He Who Controls ________ Controls the World
From: Karen Ewoks
“I’m getting married on April 27th and we’re going to play your game at the reception!”
From: Cards Against Humanity
“Did you know 50% of first marriages end in divorce?”
From: Frank Stickers
“When are you going to be in stock again? Let’s be honest. Who is going to go to Staples and print their own cards? Not me. Get your shit together.”
From: Cards Against Humanity
“Cards Against Humanity will be back in stock at some point. We could be more specific, but you could have been nicer.”
From: Frankton Orifice
“I bought the Bigger Blacker Box, but my Dad sat on it and crushed it! Is there any way I can get a replacement Bigger Blacker Box?”
From: Cards Against Humanity
“In the long run it would be more cost efficient to replace your dad.—Holly.”
From: Hamilton B.
“What is the age range for the cards? My 15 year old son is asking for a set, but I’m hedging on it.”
From: Cards Against Humanity
“That depends on how bad of a parent you want to be.”
From: Dale Chippen
“Would you guys mind responding in an email that just insults me? Is that cool with you? Because that would be really awesome. Love, Dale.”
From: Cards Against Humanity
“You’re not worth the time.—David.”
Shortly after Christmas in 2014, a quarter of a million people opened their mailboxes to find a printed pamphlet with the title “Your Emails Are Bad and You Should Feel Bad.” It contained thirty-six pages of emails from customers writing in to the customer-service department at Cards Against Humanity, makers of the card game of the same name, and CAH’s responses. The 250,000 recipients had paid $15 each to receive it as part of a “10 Days or Whatever of Kwanzaa” gift box they purchased from CAH. It joined, among other things, a set of comics, a packet of candy that changes the taste of food, a promise to bribe several public officials, and, in their words, “a bunch of stickers that you definitely shouldn’t use to vandalize public property—that would be wrong.”
CAH’s fans—only fans spend $15 to get a box of unrelated junk from a game manufacturer—responded favorably. “Your Emails are Bad and You Should Feel Bad” currently has 4.3 stars (out of 5) on the online literary review community Goodreads.
The Cards Against Humanity card game comes with two sets of cards: black question cards and white answer cards. The black cards have phrases or sentences that ask a question; the white cards represent potential answers. During each round, the player acting as the judge reads out a black card, and the remaining players use their white cards to pick their best response. It’s a game best played with friends who don’t mind horrible, horrible vulgarity. A black card reading: “What ended my last relationship?” might receive white cards like “The American dream,” “A disappointing birthday party,” “Prancing,” “A fetus,” “White privilege,” and “An oversized lollipop.” Except there’s an almost 100 percent chance that at least one of those cards would refer to sex acts, bodily fluids, or celebrities (along with their sex acts and bodily fluids). Expansion packs are released at regular intervals, adding new cards to the deck and keeping the humor timely and horrible.
Wil Wheaton, actor and host of the Geek and Sundry gaming show TableTop, opened his Cards Against Humanity episode with the following warning: “You don’t want to watch this episode of TableTop. This episode of TableTop will be offensive to everyone. It will be rude. It will be in exceedingly poor taste, and it will be outrageously profane. If you are sensitive, or offended by . . . anything, we at TableTop encourage you to find one of our other episodes to watch.”
Customer inquiries at CAH are answered by a team composed largely of aspiring authors and comedians. In fact, their work is less about customer service and more about creative writing. When customers write in with a question about when items will be back in stock, or a suggestion to make a wolf-themed deck of cards, or a complaint about their missing order, it is official company policy to fix the issue . . . and then immediately mock the asker.
Jenn Bane is the company’s community director, which would probably be called head of customer service elsewhere. “Even if they are like the dumbest person you’ve interacted with, even if everything is their fault, remember that they’re a human being, and they’re emailing us for a reason. The first thing you do is fix the problem. And then you make fun of them.”
The freedom to entertain and amuse in what would traditionally be a dry interaction can be bought only at the price of really really good customer service. A customer who is frightened that a girlfriend’s birthday gift might be lost in the mail is not someone to tease. A customer who is relieved that the gift will arrive in time, and who perhaps may be laughing at his or her excessive terror, certainly is.
“We generously give out refunds; we generously send restocks. We’ll throw in an extra expansion package because they’re having a rough day, or they got broken up with,” says Bane. “Just give it. There’s clearly a right thing to do, so just do it. There’s no standard formatting, and you don’t get anything back that says ‘You are customer number blah blah blah,’ ” she explains. “We want to sound not like a corporation. We don’t want to sound like you’re talking to a robot. We want them to understand that they’re talking to an actual human. We’ll say, ‘We’re really sorry,’ but instead of saying we’re really sorry your order didn’t arrive, you might say, ‘We’re really sorry we fucked up your order.’ And people are usually pretty delighted.”
