LA Webfest 2013 – defining the future of webseries

Short observations from the LA Webfest (March 28-31, 2013):

In 2010, LA based TV writer, producer and director Michael Ajakwe gave birth to a simple idea, creating a place for the new story format webseries, to be seen, find like-minded creators and exchange ideas. Soon, the concept took up international speed and a group of visionaries around French producer Jean-Michel Albert launched the Marseille Webfest in late 2011.

2013 marks the 4th anniversary of the LA Webfest and Ajakwe’s idea has grown into a global movement by now. This year we have 2 more webfests to follow his lead: Melbourne, Australia in July and ours in Hong Kong, June 5-7.

Not only did the movement grow, more webseries are produced worldwide today than ever. Vast communities fueled by Google Plus connecting internationally and the big players in the industry start to jump in on the game. Canada created various media funds webseries makers can tap into. Hollywood started launching digital departments with each of its studios, that are solely producing targeted webseries content with high production value. France sees a vivid content market where webseries get licensed into TV networks.

For the second time, the LA Webfest took place at the Radisson LAX, providing all events and screenings under one roof. The 4 day event saw a total of 220 series screened (each twice) as well as a large variety of panel discussions with makers and industry experts. Most notable were Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling panel and the “woman taking control” round tables.

Festival director Ajakwe made a strong focus on how to turn a webseries into a TV show by hosting a seminar in which he showcased the adaptation of his webseries “Who…” into the soon to be aired show “Trophy Wife”. This topic was paramount to most round table discussions and private conversations as well.

Turning a webseries into a TV show seems to be the more realistic scenario in Hollywood as opposed to TV licensing content for straight syndication in Europe. Also, questions of how to monetize a webseries kept popping up throughout the 4 festival days but were barely answered comprehensively. While most proposed Kickstarter, product placements or private investors others went for self-financing their shows with day jobs or the 3 “F”s.

Only few I met were thinking about alternative business models in order to finance their shows. One of them was the team of Dark Pool, Karen Pollard and Rick Gott based out of Sacramento. Due to their educator background they give local film students the chance to participate in professional productions within their newly created studio Indie Episodic. While having a constant fundraiser running on Indiegogo they make finance deals with local businesses and offer web commercials in return. Such commercials are being produced by their students as well, which provides them with the opportunity to get their work seen and even onto TV. Pollard & Gott’s mission is to bring webseries to a mature audience. They want to create stories that are accessible to a demographic that is mostly ignored by commercial creators as it is a less tech savvy but sophisticated one.

The other end of the spectrum was Jill Golick with Ruby Skye P.I., based out of Toronto. Her mission is to serve another neglected demographics in web entertainment, teenagers. With her award-winning young detective show she was able to tap into the Canadian Independent Production Fund as well as secure some tax incentives which gave her show a comparatively generous budget. Prepping for season 3 right now, Ruby Skye holds a vast web universe of interactive clues from the show and a wide range of merchandise articles.

Opinions widely differed when it came to distribution platforms. While YouTube turns increasingly into a legal troublemaker for shows when it comes to music rights or other (often falsely flagged) copyright claims alternative platforms where seen as critical too. For most creators Koldcast seems to provide a good deal once the show is selected. Others criticized the platform for not providing topic separation between the shows, thus kids shows appear next to adult targeted ones.

General consensus, however, was to follow the model of the music industry. Michael Ajakwe brought up several times the comparison to Rap music in the 90s and how this new underdog style gradually moved into a fixed position between all other accepted popular music styles like Rock, Pop, Classic or the like. Webseries will eventually be seen in the same way, as a standalone medium next to film and TV.

While the medium matures finance models will too. At this time in history creators still think about micro payment models for the “end-user”, similar to the 99cents per music track iTunes offers. Eventually, a model needs to be created that is not inspired or oriented by outdated business practices of the old media like feature film or TV but rather adapts to the situation of mobile technology and audience behavior on both ends, online and offline.

On June 6, 2013, we will will discuss this point in further detail at the HK Webfest. As Asia holds a different stance within the new media entertainment landscape we will tackle the finance issue primarily from a branded content angle as film and TV industry have yet to fully comprehend and implement the concepts of transmedia and subsequent webseries.

