Narninian Apprentice: Season 2

[Reginald L. Everett]

"History" - a nice, stuffy word if ever I heard one. Pshaw! This is a forward-thinking venture. History is one thing, but we must not rely on the precedent to set our standards for what is to come! That is the kind of behaviour which leads to the stale sequels mentioned by my colleague.

This is not to say that I disagree with your statement that time is of the essence. It is merely that you seek to undermine the effort of your competitors so blatantly. I do know there are other multi-billionaires who prefer their employees to work in such a fashion, but I personally would prefer some subtlety in the sabotage, if sabotage

must

be necessary. As it stands, the only asset of your project which you have deigned to advertise is the fact that it was completed quickly. Had the other team missed deadline, you may have a leg to stand on. As it is, I see a blatant and clumsy attempt to undermine your opponent on no basis whatsoever.

One can hardly call the deadline being "milked", when there are still two days remaining. It causes one to wonder whether the first submission was rather skimmed through. Aha! "Skimmed"! Haw-haw-haw! ~snort~

[Reginald L. Everett]

Rather nice, this "Cold Medina" whatsit. What did you say was in it?

[Zero]

This is not to say that I disagree with your statement that time is of the essence. It is merely that you seek to undermine the effort of your competitors so blatantly. I do know there are other multi-billionaires who prefer their employees to work in such a fashion, but I personally would prefer some subtlety in the sabotage, if sabotage

must

be necessary. As it stands, the only asset of your project which you have deigned to advertise is the fact that it was completed quickly. Had the other team missed deadline, you may have a leg to stand on. As it is, I see a blatant and clumsy attempt to undermine your opponent on no basis whatsoever.

I have no reason to advertise anything else about my submission to my competitors. It would only give them inspiration. Sabotage would be interfering with them, which I haven't done. What I'm doing is competing with them, and time

is

added value in this business, a valid basis to compete on. Since their project isn't available, its the only attribute open to criticism yet, but I assure you it wont be the last. I'm sure you know Narninian's niche in the market, and it isn't for the weak or submissive, but you came to him because you wanted to reach the mafiascum market, and you couldn't have made a better choice. Nice is for your partners, not your competitors.

One can hardly call the deadline being "milked", when there are still two days remaining. It causes one to wonder whether the first submission was rather skimmed through. Aha! "Skimmed"! Haw-haw-haw! ~snort~

Two days is immense in the lifecycle of a released movie. Narninian himself said that he would appreciate if we didn't require the entire deadline. Perhaps you feel differently, but most high powered executives prefer their marketing teams not to keep them waiting.

Time to market can make all the difference in Hollywood. The bottom line is about art yes, but if time to market and other commercial interests aren't considered, a film will never escape the "art film" kiss of death. The box office winner isn't the guy who takes 10 years to make a movie. That guy will end up with a movie that is out of date and overbudget. Obviously I'm not telling you anything you don't already know from your own experience, but I think when it comes to marketing, such crass commercial interests play an even greater role than they do in filmmaking in general.

[Fritzler]

Rather nice, this "Cold Medina" whatsit. What did you say was in it?

* 1 oz. Southern Comfort®
* 1 oz. Blue Curacao
* 1 Ice
* 1 oz. Absolut Vodka®
* Cranberry Juice Cocktail

[Reginald L. Everett]

Zero: I like your spunk, boy. Well said! Much better than the argument you posed previously. I would advise that you be careful not to push

too

hard, though.

[Fritzler]

Yea Zero. Right now dis radio station is busy - brainknowledgeably wizzy
Honey drippers, you say you got it

You know what I"m sayin?

[Winston Moneybags IV]

Well I see my fellow judges have already checked in. Well, what do you expect when you simply run only a Fortune 50 company? I haven't the time to spend away from my office, but since Narnian recently supported my bid for President of the New England Society for People with more Money than Uruguay, how could I say no?

[Blackberry]

/sent in our final submission

[Narninian]

The Syndicate's Proposal:

The Syndicate's proposal for marketing Narnia to the mafiascum demographic is to reach them through their core medium, the game of mafia itself. Narnia in general and the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in particular is very well suited to the mafia format. It has sharply defined forces of good and evil in a battle for the future of their land, it has a pantheon of unique and memorable characters, and the outcome could really go either way right up until the end. We feel that playing within the Narnia universe is the very best way to grab the attention of mafiascum players.