CAH is routinely the number one bestseller in Amazon’s Toys & Games category. As of late 2016, the core pack had more than 33,000 reviews there, and quite a few of them mimic CAH’s signature banter. They’ve also colonized the “Customer Question and Answers” section. For a customer who wants to know “Why won’t Amazon ship this to Canada?” there are dozens of fan responses, including “Because Canada is too nice for this game” and “Shipping to the new state of ‘More North Dakota’ will incur a small surcharge. Ay?” Hundreds of customers marked these answers as helpful enough to move them to the top of the answers list. It requires scrolling quite a bit before you’ll find the correct response, “Just go to Amazon.ca and order it there.”
For Black Friday 2013, the time when many companies attempt to cash in on early holiday purchases with big sales, CAH decided to raise its price for the day from $25 to $30. Max Temkin is one of the game’s creators. “We thought people would be angry about it,” he remembers. The result was actually a net increase over Black Friday sales from the year before, and an outpouring of good-natured support from both fans and the media. “People liked it. People bought it on Black Friday because they wanted to be part of the joke. They posted their receipts on Tumblr. They really played into it and they were like, ‘Oh, this is an incredible opportunity to buy Cards Against Humanity for even more money!’ That was really unexpected.”
CAH fans value the interactions they have with the company just as much as their copy of the game, whether those interactions come in the form of a customer-service email, a visit with them at a convention, or playing along with a marketing ploy that makes them feel like part of an inside joke. These types of interaction have become part of the Cards experience. On Black Friday, fans were allowed to express their sense of the absurd, support a company they liked, and boast about being a part of something unique, something only a true fan of the game would do.
“What you see in the media, and the coverage, and the social media around it, that’s the sort of performance. People like being part of a spectacle like that. It does give everyone the feeling that they’re on the inside of an inside joke with us,” says Temkin.
Corporate Values vs. Corporate Voice
CAH can get away with an antagonistic publicity stunt because goodwill is at the heart of its business model. It’s the type of goodwill that can’t be sprinkled on top of a product with savvy marketing or a new catchphrase, or even great customer service. Cards Against Humanity is free. The entire starter card set is available under a Creative Commons license. It can be downloaded from the CAH website as a thirty-one-page PDF along with instructions for printing and storing the cards yourself.
Of course, most customers don’t want to take an hour to print out thirty-one pages of paper and cut them into paper cards that will disintegrate the first time a beer spills on them. Most are happy to spend $25 (or $30) for a professional version. But offering the cards for free means happier customers in general. Paying that $25 is a choice, not an obligation. It’s a lot easier to field complaints about price, or shipping costs, or lost packages when one of the alternatives is always “So don’t pay!”
What marketers call “surprise and delight” cannot be crowdsourced. Despite all appearances, CAH’s ability to keep its fans on their toes is the result of a carefully orchestrated strategy. It revises the card decks several times a year. The game writers review every card in the deck and decide if it’s still relevant. A Britney Spears joke might become a Miley Cyrus joke. There is, intentionally, no change log posted anywhere. The only notification that cards have been updated or replaced is the incremented version number on the back of the box. “As you can imagine, that enrages fans,” says Temkin.
In 2015, Cards Against Humanity again ran its holiday subscription service. This time it was called Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah. The booty sent to each participant included a pair of socks, a second pair of socks, a third pair of socks, an investment in the US Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities fund, and an individual subscription to WBEZ, the NPR affiliate in Chicago. For night six, CAH bought everyone at its Chinese factory a week’s paid vacation—the gift was the workers’ tear-jerking thank you letters and photos. Night seven was a 1962 Picasso lithograph and a survey question: should it be donated to a museum or cut into 150,000 pieces and mailed to subscribers. Night eight was ownership of (a very small piece of) a castle in Ireland.
It takes a special combination of circumstances to make offensiveness a viable marketing strategy, although many try it. Celebrities who are after a bad-boy persona are often advised by their agents to engage in strategic acts of outrageousness. The UK boy band The Wanted was initially instructed to party as hard and publicly as possible to differentiate themselves from rivals One Direction. In Chicago, the infamous Lincoln Park hot-dog stand The Weiner’s Circle has created a mystique around its willingness to verbally abuse patrons. Frat-favorite DJ Diplo has been known to use what, for a celebrity courting a different audience, might be considered an unusual level of misogyny. In general, negative-image policies like these often backfire. The Wanted eventually lost the boy-band wars to their younger, more clean-cut musical rivals. And brands that are merely rude are usually put in their place via social-media outrage, boycotts, or petitions.
Organizations often confuse their corporate voice with their corporate philosophy. In the same way that consumers will happily tolerate a monopoly as long as it’s benevolent, fans will tolerate, or even enjoy, an abrasive corporate voice as long as they feel that the fan object’s motivations are positive. Outrageousness that reflects a bad attitude is distasteful. But outrageousness that hides a heart of gold is fun! CAH has navigated this issue. Its corporate voice may conjure a rude asshole uncle, but CAH is careful to only use it after a fan’s legitimate complaints and questions have been handled.