For the first time, LA Webfest was selecting shows from Hong Kong to be screened and run in competition. A total of 10 awards went to Mr French Taste, Squattertown and Galaman.

 

#transmedia watch Hong Kong (spring 2013 edition)

2013 already started promising in HK. The annual film industry fair, HK Filmart, adopted a number of interactive exhibition tools and the word storytelling is finally used in combination with technology and cross platform. Of course, one of our flagship projects, the immersive FullDome entertainment for high resolution live-action content production was one of the major presentations at Filmart and hopefully injects a new wave of interactive next generation content.

However, the local film industry has yet to go all-in on the transmedia game. But content creators in other sectors of the entertainment and media business are much faster in implementing their ideas to and with new media. I came across 2 exceptional projects and will give a brief intro:

#HKproblems The Play

A friend of mine and former actor in our short film “Haexagon” told me that he got involved in a new theater play that draws its ideas from the popular social media phenomenon that is generally known on Twitter as #HKproblems. These are all-day-life troubles of (primarily) expats living in HK. Common situations of the absurd, annoying or funny nature that only people who actually live or lived in HK can fully comprehend.

Now, a group of expats and returnees turned a selection of the best (or rather worst) episodes into a full blown theater play during which they animate the audience to keep their phones turned on and tweet. Of course, everyone from the team is on Twitter and event promotion via YouTube (video extensions!), WordPress and Facebook is part of the project as well.

I was able to attend a preview show during the bi-monthly #TDHK (Twitter Drinking Hong Kong) and get an idea where this project is headed. While I liked the selection of this sketch comedy like setup what most struck me was the daring presentation of topics. In a city where mainstream rules everything and media makers are afraid of losing even a single audience with appalling or offensive content (despite having a tradition and recent proof in cinemas of selling with such topics) this play came off quite refreshing.

On the other hand I wished that the makers of this play would have gone a bit further in redefining the medium of theater while assimilating the features of the source content’s original medium. Reciting in 140 character blocks for example. However,  I saw on Twitter that they took use of phones and messaging services during the actual stage performance which is an admirable, yet tricky thing for a live show. Hope there is more to come. Shows ran from March 21-23, 2013.

Links:

Blog: http://hkproblemstheplay.wordpress.com http://www.hkeld.com/events/view/151

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HKProblems_play

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Hkproblemstheplay

GigaBitePlus – Keith Sir

During Filmart I bumped into a workshop called “Micro-Film is the Future of Media – Personal TV Station”  organized by the HK Television Association where young students were presented with a music video shooting set that would explain the production process. I met Keith Sir, a young musician and music educator who manages to do something most self-proclaimed transmedia talkers deny that it exists: he makes a living with transmedia.

In late 2011, Keith opened his own studio for recording music and teaching students. He browsed the web and found that music instruction videos on YouTube are tremendously popular, only, no one in HK is actually doing it. Hence, he re-branded the idea, gave it a full local make-over and fired up about 500 instruction videos for a number of instruments, styles and song writing on his YouTube channel. Those videos are mostly split-screen with him playing the instruments and the keyboard and/or note papers. His channel got almost 26k subscribers and over 6 millions views. However, this channels is only partially monetized and he does not charge for the videos!

Old media people would be shocked now, as he is giving away such a huge amount of potential cash-in by the traditional business models. For Keith, these videos are customer care, branded storytelling extensions in a way. He makes his money with music education and students visiting his studio. In fact, this became so successful during the past months that he opened 4 more branches and created a team of fellow teachers to take care of the vast amount of customers.

Social media is a major part in his strategy. He turned his personal Facebook profile into a blog with over 17k subscribers and is also active on Google Plus and Sina Weibo. The What’sApp messenger service is crucial for his customer care and he provides a phone number in every video so people can get in direct contact with him.

It is important to understand that Keith offers an entirely localized service. All those video views, all those subscribers, all the interaction come from Cantonese speaking people in HK only. He found himself a market niche and serves it well by having a direct connection and feeling for the needs of his audience.

Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gigabiteplus

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/gigabiteplus/

Webpage: http://www.keithsir.com/

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Transmedia Watch Hong Kong will return soon, with more projects and new insights on the local transmedia developments!