For our Narnia LW&W theme game, we've fleshed out 20 individual roles featured in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. To make sure that every player has the for conversion to a moviegoer, every role has at least some interesting twist, however small the gameplay impact. If greenlighted by the Disney marketing team, one of the Syndicate's experienced mafiascum moderators would personally conduct the game to ensure a successful outcome that meets the companies promotional goals while remaining consistent with the brand image.

This marketing proposal would have minimum staffing or material costs, and could thus be implemented for a minimal outlay from Disney's marketing budget. If an agreement is signed to work with the Syndicate, we can provide the option to extend the contract through the full series of sequels, designing and running a game with a different set of characters from each movie being promoted.

Since the secrecy of the exact roles we are using is essential to the success of the game, we will not publicly post the 20 roles we've selected. However, we will provide the full list of roles to all Disney marketing executives evaluating our campaign. Simply send a PM to Zero, and I will send you the confidential list of roles. Narninian and other Syndicate team members will also have a copy of the roles.

[Narninian]

Cosa Nostra's:

What we would plan to do, is first, make a mini trailer (somewhat like your trailer of Narnian Apprentice 2) We would post a link. We have already made a deal with AniX, that' he'd post in the thread 'OMG, that trailer is awesome, you guys need to see it!' and also he'd spread word of our amazing trailer to other. (We already showed AniX the trailer set-up and he agreed it was worthy of 'telling people about')

So, first-off, here is our trailer:

*Peaceful music plays*

-Lucy running through the house playing hide-go-seek with her brothers

*Credit of the Film Companies: (From Walt Disney, Etc.)*

-Lucy finds a wardrobe, hops inside

"A Journey Will Begin..."

-Finds the very back of the wardrobe, the entrance into Narnia

"For Four Young Children..."

- Shot of the children walking in the snow

*dramatic, exciting music, begins to play*

"Danger..."

- The queen stoning the participants of Father Christmas' Feast

- Father Christmas giving Lucy, Peter and Susan their gifts(/the weapons).

"Friendship..."

- The kids meeting the beavers

- Aslan talking with his loyal army

"Destiny..."

- The queen's army along with her polar bears

- Aslan roaring, and the two armys fightind

"The Chronicle Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe"
- "Remember, numbers don't win a battle"
-"No, but they sure help..."

*Explanation To Judges: We want a trailer to enduce thrill and excitement. We wanted to make one of those trailers where your heart starts beating faster and you can't wait to go see it because it looks amazing!

Next, we'd post a poster. The idea is the same, to enduce the excitement into the viewers. We do this by surronding the lion with fire.

[Blackberry]

Here is the pic we included in our submission.

[Narninian]

Thank you -- I was about to send you a PM asking you to post that.

[Reginald L. Everett]

Well I see my fellow judges have already checked in. Well, what do you expect when you simply run only a Fortune 50 company?

I haven't the time to spend away from my office

, but since Narnian recently supported my bid for President of the New England Society for People with more Money than Uruguay, how could I say no?

If by "office" you mean "hot tub". You're old money, Moneybags. You don't

work

, you just haul in the cash from old Moneybags I.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. ~wishes he were old money, too~

[Winston Moneybags IV]

Who says you cant have a hot tub in your office?

I have questions for each team that I would like addressed:

Syndicate:

You only have twenty roles in your theme game. This suggests that the marketing effort will only reach about twenty people. How do you plan to get it out to the rest of the community?

Also, please send me a copy of the roles.

Cosa Nostra:

The goal of the project was to create a marketing campaign that targets a specific demographic, what parts of your trailer were designed with that thought in mind?

[Winston Moneybags IV]

Syndicate:

I have the roles. My secretary lost them somehow, but dont worry she wont make that mistake again. Ive already dismissed her to work with the Plebes in the field.

[Cash Johnston]

Cosa Nostra: What's that taste in my mouth? Oh, wait, it must be

bland

. A trailer? A movie poster? Unless you're going to push the old formula in a new direction, it's just the same gig that's been used ad infinitum. My heart

is

racing, but that's because I'm having a heart attack over looking over your pile of a proposal.