Fan management—what to do with a fan group once they have been won over—is something with which many organizations struggle. Fan loyalty does often quickly lead to increased income for the fan object, a fact that does often seem to justify the immediate time and attention that goes into building the audience. But when it comes to maintaining the relationship, whether the fan group grew organically or was the result of meticulous strategy, many brands end up returning to where they started. That is to say, they treat their fan audience as a group of consumers with particularly attractive buying habits, and nothing more. It’s very tempting to remember fan loyalty and forget all of the strings attached.
The most important strategy of fan management requires addressing group cohesion; fan maintenance is the primary concern and any type of monetization comes second.
Hello Brooklyn
“Of course it’s personal,” read the billboard, white text on a black background, tagged with #HELLOBROOKLYN on the bottom right corner. Next to the tagline was the logo for the Brooklyn Nets, the NBA team shortly slated to move from New Jersey to its new home in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.
If it was meant to be a homecoming, it was already a mixed one. The flashy new Barclays Center, which would house the team, was still under construction, and community reactions to the building were strong on both sides. Enthusiastic fans packed a rally in support outside of Brooklyn Borough Hall, screaming their approval. Meanwhile, the construction site had become the scene of frequent protests as local groups and clergy condemned the loss of housing and jobs, and the creep of gentrification as the borough had become wealthier.
The Nets hadn’t been a New York–based team since the 1970s, and at least some Brooklynites didn’t necessarily want them back. As one marketer involved in the #HELLOBROOKLYN campaign remembers, “[They were saying] no. Get out of Brooklyn. You’re killing our community. People were like, yo, not only do I not care the Brooklyn Nets are coming here, I don’t want them here, this is not my team.”
The Nets disagreed. “First Home Game Since 1957,” read another Brooklyn Nets billboard. (The Brooklyn Dodgers played their last home game that year before moving to California.)
In #HELLOBROOKLYN’s version of the story, issues of gentrification were sidestepped. What Brooklynites truly cared about was differentiating themselves from the rest of the city. Having a Brooklyn-based basketball team meant no longer having to root for the Knicks, who played in the heart of Manhattan. Other boroughs could have their own teams. The Nets were for Brooklyn.
Nets CEO Brett Yormark, in a statement introducing the #HELLOBROOKLYN advertising campaign, told his future fans, “We are delighted to continue building a connection between Brooklynites and the players on their new home team.” Nets chief marketing officer Fred Mangione put it more bluntly in an interview with ESPN. “Our goal is to own Brooklyn,” he said.
Months before the move, the Nets released a video acknowledging their future neighborhood’s history of playing second fiddle to Manhattan. “We’re a friend to the scrappy, the loyal and ready. We’ve seen spirit and thrills at its very best . . . and at its most trying. We’ve also been the underdogs, waiting for our chance. And now, Brooklyn, we root for the same cause, because we believe in the same things you do: that neighborhood is family,” said the voiceover.
For the Nets to be a true neighborhood team (granted, to a neighborhood of 2.6 million people), it needed a “ritual enemy.” Someone or something that all of Brooklyn could hate. We’re not like those guys, we’re like us. And people like us root for the Nets. In this case, that ritual enemy wasn’t another team, it was the anti-Brooklyn—Manhattan. Doubtless the campaign’s architects hoped that a cross-borough rivalry would inspire a cross-team rivalry with the New York Knicks.
Dealing with an adversarial fan group was a challenge for the Nets, but certainly not a crippling issue. Long before the first hoop was installed in the arena, the Nets set out to win themselves a fan base to go with their new geography. It took serious advertising dollars to fund their way into the hearts of those Brooklynites who remained reluctant, but all the funding in the world would have been useless without understanding their fan group well enough to choose the right message.
Of course, the Nets are in fact, as of 2016, entirely owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owns Barclays Center. The Nets belong to Brooklyn only in the sense that some of the borough has become wealthy enough to afford tickets to their games. However, by the time the first Nets-Knicks game came to Brooklyn, the rivalry was in earnest. Official attendance numbers were up 23 percent over their New Jersey numbers. And most important, Nets fans were already leading the NBA in at least one lucrative area: apparel sales. As Brooklynite Ryan Wynn put it at the time, “I don’t know what a Brooklyn Nets fan is, all I know is that we’re soon to be diehard fans.”
Give a Little, Get a Little
It’s not impossible to imagine a situation where Brooklynites reacted to the #HELLOBROOKLYN campaign with ridicule, or even parody. Recent history is filled with well-meaning attempts at engagement that were hijacked by mischievous or dissatisfied fans. It’s a difficult decision, allowing the public to collaborate on creating a fan object’s meaning. Fans in particular have often invested time, energy, and financial resources to understand their fan object better than its initial creators. The concept of handing over brand control to an outside group, whose intentions may or may not align with the owner’s, can be terrifying. And yet, despite the danger, fan objects—especially for brands like sports teams (or fashion labels), where so much of the value lies in intangible associations—cannot exist without a strong context. And fans have a wider variety of backgrounds and personal experience to generate that context than any single marketing team.
