketing consultant, you’ll just get buried in the masses.
Hmm… maybe there are some don’ts after all then: 1. Only do tried-and-tested 2. Make no mistakes 3. Have no interactions with your fans.
Do you use crowdsourcing or crowdfunding in the project?
Oh, let us first look up those fancy words in an English business dictionary 😉
We already do crowdsourcing. Our fans have given us lots of ideas which resulted in two new characters (who haven’t been introduced yet). We also asked our FB community to invent the name of the fictive beer our characters are drinking.
In the future we want to give our fans more and more say in what will happen. At the moment this is difficult, as it’s still quite the “hobby project” and we’re not making any money with it.
Regarding crowdfunding we’re trying to raise a part of the financing for our coming actions through small donations from our fans – I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who already donated. Every euro really helps us to make this series! – but unfortunately that’s not nearly enough.
What is the role of off-line marketing in your plans? You use lots of giveaways it seems.
Off-line marketing surely has it’s place but you have to use it in a focused way. Sending flyers by mail wouldn’t make much sense, but it can help you a lot if you get exposure in the right magazines.
At the festival we had buttons for example, that we gave to people who came by our stand, so they’d remember us. The rest we gave away to our friends (I know some punks after all) and thereby promoted the show some more.
Our stickers are also off-line-marketing. We don’t just give them out at festivals and events, but we use them in our home towns or during trips to make our brand known to as many people as possible.
To conclude, do you have any exciting news about show you want to share?
In Berlin we talked with the Senior Content Manager of MTV and it was a very positive meeting. Of course nothing was decided in a short first time meeting, but we already agreed (and this is great!) to work jointly on developing the first episode, so that we can tailor it to MTV in advance. Which just means that we have to get even more extreme with the content and dialogue. This gives us the possibility that MTV or another channel might feature us or will work with us on an international distribution plan.
Thanks for the interview guys and good luck with your project!
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