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Purefold, the open media franchise conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s RSA Films and Baby Cow Productions, has come to a halt.
A combination of factors have prevented this ambitious project from gathering the required funds to get off the ground.
Purefold envisaged to break with some of the traditional components of branded content initiatives.
Set in the near future, the project relied on prototype placement (or product invention) instead of product placement as a way to integrate advertisers into storytelling.
It provided the opportunity for multiple advertisers across multiple categories to fund short form episodes.
It featured multiple loosely connected story lines, connected through a central theme “what does it mean to be human” and the subject of empathy.
It provided the audience with the opportunity to contribute in real-time to individual story lines through FriendFeed groups.
And last but not least, it used a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence to give back the productions to participating audience members and partners, and to maximize frictionless and unlimited distribution for sponsors.
Combining so many innovations proved to be a challenging recipe for most agencies and advertisers and despite advanced collaborations with several A-list brands, a lack of sufficient funding meant that Purefold was unable to move from script development stage into production stage.
Because of these evolutions, Ag8 has ceased its activities.
Ag8 would like to thank all the collaborators and supporters who have contributed along the way, whether through a tweet or blog post, thus having helped this project take shape over the past year.
If you’d like to find out more about Purefold, here are a few videos and posts worth checking out:
Video
between 09
MIT Futures of Entertainment
Notes on MIT Futures of Entertainment
Sadly and somehow not surprisingly, the most ambitious digital participatory storytelling project in development has ground to a halt. According to Ashley Swartz who spoke last night at Cross Media NYC, the final hurdle that could not be overcome was the inability of the unions who would have been involved in the production of content to accept the idea of working within a Creative Commons model. Likely it's going to take repeated proofs of concept and financial viability in smaller projects to overcome this resistance.
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