Co-creation: Four-eyed Monsters and Crowdfunding

Engagement can be basic - how much time and how many interactions will a user have with an experience. This simple baseline allows advertisers to try and gauge (can't say measure) how "engaging" an ad is.

That doesn't begin to describe the real promsie of engagement. In the online video world, there have been some terrific engaging experiences. From ZeFrank's The Show, now archived on Blip.tv to havemoneywillvlog, creators are trying new ways to make involving experiences.

Now, the filmmakers behind a 71 minute film, Four-eyed Monsters, are trying to get known, get reimbursed, and prove out a new sponsorship/promotion idea. The film which is available on YouTube and Spout.com begins with the filmmakers displaying the fan of credit cards that funded their film. They tell the viewer that for every sign-up at Spout.com (if you want to sign up, use the link below so the filmmakers get their dough), they will recieve a dollar (up to $100K) to offset their movie debt. I am pre-loading the movie as we speak and only know that it begins on an unassuming suburban ranch house. I can say it looks nicely shot and made. We will know more later, perhaps much later.

I cannot help but want to know the fine print. Are the filmmakers who they say they are? Are they truly at risk financially? How did they hook up with Spout.com?

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice seem to be as real as you and me. (Susan has 3600 "firends" or so at MySpace; Arin, well, his MySpace page won't load so I don't know how many he's got).

So far they have about 5100 Spout.com members to their credit, so $5100. If they go all the way, that would be huge for Spout - 100K new registrants. Of course that is step one in a review service. You also need to promote activity or there isn't any "there" there.

What is Spout.com? Essentially a social network for movie reviews. They have been plugging away since January 2005. And they are pretty well known judging from their Techcrunch and news stories. Rick DeVos is the CEO. Here's how they describe themselves:

"In a nutshell, we were four guys wanting to make movies. We got tired of seeing great films die on the vine at film festivals because the Hollywood model for Marketing and Distribution is broken. Some of the best stories are lost beneath popcorn-seller flicks, but they're out there and people--somewhere, someplace--know about them. So, we thought:

If we can make it easy for people to share movies they love with others, the big movie/little movie playing field will be level and really meaningful stories will find their audience."

There is a lot of user-inclusion in their service. I can become a Spout tester (get paid!) and they actively solicit feedback on new features. They also offer small rewards like digital swag where I can download widget-like apps and tag cloud screensavers.

There are a lot of opinion sites out there. Movies is a solid genre to pull enthusiasts together in this social network-like model. The great thing is that Spout is very open. They facilitate pulling Spout into MySpace and other SNSs and are not trying to build a walled garden.

If you join, go to www.spout.com/foureyedmonsters so the filmmakers get the bucks. Could a bigger brand ever do this? A Netflix? A studio? A consumer product like Coke that tries periodically to endear itself to the creative intelligentsia? Part of the reason this seems to work so well is that Spout is a genuine start-up like the filmmakers, themselves. I wonder if big brands might spoil the experience....