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Most notable Transmedia projects in Hong Kong of 2012

We will soon release our second installment of the Asian Screen and provide new updates on trends and markets in Greater China and South-East Asia. Since the report will rather focus on industry insights and interconnected relationships we want to highlight specific projects mentioned within here in greater detail with direct links and videos. Hence, this post will be a small recap on what kind of transmedia projects came out during 2012 in HK.

However, this is HK in 2012 and transmedia still has not actually gotten off the ground yet. So we will use the definition of what is a transmedia project a bit broader than usual, otherwise there would not much to report at all. Also, this is by no means a complete list. A lot of local projects do not even appear on our radar as they fail to reach a significant audience to be regarded as relevant. However, should you think we missed something/someone please do let us know in the comments below.

Webseries

Galaman

This animation series is quite the exception in HK. It is one of the most notable, creative and well-maintained transmedia projects in town. Run by Minimind Studio, a young start-up that is currently part of the HK Design Centre incubation program, Galaman is a mix of superhero and game-style comic animations with a number of episodes online. Besides building a vast story universe with a number of characters, latest episodes divert from the main hero to entertaining side characters. Every episode holds underlying social and political criticism towards the HK society and sometimes reacts to recent trends as well.

Despite the webseries primarily running on YouTube, Minimind Studio managed to find syndication effects with Yahoo HK as well as a whole catalog of merchandizing articles for all its characters. Since the team is small, a new episode will be released every 2-3 months. While the story universe keeps evolving, Galaman built a solid audience base on Facebook.

We will discuss Galaman in further detail in our upcoming report as well as within an interview with the creator.

Page: http://minimindstudio.com/galaman/

blog: http://jacso.hk/johnee

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/galamanhk

Current 7 episodes of Galaman:

Cross-over projects:

Mr French Taste

A HK-France co-production of a comedy series that ran very successful on Koldcast.tv. With an international creators team Mr French Taste is an entertaining series with a broad audience appeal on a global scale. Even though the transmedia aspects of the production fell short on season 1, the series will hopefully embrace social media integrations and story expansions with interactive nature during their next season.

Koldcast: http://www.koldcast.tv/video/the_job_interview_ep_1

Page: http://www.misterfrenchtaste.com

Microfilm series

There are very few webseries produced in HK that fall under the traditional definition of a webseries. Microfilms are running very strong recently, short films with a branded entertainment character, sponsored by corporations or brands. Such microfilm campaigns often come in a bundle of 3-6 short films and hence have a webseries character. On top, such branded entertainment is mostly produced and directed by famous feature filmmakers. One of the more relevant contributors to these microfilm series in HK is Heiward Mak. In 2012 she came out with two series. One for MTR Malls, one for LG. Story structures and character development are mostly loose and the main focus of such series always lies on staged nostalgia and generic forced emotions. Such webseries usually come with a transmedia-like marketing campaign around them. MTR Malls Popcorn campaign for example created game apps, live events at the malls as well as social media channels for fans to engage.

MTR Malls Popcorn:

LG × 麥曦茵微電影::

Feature Films

Triad

Triad was the only local feature film to adopt a transmedia campaign for its theatre release. And yes, we are talking about using transmedia for marketing purposes only. The concept of generating a story on a sole transmedia level has yet to be understood and implemented by local producers and filmmakers.

We talked about the campaign of Triads before here (https://haexagon.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/haexagon-concepts-monthly-recap-october-2012/). Sadly, since this post there have been no significant developments. In fact the entire campaign stopped at the opening weekend and the film basically flopped at HK box offices

But how do Hollywood feature films translate their transmedia marketing campaigns to HK? Usually, local distributors do not bother to localize what the US studios provide. The big campaigns of Girl With A Dragon Tattoo or Prometheus always merge down to simple posters on public transport. In fact local distributors seem to struggle a lot with the use of technology. It took two years for them to put QR codes on film posters. Such codes would lead to a flash web site and rendered quickly inappropriate.

Only a few weeks later no film poster in town would have any QR codes at all. Even the big players like Warner failed to set up a simple movie web page for their tent pole pictures. The Dark Knight Rises would show a blank page until the opening week.

Official trailers sometimes get deleted from YouTube. In general a distributor’s YouTube channels can get quite confusing and messy. Obligatory are localized Facebook pages that just post the usual cross-promotion efforts. Main focus across the board still lies with TV adverts, huge banners on busses and marketing stunts with meet and greet s
essions inside shopping malls.

