Netflix changes streaming marketing game with Bandersnatch
Credit to Author: KAYE VILLAGOMEZ-LOSORATA| Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2019 18:17:49 +0000
Last December 28, Netflix found a way to swim upstream, away from the crowded business that is online streaming. Over the holidays—just when everyone actually has time on their hands—Netflix rolled out a choose-your-own-adventure movie under the Black Mirror franchise titled Bandersnatch.
If you haven’t watched Bandersnatch, you might want to skip this read because there are light spoilers ahead.
Netflix is not new to the interactive watching game. The streaming service has offered choose-your-own-adventure videos since 2017, but Bandersnatch is the first to succeed and also the first that isn’t a cartoon for kids. Before, it’s simple A or B choices that offshoots the plot. Bandersnatch, on the other hand, provides an involving self-referential spin by building the story around a choose-your-own-adventure novel.
On so many levels, the streaming service upped the game while staying true to Black Mirror dark sci-fi flare. Interactive and pressure-packed, Bandersnatch posts options on how the viewer wishes the story to continue by showing two choices at a time for the main character, given the break of his life when a company taps his proposed computer game.
Set in 1984, Bandersnatch was also generous with ’80s soundtrack and the options to try out other story routes even if viewer has chosen a particular option. The pressure to come up with a choice in just 10 seconds adds a whole new flavor of suspense to the viewing experience. If you fail to choose, the story takes you to a default option.
At one point, the character discovers that his choices are being controlled by a Netflix viewer. When he says something about being controlled by a streaming service from the future, you can’t help but relate current real-life addiction to content served via our handheld devices.
The Verge called Bandersnatch as “Netflix’s first big success with the [interactive] format, and this win has the potential to be more than just another buzzworthy title. It paves the way for a new revenue stream that could be a lifeline for the streaming giant and a natural extension of its existing infrastructure.”
The format also combats piracy. “The interactive format offers Netflix some clear benefits: it’s more difficult to pirate than linear films or TV episodes, and its nature as a puzzle encourages more active fan engagement than most projects. But the greatest advantage lies in the data Netflix can gather from user participation and the ways that data could be used to create an internal programmatic marketing infrastructure.”
Bandersnatch doesn’t only provide audience participation in the most obvious manner. It also gives Netflix a huge visibility over how its audience thinks. By gathering the popular options, Netflix can use the data to its advantage.
The Verge explained, “Netflix has been a data company longer than it has been a content producer. Its recommendations algorithm was one of its early value propositions, and later, it was a major aspect of its global expansion. It allowed Netflix to target tastes with ‘microgenres’ and generate personalized feature art. Understanding these user preferences was instrumental in dominating the market it created, keeping subscribers within its ecosystem and guiding original programming slates. By putting the same kinds of interconnected decision-making to work within one title, Bandersnatch can generate more robust pattern discovery and insights into trend analysis than traditional content can. Where the company previously focused its data gathering on the ways users engaged with its content — what they watched, when, and for how long — this new data is indicative of real-world decisions like product preference, musical taste, and engagement with human behavior.”
According to the article, “In Bandersnatch, one of the most visceral decisions users make is whether games programmer Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) or his associate Colin (Will Poulter) will jump off a balcony. How users handle this decision — how long it takes them to click on one choice or the other, how often they return to (or avoid) a given option during replays — can be matrixed with the choices they make in resulting timelines. Those choices offer unprecedented insight about what Netflix’s subscribers want out of a story and what choices they most want to see characters take. User-generated data has already guided Netflix’s creative decision-making when it comes to marketing original movies like Bright. Bandersnatch represents a new form of data mining that gives Netflix richer, more specific audience information than it’s ever had before. That could be used to steer choices in the writers’ room or even in discussions about what kind of projects Netflix greenlights in the first place.”
According to The Wrap, Bandersnatch has five possible outcomes. The viewer can easily access these endings by going back to the options and choosing the ones they previously didn’t pick.
The author is a former broadsheet entertainment and lifestyle reporter and section editor for an entertainment magazine before crossing over to corporate and marketing PR.
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