The 2012 movie Magic Mike, a drama about male strippers, was initially marketed as a romantic comedy. A handsome gent in the sex biz finds salvation at the hands of a comely lady and must decide if it’s time for more wholesome work. But it soon became obvious that a different audience was excited to support the movie: homosexual men. In a quick about-face, Channing Tatum, the star stripper, appeared on the cover of the gay-oriented Out magazine. A Magic Mike–themed float appeared in the West Hollywood Gay Pride parade. A new gay-friendly trailer highlighted the sex appeal of a movie that, no matter the plot, does showcase a lot of attractive semi-naked men.
In the early 2000s, carmaker Cadillac saw a similar effect with its Escalade, a luxury SUV originally marketed to suburban parents as a way to transport the team to and from little league. Yet the SUV’s ostentatious price, luxury amenities, and ease of modification made it a status symbol for sports stars, hip-hop icons, and other celebrities. Later models became iteratively flashier and more sophisticated. In its heyday in the late 2000s, the Escalade regularly won the not-inconsequential award for the most commonly stolen vehicle in the United States.
The best marketing narratives make associations with a consumer’s feelings of self and identity. A good and extremely lucky marketing team might happen upon a narrative that resonates with an audience, such as #HELLOBROOKLYN, all by themselves, but then again they might not.
Of course, another huge advantage of allowing fan groups a say in a brand’s meanings is that it helps to give it a veneer of authenticity that would be difficult to generate otherwise. Collaborating with fans in any way can help distance a brand from its original commercial purpose. Deep emotions like playfulness or earnestness, when they can be accomplished without seeming contrived, are both great antidotes to the more mercenary purpose that underpins advertising.
Pabst Blue Ribbon–brand beer relied for many years on a low price tag to remain competitive. It was often the cheapest option on the menu. Yet in the last half decade PBR has become known as the de facto beer of a trendy, urban hipster population. The cause is an entirely fan-created context. PBR’s legacy as a cheap, working-class brew helped it gain a reputation as “authentic Americana” among a wealthier population who would otherwise likely purchase something of better quality. Or, to put it less kindly, PBR has become the favorite beer of a privileged subculture that wishes to demonstrate how unpretentious it is. Of course, some relish the irony of the brand. A few might even enjoy the taste, which one reviewer has compared to corn and wet cardboard. But any way the beer is poured, a top-down narrative created by the fan object itself, such as “PBR is a cheap beer,” will rarely be as innovative or effective as a bottom-up narrative created by a tuned-in fan base, such as “Drinking PBR shows solidarity with the true American working class.”
It is interesting to note that in some New England locations PBR has started losing market share to an unexpected rival, Narragansett. This difficult-to-pronounce lager, purchased in 2004 from Pabst Brewing Company by a private investor, had been around for more than a century and carries a similar in-bar price point. It was once so synonymous with eastern seaboard summers that it was the beer of choice for shark hunter Quint in the classic seventies movie Jaws, set in a fictional northeastern town. But by the mid-2000s, its production was down from 2 million barrels annually in the 1960s to just 600 barrels a year.
By 2014, production was back up to nearly 80,000 barrels. Like PBR, the secret weapon in Narragansett’s comeback is the allure of authenticity—in this case, a love of authentic local-based heritage brands, served with a side of nostalgia. The brand has capitalized on its comeback by releasing limited-edition Jaws-themed cans. It’s definitely a hit with some who believe PBR has become too mainstream.
In the hierarchy of authenticity, the newer, less-known product almost always wins, a truth that holds firm whether the product is an undiscovered old-school beer, an unknown clothing designer, or an off-the-map Chinese restaurant. Authenticity one-upmanship in the indie music community has defined the scene for so long that it has led to the popular tongue-in-cheek catchphrase, “I listen to bands that don’t even exist yet.”
Remember that fandom is, at heart, externally generated branding. Just like internally generated marketing efforts, fan-created meanings don’t need to be based in reality to be effective. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer ceased production in Milwaukee, the blue-collar heartland from which it draws its all-American allure, long before its revival in hipster bars across the nation. It’s now owned by a corporate partnership that includes TSG Consumer Partners LLC, a multibillion-dollar private-equity firm based in San Francisco, which has also invested in Famous Amos Cookies, MET-Rx nutritional supplements, Vitaminwater, and Popchips. When it comes to fan objects, what’s important is what it means to the potential fan, not what it means to a company’s shareholders.
Kickstarting Done Right (and Wrong)
In a few years, it’s possible that the area around Barclays Center will have just as many organic cold-pressed-juice bars and yoga studios as Brooklyn’s rapidly gentrifying Greenpoint neighborhood just a few miles north.
It is here, in the shell of an old pencil factory, that Kickstarter houses its headquarters. The façade channels old Greenpoint: a blank brick wall with occasional graffiti, the iron windowsills tastefully rust-covered. In fact, there are few markers hinting this is the home of the most iconic crowdfunding website in the world, not even a painted sign. Inside is all reclaimed wood, antique fixtures, polished concrete floors, and hushed, light-filled loveliness. There’s a library straight out of a 1920s murder mystery and a roof garden of local grasses (the guardrail is actually a standing desk). There’s a full-sized theater with reclaimed chairs, and an art gallery. In the giant, homey kitchen, near the arcade-style video games, a woman in a vintage sundress passes out salted caramels.