Disney on the other hand knows how to play the global transmedia game. Almost all their campaigns of 2012 releases are highly engaging event periods, online and offline likewise. Notable is the two months run for Wreck It Ralph. Tying in the film IP and theme to affiliated promotion partners like Samsung made Disney not only translate the game/technology aspect into all-day life but also gave audience something to connect with since Samsung’s mobile devices became highly popular in HK during the past six months.

Admittedly, it is fairly easy for Disney to appeal to a local audience and find connection points as they are used to localize all their IPs, primarily on the audio level, on a regular basis. Naturally, having local celebrities dubbing the animated characters creates a very own eco system of marketing/ads and cross-storytelling. Of course, such an eco system is complex and hard to create. Only a few big players like Disney actually have the needed muscle to pull it off. But then again, this is still gatekeeper thinking rooted in the old film industry middle-men-system and transmedia projects (not including the ones using it for marketing sake only) have a serious potential to cut costs while achieving the same results for/with the audience.

With a bit of hesitant caution one could count Iron Sky to such an underdog example. The film finally landed in HK and closed its one year global theater run here. But how do you make a place connect to a film’s topic that is culturally not even remotely relevant in this region. The answer lies in promotion stunts and turning Nazis into pop-culture icons. Premiere parties with guests dressed in SS uniforms, an Iron Sky helicopter during the biggest music festival in town or students greeting publicly “Sieg Heil” at a screening at the HK Design Institute, it all brought dubious Nazi-Schick in our lives, at least for a couple of weeks.

The social media team rendered excellent work with bilingual content on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/IronSkyHK ) and Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/IronSkyHK ). The traditional press work was conducted on a regular mainstream film level. For some reason (presumably to be found within the film’s financial structure) the www.ironskythemovie.com webpage turned into the HK webpage and offers promotion tie-ins for dining. Not sure how that correlates with moon Nazis though.

Now it has to be mentioned the local distributor for Iron Sky is VII Pillars Entertainment, a company founded by former Hollywood studio executives.

Despite all those efforts Iron Sky did not turn into a box office success. It seemed like the cultural gab between pretending to be a moon Nazi and watching a film about moon Nazis was still too great. Identification and fun alone do not sell tickets.

Documentaries/short films/indies

2012 was still no breakthrough year for indies and documentary filmmakers to adopt transmedia storytelling. While the indies rely on copying the big players by selling out to studios or brankrupting themselves by employing PR agency giants to make them look like a non-indie production, documentaries were caving in to even deeper underground status with primary focus on exiling themselves from the international scene together with their Mainland Chinese network.

Short film projects with huge transmedia potential like the recently launched Zombie Guillotines (https://www.facebook.com/ZombieGuillotines) fail entirely in online-strategy. While the time of the web launch was chooses perfectly with the Chinese mainstream film Guillotines hitting cinemas end of December the project seems to stall before it even began. After an obligatory Yahoo syndication of the short film and a more less decent view count build up on YouTube, the project offers only little to maintain a sustainable audience base. The filmmakers will definitely look for a genre festival run and maybe a follow up video. Despite this being one of the few very creative short film concepts this year that does not go for the oversaturated love/family drama kitsch there is very little room given by the creators for designing something outstanding.

The remains of the day

What becomes evident in 2012, the major social media channels for any kind of film related production are still Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube. Significant for community maintenance, but not necessary building, are Sina Weibo and WeChat. Distributors still jeopardize their entire first week box office revenue on traditional ad spent for posters,
banners and TVCs, holding on to a system that is burdened by an army of middle-men which supposedly worked for the past 50 years.

The audience more and more turns away from cinemas. Screens have become too small, prices too high, value too low. The potential of mobile story telling has yet to be discovered. HK in 2012 was still a place where the media world was proclaimed to be flat and those who said that transmedia can make it round were burned for witchcraft. So we move on into 2013 in the hope the inquisition might cut us some slack for a proof of concept.

——

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Virality is dead, long live Buyrality

Those were the days when you had a crazy idea, made an even more crazy internet meme, put it up on Facebook, shared it amongst your friends and it went viral. Those were the days, yes; those were Facebook’s pre-IPO-days. Ever since the blue social media conglomerate took on public shareholders the game changed on the web. All of a sudden, FB had to proof it’s monetary value and that they can actually make money out of something that was supposed to connect people for free in the first place.

