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Night of the Living Dead - remade by the fans

Speak to some of Neoco’s big global brand clients and you will soon hear them going on about the ‘co-creator generation’ and how to engage them. Co-creators are a group of people who share a similar love for something and work to create or progress the ’scene’. Have you seen the Kill Bill special ‘fan’ edition (The Whole Bloody Affair)? Or what about the Lego Mindstorm development studio or any of the Lego scenes on Google Images or You Tube…

Co-creators or the generation thereof are not categorised by age or similar demographics, they are actually a mind set. It’s mostly a co-incidence that they are of a similar age or sex. A general rule of thumb is the more niche the cause, the more passionate the co-creators. In some ways, that’s why the big brands are destined to fail with their recruitment of this audience as by and large, people just don’t care enough about a mobile phone and the intrinsic links to other content (music, video, photos, etc) are too generic to evoke true passion.

An example of a genre that is never short of co-creators is the living dead, or zombies. From zombie pillow fights in Seattle to zombie talk radio podcasts, the world of the dead has never been so alive and online has made this possible. The latest co-creation to hit zombie-land is NOTLD:R – an interesting remake of the 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead. The whole movie has been cut in to scenes which are then distributed to co-creators who have to animate the scene in their own way. The new animations will then be recompiled for an entirely new experience of NOTLD. Sounds very exciting but to a lot of people this sounds quite sad and those people are missing the point. Co-creators are passionate about their interests and spending four months animating a scene for a collective movie is a state of mind and emotion. These people would not go watch a football game, they would be the ones who get painted and turn up with drums, horns and flags at every game.

So whilst the idea of involving co-creators is a great one, the brand needs to ask a few questions first:

Is our brand strong enough to withstand the impact of co-creation
Is our proposition really inline with their passion?
What do we want to get from this?

If you can get positive answers from these three questions, you might just have something that could involve or attract co-creators and all the positive word of mouth, buzz and advocacy that it brings. Be warned though, if you even have one answer that is not strong you are likely to just end up with a handful of zombies going through the motions.