Upstairs in the cavernous workspace, filling the length of one of the long wooden tables that act as desks, sits the Project Liaison team. Their job is to critique and edit potential project pages and help creators set up an attractive campaign. Each of the Kickstarter genres is represented: Art, Comics, and Crafts all the way down through the alphabet to Theater. The team makes sure that every listing has a decent video, a description, and rewards for backers; that the project itself seems legit; and that it all makes sense together. But occasionally they do a lot more.
Kickstarter is a platform: a website. It has no warehouses, stock, or subscriptions. It sells nothing. Its mission, stripped of context, is to provide server space for individuals who want people to give them money, and then to collect that money in return for a fee. Kickstarter may guide project owners on what type of “thank you” products to gift their backers once a campaign is over, but in general the company wants to be a medium, not a preorder system.
So what is the purpose of such a large team of what, in any other industry, might be called quality-control specialists? They represent a significantly larger presence than the community support team a few rows away, whose job is merely to offer general customer service. In a company with just shy of 140 employees, it’s a surprisingly large amount of resources to devote to making sure individual creators are speaking effectively to their audiences.
When Max Temkin and his Cards Against Humanity colleagues approached Kickstarter about hosting the campaign that launched their game into the public eye in 2010, it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision.
The game creators had been designing elaborate stratagems together since first grade. By college, the group found itself hosting sprawling game-themed New Year’s parties for friends. With ever-larger crowds to entertain, standbys like Pictionary became impractical. “Cardenfreude” was born. The name didn’t last but the game did, and when the party guests returned to their respective universities a month later, they shared it with their friends. By spring break 2009, word of mouth had reached such a fever pitch that Max and one of his co-creators felt moved to launch the now infamous website offering the game for free.
The website drew new users in with the lure of inexpensive fun, but it also, incidentally, collected visitors’ email addresses for future contact.
By the time CAH was ready for Kickstarter, it had already attracted a robust audience. Game play had been thoroughly tested through thousands of downloads. And because of the website, it also had reviews from industry giants such as the Chicago Tribune and the Onion A.V. Club—which should have been impossible for a product that wasn’t technically for sale yet. Moreover, Cards already had a relatively huge preexisting buzz. As Max put it in an interview at the time, “Nobody had ever heard of us, so making the entire game available for free was a great marketing tool. Even if someone downloaded the game instead of pledging to our project, they would play with some friends who might pledge.”
The rewards for participating in the Kickstarter campaign were simple: back the project, get a professionally printed version of the game. Higher-level backers would get custom cards that could be filled out however they wanted. There were no Cards Against Humanity mugs, key chains, or beer koozies, just the promise of more of the same, printed better. One week into the Kickstarter campaign, a letter went out to all the fans who had previously expressed interest through the original website. It began, “Dear horrible friends. . . .”
The $4,000 goal was surpassed at week two. Further emails were sent out asking for advice on how to use the extra cash, with options such as higher-quality cards and fancier packaging. By the end of the campaign CAH was up to $15,570, at the time a fairly large amount for the platform.
Good crowdfunding campaigns don’t just happen. The success of CAH’s offering on Kickstarter was the culmination of months of fan interaction and experimentation. With the exception of Kickstarted projects that receive outside support, such as a big media mention, very few are ever successful without the presence of some form of preexisting fan group. It’s not that campaigns require a huge number of people who want their product—quite a few people who had already downloaded the free version of Cards by definition had no need for a second one—it’s that a core group of preexisting fans is almost always necessary to reach a broader audience.
The Social Part of Social Monetization
Fandom is one of the most effective tools for social monetization—that is to say, using a fan’s own friend group as an advocate for money-making activities, especially ones related to marketing. Social networks are extremely efficient at conveying news and information to those they’re most likely to impact, as quickly as possible.
The narrower those interests are, the faster and more targeted the messages will be. The release of a new LEGO Jedi Scout Fighter play set might disseminate slowly through an indifferent public, but it will make its way through the Star Wars fan community more quickly, and through the LEGO Star Wars fan community even faster. There is no magic to this—fans are simply more likely to befriend others with similar interests, who want to find out and discuss similar things.
If, as the old marketing adage goes, buyers need to hear about a product seven times before they decide that it’s worth checking out, fan communities increase the number of people who hear positive things about the product, and decrease the time it takes for them to do so. It isn’t true that social-marketing success always follows the presence of an enthusiastic, well-connected fan group, but it is certainly harder to realize without one. And even then, the group must be properly primed and handled.
Luke Crane’s desk at Kickstarter is littered with figurines, card sets, and books—the detritus of dozens of curated Kickstarter projects as well as his own campaigns. His official title is the charmingly generic “Head of Games.” His job, in a manner of speaking, is to critique projects for their fan appeal.