We accepted a long time ago that FB monetizes on our private data in exchange for providing the perfect platform to create your own virtual influence universe while establishing your fake web persona. An illusion blown out of proportion by 2000 friends and a Klout score of 73 that manifests your global online celebrity status. Now, FB goes further and capitalizes on this very attention addiction of its users and turns their wallets against their egos.

FB controls 100% what goes viral on their own platform since October 2012. If you want to reach someone, let it be your page fans or even your own mother, you going to pay for it. Sponsored posts, FB ads, in-stream ads, in-search ads, whatever it takes to push your own stats back to the numbers of 2 months ago, you pay!

The outcry on blogs was loud when the news stream algorithm changed, post reaches dropped 40%. Most effected FB pages. Some posted advices like “add us to a list to make sure you still see our posts”. But it was already to late.

I was reading on various pages that this 40% decrease was more less a fantasy number. Reality was far bleaker than expected. One said, his page had around 9K likes and an average of 2K reach on regular posts. Now, with FB’s new indirect paywall, one post reaches barely 200.  Yes, that’s right, that would be 10% of his previous reach, not 40% less.

But what is “reach”? What does actually count as reach? FB provides us with metrics that we take for granted. We build entire startups around them, yes even weekly community meetings. But ultimately no one exactly knows what goes into those numbers and how reliable they are.

The story is the same everywhere. Our own company page on FB does not have 9K likes, we got a modest 239, but still can feel the impact. A regular post would reach about 100 page followers. Now, it’s down to 60-70. Posts that reach beyond 100 are usually photos with people tagged inside.

Biggest difference for us was, that we not only lost reach but also interactions. Regular posts would have a couple of likes and some comments from time to time. Now, the majority of posts are doomed to rot as unliked social media zombie.

Hence, it’s no far stretch to think that a post, which has supposedly a reach of 70, isn’t actually seen by anyone since there is no indication of existence outside the page at all. When you run a FB page you will know that the majority of fans don’t see the content on the page itself but rather “mirrored” in their news stream. So it’s safe to say, FB’s new algorithm cuts you off the streams, you’re isolated.

We came up with a little survey post to simply see who can actually see page posts at all. Those were the findings:

 (all data as of November 12, 2012)

• Lifetime post reach: 156
• Lifetime post organic reach: 101
• Lifetime post paid reach: 3
• Lifetime post viral reach: 59
• Lifetime post total impressions: 539
• Lifetime post organic impressions: 378
• Lifetime post viral impressions: 158
• Lifetime engaged users: 22
• Lifetime talking about this: 16
• Lifetime post stories: 20
• Lifetime post consumers: 19
• Lifetime post consumption: 61
• Lifetime negative feedback: 2
• Lifetime Post Impressions by people who have liked your Page: 371
• Lifetime Post Reach by people who like your Page: 90
• Lifetime Post Paid Impressions by people who have liked your page: 1
• Lifetime People who have liked your Page and engaged with: 18
• Lifetime People Talking About your post by those who have liked your Page: 15

Take from those numbers whatever you want. What strikes me most are two groups of numbers: 1) The paid reach, since we never sponsored the post. We intended to, in order to test this option too and provide two seperate sets of numbers but couldn’t due to technical reasons. 2) The negative feedback. Obviously this post was so offensive for two of our page followers that they muted it on their own news stream.

But who did we actually reach with the post as the purpose of this survey? Out of all those numbers we can only be sure on the people who liked (15 on the page, 2 off page), commented (1) and sort of disliked (2) the post and this would be 19 out of 239, 8% of all page followers!

Of course, this is no real sample case study to proof anything, especially since our page got comparatively low like numbers. But chances are the findings and theory above apply to most pages.

I was stunned to see that a local ad agency who pivot their core business to FB marketing in the past months seems to suffer from a far greater effect of FB’s changes than ours. While we run a micro community on our page that is more likely to engage, they boost up their like numbers via FB’s ad offers and created “own” strategies (which are quite universal as FB provides the rules and playground of this game in specific detail). They started with a similar like number like us back in June/July 2012. Now, they passed the 7k mark. Their sponsored posts are everywhere, 24/7. But now things become obvious. Posts that have not been sponsored reach an average of 15-25 likes. Sponsored posted come in at 200+ likes. So do the math on your own here.

