Today’s Digital Entrepreneurs Need 360-Strategies for Financing and Audiences

The new standard for entertainment media includes a multi-faceted production approach: web, games, apps — and of course TV and DVDs. And this is just the start, according to a new article featuring FanTrust among today’s Digital Entrepreneurs:

“As founder and president of Vancouver-based FanTrust Entertainment Strategies, [Catherine] Warren spends the bulk of her time helping entertainment companies, including some big-name clients such as broadcaster CBC, build audiences in the digital space (or in some cases, reconnect with audiences that have migrated there). Her primary tools are broadband video, social media, games and mobile apps.

‘Let’s say you’re a broadcaster. There’s an increasing expectation that our clients who are producers will show up not just with a TV pitch but with a whole 360-degree pitch: here’s what our show is going to look like on air, online, via mobile; here’s how we’re going to monetize it through e-commerce; here’s the game; here’s how all these things roll out,’ says Warren, who has consulted with entertainment companies throughout North America and Europe, is a judge for the Interactive Emmys and sits as a board member of the World Summit Award, a UN partnership project recognizing “new media for a better world.”

Warren often matches her big media charges with small, digitally conversant innovators, the startups, to access the online market. She says that larger companies, while not exactly the dinosaurs identified by Paul Kedrosky [senior fellow at the US-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation specializing in innovation, entrepreneurship and the future of risk capital], are increasingly reliant on nimble innovators for their survival; EA, she notes, acquired London-based social gaming company Playfish, a 200-person outfit, for about $400 million the same month it laid off 1,500 people. In Warren’s opinion, the shift we’re seeing is not the death of traditional media but a kind of democratization of the industry, where there’s room for both big and small companies to access and profit from the same market. And with the increasing availability of startup financing –  [such as] VanEdge Capital Inc., a new $100-million venture capital fund administered by former EA executives Paul Lee, Glenn Entis and Jason Chein – that market is well positioned to grow.”

Excerpted from an April 2010 article by journalist Jessica Barrett; to read more about digital innovation or for the full story by Barrett visit: https://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/2010/innovation