B-Side Entertainment, Inc.
“In Thinktiv, we’ve found our virtual creative director, responsible for everything from corporate branding and user experience, to designing all of our print, web, merchandise, and distributed media including film key art, retail dvd menus and covers, and digital advertising. Our partnership has been instrumental into growing B-Side into the recognized brand it is today.”
Chris Hyams
CEO, B-Side Entertainment, Inc.
As our relationship deepened, we moved to focus on scaling this pilot into a market-leading solution for film festival technology. 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 collection of independent film fans (3M+) and the world’s largest database of independent film ratings and reviews.
With B-Side’s festival pipeline maturing, it was time to produce a scalable brand and begin focusing on the distribution side of B-Side’s model. We became responsible for the collateral, consumer experience and visual designs for the entire portfolio of B-Side films. 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.
Thinktiv continues to provide B-Side with an in-sourced team of creative talent delivering interactive, viral and traditional marketing campaigns, visual interaction strategy and overall brand management.
The Online Festival Community
B-Side's Festival Community provided 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 for B-Side were to collect data for B-Side’s analytics from audience members and to increase ticket sales at a film festival. Thinktiv worked with B-Side to meet these goals while building a flexible product that could be skinned to work with the appearance attributes any festival brand.
Film Marketing
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 film’s key art and deliver film specific skins on a consistent film website framework of our design.
Identity Design
Brand is always important but for B-Side it was different. The company needed a strong, confident brand but not one that competed with the content they planned to support. As a specialty film distributor focused on the Independent film industry, B-Sides brand was designed as a black and white brand allowing the content of the films to be the focus. The simple typographic mark with the integrated dash provided b-side with a memorable, scalable mark that could be reduced to simply the first letter of the brand while retaining the brand.