“You don’t have to have three million fans on Facebook to be successful, but you do have to be tapped in to some kind of community that is familiar with what you represent,” explains Crane. “If somebody comes to me and says, ‘I’m just getting started, I have some experience in the industry but I want to raise $200,000,’ and I ask them how much [outreach] they’ve done and they say, ‘None,’ then I try to very gently nudge them in the direction of maybe you’re not ready for Kickstarter yet. Maybe you need to go out into the world with your idea, and show it to people, and build a relationship with a community so that you’re not just sitting on Kickstarter drumming your fingers going, ‘Where is everybody,’ when you launch. You can’t just roll out the Kickstarter, slap down a heroic project invention and be like, let’s go. Give me all the money.”
Crowdfunding is very much about activating a preexisting community. It allows creators to take advantage of original fans as well as the extended network of acquaintances they’re likely to entice. This is a completely different strategy from finding an existing fan group and trying to market to it. What makes a person a poker fan, or a fan of a game like Magic: The Gathering or Trivial Pursuit, is more personal than a general love of card games. Approaching a community of poker players and trying to convince them to back the Cards Against Humanity Kickstarter would be laughable. “To post for the first time on a community forum with self-promotion is such a delicate thing. Knowing how the community works . . . and being able to get in there and appeal to them and show them that you’re one of them, you’re making a cool thing, that’s key.” And that “insider” mindset needs to influence every level of a campaign, not just its promotion.
For example, one common pitfall in crowdfunding campaigns is in choosing the wrong backer rewards—the thank-you gifts that donors receive. Too often, they read like the merchandise booth at a concert: $1 gets a sticker, $5 gets a key chain with a sticker, $15 gets all that plus a T-shirt. For an audience of consumers this might make sense: more money equals more stuff. But for a fan, it can cheapen the experience. “Nobody wants a koozie for whatever you’re doing,” says Crane.
Fans are looking to show their support, not buy some stuff. The wish to be associated with the project creator and be part of something bigger than themselves is a strong one. Backing often comes down to a very emotional, gut-level decision. “We’re always, always telling creators: make it a story about who they are and what they’re making, and why it’s important to them. Appeal to that emotional reaction rather than the transactional one. This process is very much about having a relationship with these people and maintaining that relationship.” A Kickstarter to fund a movie must convince backers to spend their cash years before seeing any output, instead of just spending the same amount on a ticket once it has already been made. Both actions support the movie, but the earlier support is much more valuable to the creator.
The best backer rewards are often experiential. A postcard is a terrible reward, but a personalized, signed postcard, with its proxy aura of nearness to the project creator, could be a better one. So is proprietary information, a personal phone call, an in-person invitation, or early access to a product. These rewards symbolize a relationship, a special insider status unavailable to the general population. It’s unfortunately also a relationship that can foment feelings of entitlement—it’s not unheard of for backers to hassle creators and demand some type of creative control over the project—but in general it’s a positive experience for both.
What to Get for the Fan Who Has Everything
Shadowrun is a tabletop role-playing game in which players engage in complex corporate espionage. In the future. A future with elves and orcs and dragons. Eric Mersmann has been playing the game with a group of friends since the mid-nineties, so he was understandably excited when Shadowrun Returns, a video-game version from the original creators, went up on Kickstarter. The highest-level backer reward was a private gaming session with one of the game’s creators.
“I spent five days going back and forth on whether I should pull the trigger or not [on] that top tier award,” he remembers. If he made the pledge, one of the game’s original creators would come to his town and act as game master for a Shadowrun game for him and five of his friends. “Of course I knew exactly which five of my friends it would be,” he says. “I was just super excited for that opportunity. They said that there were three out of three slots available. I watched the first one go in the first day, and the second one go on the third or fourth day. I hemmed and hawed, and gnashed my teeth, and then I jumped in and took that third spot.” The final cost: $10,000.
“People were pretty mystified. From friends of friends, I got reports of indignation that I was spending so much money. It was really funny because the first person who understood was somebody who is not gamer at all, but a huge sports fan. I mentioned that I did this and I was really excited. He was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I totally get that,’ and I was like, ‘Really?’ He was like, ‘Yeah. If I could sit in box seats at an IU [Indiana University] basketball game with Bobby Knight, I would do that in a second. No matter how much it cost,’ ” Mersmann recalls.
The phrase “experience economy” refers to the concept that intangible goods such as memories, emotions, and education are fantastically valuable to consumers, more so perhaps than physical products. Premium experiences like this are even more valuable to fans, who may have already tried all of the easily accessible fanlike activities associated with a fan object. It was certainly the case for Mersmann, who has no regrets about the once-in-a-lifetime game he and his friends eventually enjoyed.
“I think that’s part of the emotional process of the investment. We all loved the game. We loved our experience playing the game. It was a total high-school-nerd reunion. It was awesome.”
The Zach Braff Effect
Fans expect a level of respect in return for their enthusiasm, and rightly so, but it can sometimes be difficult to interpret exactly what form that respect should take—discounts, early access, in-person experiences, limited-edition extras, or other types of swag. Fans are quick to calculate how much monetary value they are willing to assign to their zeal, yet few members of an audience have any concept of the true costs involved in providing and maintaining a fan object.
