ideaBOOST Case Studies: Focus Group – The Path

Focus Group

Author: Zan Chandler

Lead Facilitator: Veronica Heringer

Overview:

The Path, SmokeBomb Entertainment

The Path is an urban fantasy digital series and a “hosted” social experience that aims to stimulate viewers to participate in conversations around the show and create fan works through a low-barrier platform. The Path is a fully interactive, multi-platform experience that includes the viewer in the creation of a story world.

From the fall 2012 until spring 2013, The Path was one of seven teams to participate in the CFC Media Lab’s digital entertainment accelerator, ideaBOOST. The program employs the best practices from tech’s lean startup movement and other disciplines. The program’s goal is to help companies navigate the entertainment and technology startup market, sharpen their product vision, and refine their strategies to target audiences and generate sustainable revenues. As part of this program, the teams were exposed to a number of participatory design techniques. Each team made use of several techniques in order to further the development of their projects.

Method:

A Focus Group was used to inform the learning and discovery phase of The Path and enabled the team to gain valuable feedback on the core concept and proposed process for developing the project.

Participants:

Participants in the Path’s Focus Group were members of the general public with an interest in urban fantasy fiction.

Goals:

The Path team was early in the development of its concept and needed to get feedback from the public on both the core concept and their  proposed process for developing the show. Their goals were to gauge both how interested participants were in the storyline and heroine, and whether participants might be willing to play a role in the development of the show. Unlike the traditional path for developing serialized content, which seeks to gain fans after the show has been fully developed and some episodes have been produce, the Path’s team were exploring how they might  involve fans from the very beginning of the process. They needed to understand how interested fans might be in engaging with writing staff , contributing to decision making and contributing fan works to help build a story world.

Process summary:

Approximately 20 people participated in The Path’s Focus Group. While technical issues limited the participation of the California-based writers and other members of hte creative team, The Path’s team facilitated an active discussion of popular urban fantasy shows, shows with strong female leads, favourite characters, plots and settings, influential writers, fandom, fan fiction and audience engagement with brands.

Images or diagrams:

1.     Focus group participants discuss fandom and their interest and consumption of urban fantasies

Path Focus Group1

2.     A video produced by Smokebomb Entertainment that provides an overview of the The Path’s focus group 

3.     The Path’s official trailer 

Results:

Focus Group participants responded positively to the core concept of the Path, as well as its heroine. The group’s enthusiasm for discussing their engagement with their favourite shows demonstrated that fans were eager to participate in their favourite storyworlds. The discussion around fandom and fan fiction revealed that the participants were engaged by the possibility of contributing to and helping to shape the development of the show.

Outcomes:

The positive response from participants in the Focus Group reinforced the team’s desire to hold a series of “Creative Rooms”, in which fans were able to interact with the creative team, provide early feedback on storylines, characters, settings and more. These “Creative Rooms” were complemented by many social media platforms where fans were able to discuss the development of the show and contribute fan fiction works.

ideaBOOST is the CFC Media Lab’s accelerator that emphasizes Audience Engagement for entertainment platform development. This case study was prepared for the ASTOUND initiative, a partnership between the CFC, HotDocs, and OCAD University.