Naturally, this agency makes money and got loads of running clients, cause we’re in a vicious spiral here. Once you crossed a certain social media stats peak you’re willing to pay to keep it up there and you’re even more willing to pay additional premiums to get numbers higher.

Companies who justified their business with social media numbers are hooked at this point. They can’t afford to loose out now even though such numbers are entirely unrelated to their real life sales/business. The wheel keeps spinning, the bubble keeps blowing up.

So let me close with a US ad agency video that brilliantly sums up the state of mind Facebook and most other social media page
s are at, on their strive to monetize imaginary assets:

– John St. explains what Buyral is:

Announcements from the Hall of Justice

With one month to go the DREDD 3D campaign is in full law-giver swing. Hence, it is time to take a look at what Lionsgate presents its comic IP fan base and how (or better if) they try to target to a new audience group.  The property itself seems to be an emotional one since the 1995 film version saw a mixed reception. For some it still is a cult film to which the remake has yet to live up to. Others see it as a total misfire and hope the reboot will finally give them what they expected from the comics.

Old guns

Now, Lionsgate runs a double canon campaign on DREDD 3D. Based on what the studio leaned with its traditional social media marketing approach on EXPENDABLES 2 the focus lies on Facebook engagements and (re)sharing a mix of old content (comic strips) and new banners communicating release date countdown and Twitter hashtags. EXPENDABLES 2 draw its old content from known production stills of the actors past films and called it “Know Your 80s”.

DREDD 3D however, seems to create more fan-art posts which is probably related in the IP’s comic book origin.  But Lionsgate learned its lesson from EXPENDABLES 2 when it comes to requesting specific fan submissions in order to build up an audience touch. While other Facebook pages rely on the Fan Art Fridays, featuring the best submissions/posts, Lionsgate opened the “Battle Scars & Bragging Rights” contest. The idea was intriguing for fans, showing the world your personal body scars from the wars with your dog on the front porch and all the evil tattoos under your toes. Unfortunately, the timing was too late, the film already started in cinemas and this campaign element wasn’t perused further. Instantly Lionsgate took over the idea to DREDD 3D, asking for Judge name submissions and “Your Badass Judge Bio”.

Ultimately, EXPENDABLES 2 had/has the greater potential to engage it’s fan base in place as well as extend this base with new recruits. Every single one of the 11 main actors brings in his own followership while enticing their regular peers (for example Stallone on his Twitter). Also, Lionsgate could tap into already established networks. The Facebook page to EXPENDABLES 1 had far greater updates than the in June 2012 launched page to part 2. So what can DREDD 3D do in order to make more arrests?

The slightly fragmented campaign shows us two tent pole web pages: http://dreddthemovie.com  and http://judgementiscoming.com. Both with very similar content, linking with the Facebook page and Lionsgate’s  YouTube channel as well as Twitter. @lionsgatemovies  is even renamed DREDD 3D and the channel branded the same way. But here comes something new, something that is not linked with the official sites at all yet.

New guns

http://dreddreport.com is a simple news page, sort of newspaper style that compiles a couple of news headlines phrased in the IP’s propaganda polemic. When clicking on the link they will bring you on an actual news blog with a real story that relates in content to the Dredd-branded message. Also on this page: crime rate reports of Mega City, a Judges-on-duty-ticker, radiation levels and feeds from the Twitter account @DREDDReport that retweets the news and links.

There is also advertisement on the page, offering body armor (real life protection for a change, possibly one of the film’s sponsors). Most remarkable however is the public service announcement  campaign element. The film’s Hall of Justice informs about the risks of using the drug Slo-Mo. A banner links to http://www.saynotoslomo.com which, at this moment, redirects to the Youtube video below:

During this year’s ComiCon Lionsgate released the first teaser, already showing people taking drugs while Dredd raids their room, all shot in slow-motion. After this PSA it appears that the slow-motion effect in the film is not just a visual gimmick but rather a certain plot point.

The DreddReport branch of Lionsgate’s campaign got quite some potential but doesn’t seem to have gotten the right push yet as it is neither directly linked to the other promotion channels nor holds significant points of interaction or engagement for users.