Says Kickstarter’s Luke Crane, “When a backer comes to your project, they look at your goal, and they do a quick calculation in their head: Does that seem right? Can you make this thing with that amount of money? Of course, most of them don’t have the knowledge to make a real guess. If they really knew what it cost to make these things, they’d be like, ‘Wow, you’re not asking for enough money to make that.’ ” So it sets up this weird dynamic where creators are trying to guess how much backers are willing to pay, and backers are holding creators accountable for a process they don’t really understand. When it goes wrong it can be really painful.”
During one well-publicized incident, indie rock star Amanda Palmer raised a huge amount of money—just shy of $1.2 million—for a new album on Kickstarter, yet continued to use volunteer musicians in her shows. Fans went mad with condemnation. Surely with so much money she could now afford to pay everyone, despite her pleas that the funds had immediately gone toward the process of making the album. Palmer has since moved her crowdfunding efforts to subscription-based Patreon, perhaps in the quest for more transparency in the relationship between funding and production.
“You can see it in these hilarious and unreasonable demands that fans make. You see fans shouting down people being like, ‘How dare you ask for that much money? What are you going to do with all that extra money?’ ” explains Crane. “We’re all like, ‘But there’s no extra money. I have to make a thing and ship a thing to you. There’s zero extra money.’ ”
Any feeling of being taken advantage of, no matter the grounds for truth, can sour the fan relationship. Call it the “Zach Braff” effect. In 2013, Hollywood star Braff turned to Kickstarter to finance his comedy movie Wish I Was Here. He had a large existing fan group from his earlier TV shows and movies, and the goodwill of any number of celebrity friends and costars to help publicize it. His Kickstarter surpassed its $2 million goal within forty-eight hours. Less expected was the huge fan backlash once his numbers got high enough. Braff was already a multimillionaire, and, despite his protestations, many speculated that his net worth might have funded the movie without a need for outside assistance.
Fans want to feel like they have made a difference: something has happened as a result of their love and attention that would not otherwise have occurred. The best Kickstarter rewards show a deep sense of thankfulness and appreciation for a fan’s support. If it turns out all that support and effort was wasted, or worse yet, wasn’t required in the first place, fans are probably justified in feeling peeved.
The principle holds true for fandoms that will never need to crowdsource, crowdfund, or do anything with the word “crowd” in the title. The fan/fan object relationship is parasocial—it’s strictly one-way. Fans feel strongly about the thing they love, but the reverse isn’t true, at least at an individual level; it isn’t humanly possible for celebrities to learn intimate personal details about every one of their fans. The most valuable fan experiences remove those barriers in the association, flattening it and helping the relationship feel more two-way. Allowing a fan to feel personally responsible for a fan text creation is powerful, but so are activities that can show fans how important they are individually, not just as an aggregate block of enthusiasm.
Building a Better Fan Text
Games and gaming are a common testing ground for different types of fan interactions, perhaps because they are, by their nature, already participatory.
Cards Against Humanity has a “Suggest a Card” area on the front page of its website. “Throughout the history of the company, it’s been sort of an adversarial relationship with the ‘hard-core’ fans, the Cards fandom. They keep pushing us to accommodate fan culture on the game [and] we keep pushing back,” says Temkin. “We have tons and tons and tons of suggestions. And they’re all terrible and we don’t read them.”
Whether or not that attitude is just part of its corporate voice, CAH is certainly not alone in its trepidation at embracing fan-created content. Just like allowing fans to collaborate on creating brand meaning, validating fan-created materials has its own dangers.
Content creation is a basic fanlike activity, whether done in the name of self-improvement or as an attempt to forge bonds and gain status within the group. When properly channeled this can lead to the oft-promised rewards of crowdsourcing, like when Frito-Lay–brand snacks asks fans to develop a new flavor of potato chip and has them vote on their favorites. The resulting winner, “Cheesy Garlic Bread,” will hopefully be a hit because it reflects what the audience wants to eat. When improperly channeled, it can lead to embarrassment and legal issues, like when Frito-Lay asks fans to develop a new flavor of potato chip and they proceed to bombard the Internet with flavors like “Orange Juice and Toothpaste,” “Blood of my enemies,” “Sexual Predator,” and “Regret.” Fandom may come into being when a large enough group of people decides to express a significant emotional response on a shared platform, but some platforms, such as Internet polls, lend themselves to mischief more than others.
Grand Theft Auto is arguably the most popular video game franchise in the world; it certainly ranks near the top of the list. More than a dozen versions have been released in the last fifteen years, and the 2013 version of Grand Theft Auto V broke seven different Guinness World Records, including “Most Successful Entertainment Launch of All Time,” bringing in $1 billion within the first three days of its release.
During the game, players participate in a number of missions and mini games as they rise through the ranks of a criminal underworld. As an “open world” game, where players are allowed to roam the landscape at will, the cities and suburbs where the action takes place are impossibly dense, with all kinds of hidden nooks and crannies that invite exploration.
