B-Side Entertainment, Inc.

The B-Side Festival Community provides film festival-goers with the ability to create personal calendars, interact with filmmakers via blogs and chat and most importantly, to rate and review films. The two primary business goals of the product are to collect data for B-Side’s analytics from audience members and to increase ticket sales at the film festival and.

We started in October of 2005 by creating the visual design and user experience for a pilot with the Austin Film Festival (AFF). As B-Side's first foray into being a provider of technology to film festivals, we were highly focused on branding the solution as AFF's custom web site while preserving the ingredient brand, B-Side. AFF credited the pilot with drastically increasing ticket sales, specifically second screening sales, where the product’s word of mouth marketing capabilities could influence an audience member’s purchase decision. In addition, B-Side used the customer data it gathered through the festival to choose to begin marketing their first film, The Outdoorsmen: Blood, Sweat & Beers. We deepened our relationship through the success on the pilot, and began the process of revisiting the B-Side brand and product roadmap to scale the pilot into a market-leading solution for film festival technology. In order to help B-Side reach its business goals we needed to create a marketing campaign with associated collateral for sales outreach, build a strong technology brand for B-Side and re-envision the technology solution and user experience as a product that could be scaled to hundreds of festivals and serve millions of film fans, easily and for little cost.

B-Side currently has over 300 film festivals deployed and active on the B-Side Festival Community. This network of film festivals gives B-Side one of the largest collections of independent film fans (3M+) and the world’s largest database of independent film ratings and reviews.

In 2008, B-Side began to scale its film distribution business, using the data it had collected from over 300 film festivals to select films they would acquire for distribution. Thinktiv’s part in this endeavor was to take responsibility for each and every film’s key art and for its website.

While each film needed a highly customized website for branding purposes, B-Side's program for film distribution called for a suite of social media and marketing tools that were applied consistently across all films. These tools were used to aggregate a community of fans, sell packaged goods (DVDs and merchandise) and digital downloads online and launch marketing campaigns, direct and via social media. We designed a scalable templating system based on an open-source CMS that allows B-Side to invest their marketing dollars in high-value brand customizations and user experiences that are film specific, while retaining the underpinnings of the B-Side ingredient brand and the consistent technology platform they prefer to deploy.

We have helped create some fantastic success stories, such as Super High Me, which opened on April 20th, 2008 in 1,076 locations, surpassing the 868 theaters that Fahrenheit 911 opened in, or Crawford, the first-ever film premier on Hulu, where it spent 14 consecutive days as number 1 on the site. Most recently, Nerdcore Rising, Visioneers and Last Cup have all released for sale.

The B-Side brand presented an interesting challenge. With their primary customer being film festivals, who demanded B-Side apply the Festival brand’s look and feel to B-Side’s technology, we were left with the challenge of how to brand B-Side in a powerful, engaging package that easily integrated into the vibrant collection of artistic brands festivals create. The result of our exploration into is our first true black and white brand, where we focused uniquely on information architecture, and using the rich media content of the films to provide the pop and depth the brand deserved – reserving the entire color palette for the film festival. As B-Side built their film distribution business, the brand scaled to support the variety of websites and marketing campaigns B-Side needed to build to market and distribute their films - each with its own professionally developed look and feel.