Syndicate: Though my asteemed colleague Winston is rather old-school, he's got the experience to know what he's talking about. Your marketing plan is more original and plays better to your demographics, but it's too limited in scope. How are we going to get the masses exciting about twenty people playing mafia? How are you going to promote this game? Select the contestants? It's a solid foundation, but you just didn't think it through that well beyond designing the setup.

One last tip; don't be afraid to spend money to get a better product on the market. Invested wisely, it pays off. The old adage "It takes money to make money" is worth its weight in gold, baby. 8)

-Ca$h

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

We have many experienced moderators at the Syndicate and we can certainly run multiple parallel games at the same time to accomodate more players.

[Cash Johnston]

You're going to run the same setup multiple times? The cookie-cutter approach harms the integrity of the game, as contestants can just look at other games for a strategic advantage. It would be more wise to better promote one game and get mass-interaction other ways than to reuse the same old game of Mafia.

-Ca$h

[Zero]

The Syndicate's campaign isn't limited to 20 people. The version in our proposal is a working prototype of a game that can be packaged and played ad infinitum in any similar environment, a marketing campaign that can extend far beyond mafiascum.net. There are thousands of online communities, game forums, etc, where a demographic similar to that of mafiascum.net exists. I'm sure we could all name a dozen other places where such guerilla marketing could work, and each of us would have mostly a different set of them.

Even if a poster or a trailer is in a forum that is technically viewable by hundreds of people, how many of those hundreds would actually take the time to visit that particular thread and look at them? A small fraction. And even if they do, in this age of ubiquitous banner ads and non-stop commercials, how many of them would actually be influenced by what they saw? A very small fraction of a small fraction. The beauty of our campaign is its interactivity. Every iteration of the game is another 20 people who will be intensely exposed to the material, with a very high chance of being influenced by it compared to passive media.

What the Syndicate saw as the core requirement for this task was to differentiate from the generic marketing to reach out to a specific niche demographic (that of the type of gamers who might frequent mafiascum) that was underserved by Disney's existing marketing. In this light we took into consideration the marketing that Disney already had in place, and moved away from that. Disney has posters, lovely posters. They have trailers, exciting trailers. Those are their strengths, and they don't particularly need our help with that. In fact if we had wanted to go that traditional route, we would probably base it on their existing posters or trailers (perhaps with minor edits to retarget them), and blanket the existing posters and trailers on forums like this. But that would be boring. What Disney doesn't already have is a freely distributable run it yourself gaming system, like what we propose. This is a fairly unique supplement to what they already have that will reach people not easily influenced by posters and trailers.

[Zero]

Cash, that is a concern, although not a game breaking one. One fairly simple modification within our current paradigm would be to add extra suggested roles that can be swapped into the default setup, along with subtly different rulesets for some of the more powerful characters. This simple modification would give each moderator thousands of permutations to choose from, nullifying much of the advantage of metagamers trying to figure out people's roles by comparing it to other games. To some extent people will already have a broad outline of what roles to look for simply by familiarity with the franchise.

The important thing is that each game under our system is fun, whether its run flawlessly or not. I believe we can assure that the game is robust enough to remain fun. Even a perfectly vanilla game of mafia is fun, even when people know what roles to expect, they don't know who is who.

[Iammars]

Cosa Nostra: What's that taste in my mouth? Oh, wait, it must be

bland

. A trailer? A movie poster? Unless you're going to push the old formula in a new direction, it's just the same gig that's been used ad infinitum. My heart

is

racing, but that's because I'm having a heart attack over looking over your pile of a proposal.
-Ca$h

If movie posters and movie trailers didn't work, why would people be using them today? True, there have been some intresting ad techniques that have worked, but most of the time a good movie has been promoted solely by trailers, posters and endorsements.