With such a lush platform at their disposal, some players choose to go the extra step. As in many similar games, customizing their game play (“modding” it) is as easy as adding a couple extra files to wherever the game is installed on their computers. This has led to a huge online modding community that shares such customizations. Mods range from the completely logical (cars having more realistic refueling requirements; opening up the insides of buildings for player entry) to the interesting (players can hitchhike or try their hand at being a trucker or police officer) to the downright silly (a huge tsunami floods the entire city; giant whales rain down from the sky; that knife is now a dildo; the main character turns into a monkey, kitty, or Spider-Man. Also, lots of flying).
GTA’s publisher, Rockstar Games, has always taken a laissez-faire attitude toward its modder community as long as modder efforts are only used for offline, personal play. While the company does not actively support modding—new updates sometimes disable player-created mods accidentally—it certainly doesn’t condemn them. In a May 2015 interview, a representative even gave modding tacit approval, stating, “We have always appreciated the creative efforts of the PC modding community and we still fondly remember the awesome zombie invasion mod. . . .”
It’s easy to see why: fan-created mods make GTA more valuable overall. They make game play more interesting for the masses and keep expert players involved long after they’ve finished with the authorized game play, all at no extra expense to the publisher. Instead of sending out cease-and-desist orders—as do some of their counterparts in the music and movie industries—Rockstar has found a way to incorporate its fans’ efforts into its own context. The fans get a creative outlet to have fun, show off their coding skills, and earn status within the fan community, and Rockstar gets a new, completely unexpected use for an already existing product. Modding is good for business.
And yet, in April 2015, the headlines on many gaming blogs screamed some variation of this one: “Paid Skyrim Mod Turns Into A Clusterf**k.” The video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has a similar visual conceit to Grand Theft: a large, detailed world of towns, fortresses, and natural environments. Unlike Grand Theft, Skyrim’s creator, Bethesda Game Studios, and its distributor, Valve, actively encourage modding, even releasing a number of their own creations. So in April they decided to take advantage of their modding community by allowing users to access Mods more easily . . . for a fee.
The debacle that ensued caused one of the fastest about-faces in gaming history. Fan forums and blogs immediately filled with anti-Valve vitriol, with reactions ranging from outrage to downright aggressiveness. Some modders who chose to participate reported receiving death threats. A number vowed to cease modding rather than relinquish control over their creations. A petition to remove the pay-for-mod system surpassed 100,000 signatures within the first couple of days. By the following week the paid mod system had been shut down, and all purchases refunded.
What went wrong? If fan-created materials are beneficial to a fan object, legitimizing those materials through an official distribution channel should be good policy. After all, fans often see the value and uses of a product better than the creator, and they are better positioned to understand what kind of additions will make it even better.
In Skyrim’s case, the issue was partially in the monetization: Valve allocated itself 30 percent of each mod purchase, Bethesda took 45 percent, and only 25 percent went to the creators themselves. Partially, the problem lay in a general fear that this might mean the end of free modding and the vibrant community it had created. And partially there was a feeling of resentment that fan-created materials, traditionally meant to benefit fellow fans, were increasing the bottom line of a for-profit corporation instead. As one commenter put it, “That’s what I see here: Bethesda and Valve making money off of the modding community for work that Bethesda should have done in the first place.”
Twenty-five percent seems like it’s better than 0 percent, but it’s human nature to refuse financial transactions that appear unfair. The efforts of any fan willing to give time and energy to making a fan object more valuable are priceless, and any attempt to buy them must be handled very delicately. In a way, putting a cash value on fanlike activities such as content creation can cheapen them.
Sometimes, the best fan management is hands-off: to provide support, encouragement, and maintenance to the fan community, give them the materials they need to develop and show off their love, offer them experiences commensurate with their enthusiasm, keep them informed . . . and then know when to step back and allow human nature to take its course. But that isn’t to say that fan groups can’t be steered.
The Brooklyn Nets were able to alter the very concept of what it meant to root for their team, converting their status from invading gentrifiers to a symbol of local pride. They carefully investigated what sort of message would speak to the intrinsic desires and wants of their fan group, and were able to overcome a very real and legitimate opposition. Cards Against Humanity has devoted its entire corporate voice to giving fans exactly the type of abrasive customer service they expect, while never making the mistake of being abrasive. They understand that their fans don’t want that.
Skyrim took something that was working well, a modding tradition that successfully served the fans’ quest for self-improvement and status within the community, and, without fully thinking through the implications of its actions, subverted it into a commercial venture. Because it hadn’t understood the motivations of its fan group, it made the mistake of assuming the fans would be grateful for any monetary remuneration they received from their modding, no matter how small. The resulting blowup could have been avoided with proper management.
Be deliberate. It’s the most important rule when interacting with an existing fan group. Tinkering with something that isn’t broken, like the relationship between active fans and their fan object, is an extremely risky business, one that needs a high level of strategy and forethought. There is a very real line between managing fans and taking advantage of them.