[Reginald L. Everett]

The Syndicate's campaign isn't limited to 20 people. The version in our proposal is a working prototype of a game that can be packaged and played ad infinitum in any similar environment, a marketing campaign that can extend far beyond mafiascum.net. There are thousands of online communities, game forums, etc, where a demographic similar to that of mafiascum.net exists. I'm sure we could all name a dozen other places where such guerilla marketing could work, and each of us would have mostly a different set of them.
Even if a poster or a trailer is in a forum that is technically viewable by hundreds of people, how many of those hundreds would actually take the time to visit that particular thread and look at them? A small fraction. And even if they do, in this age of ubiquitous banner ads and non-stop commercials, how many of them would actually be influenced by what they saw? A very small fraction of a small fraction. The beauty of our campaign is its interactivity. Every iteration of the game is another 20 people who will be intensely exposed to the material, with a very high chance of being influenced by it compared to passive media.

What the Syndicate saw as the core requirement for this task was to differentiate from the generic marketing to reach out to a specific niche demographic (that of the type of gamers who might frequent mafiascum) that was underserved by Disney's existing marketing. In this light we took into consideration the marketing that Disney already had in place, and moved away from that. Disney has posters, lovely posters. They have trailers, exciting trailers. Those are their strengths, and they don't particularly need our help with that. In fact if we had wanted to go that traditional route, we would probably base it on their existing posters or trailers (perhaps with minor edits to retarget them), and blanket the existing posters and trailers on forums like this. But that would be boring. What Disney doesn't already have is a freely distributable run it yourself gaming system, like what we propose. This is a fairly unique supplement to what they already have that will reach people not easily influenced by posters and trailers.

Blah, blah, blah. Sounds like hypocrisy to me. Overly verbose hypocrisy at that.

Your

twenty-person game, which could be extended to, what, thirty? will appeal to people on all different kinds of forums, but a movie poster and trailer (which appeals to a far wider audience than just the gamers) will not?

As for team Cosa Nostra, I am terribly disappointed. I was hoping for something creative. What we received was a piece of some of the most pedestrian thinking I have ever seen. A movie trailer. To promote a movie. How original.

Then again, using a mafia game to promote something on mafiascum is equally as unimaginative.

The Syndicate: How many people from the mafiascum demographic do you honestly feel this would attract?

Cosa Nostra: What makes your movie trailer and poster so exciting/special/outstanding? Have you scored/recorded any of the music, by any chance? Captured any screenshots for us? For something that took twice as long as the opposing team's effort, with half the creativity, I'm looking for something more to compel me.

[Zero]

Umm no, I wasn't talking about extending it from 20 to 30 people at all. That was not my response to how it can reach a broader market. The response was multiple iterations in different environments, with options to allow permutations to keep it fresh.

As for its appeal beyond gamers. In my understanding of the task, as Narninian presented it, that wasn't the goal. The goal was to reach gamers. Disney already has campaigns in place to reach generic customers. I can post their excellent trailer and poster here, if by chance you haven't seen them. More of the same, not targetted to this demographic, contributes nothing.

And I didn't say it would appeal to people "on all different kinds of forums". Rather it would appeal to people on many different kinds of forums, but not all. There are thousands of gaming forums and other forums with a similar demographic. But there are many tens of thousands of forums where it wouldn't apply. In my understanding, the goal was to reach this specific demographic, with all those others beyond the scope of this task.

And somewhere in that overly verbose hypocrisy, I made an important distinction between how many people will be influenced and how many eyeballs will potentially be exposed. An interactive advertisement may reach fewer people, but a passive one will only actually be noticed by a small fraction of the people who see it. So I dispute that their poster would actually reach more people on mafiascum.net than a game would. It would be seen by more people yes, but then the game would be seen by people who didn't play too. But passive advertisements are too pervasive and our demographic is trained to tune them out.

[Zero]

As for whether it was creative to use mafia on mafiascum. No, that aspect of our idea was not particularly creative, and there is a reason for it. The idea is so obviously the right way to approach this task that there could be no better choice. We were actually concerned that the other team would come to the same conclusion and take the same approach, in which case it would have come down to game mechanics.

Where the creativity comes into play is in the realization of our idea. Just as with posters and trailers, the creativity or lack thereof is totally in the implementation of them, not the idea of having them. We took an obvious idea and used creative roles to give it an accurate feel of the story.

[Reginald L. Everett]

So Zero, do you have teammates, or what? Your semantics bore me.