#SXSWi Session Notes: Decision Trees: YouTube's New Breed of Interactive Storytellers

These are my raw notes from this session.Hacking YouTube to create "choose your own adventure." the videos become video games.It starts with figuring out the decision tree and how many videos you can reasonably make. Then scripting it out properly. Did an American Idol one that had 57 videos, which was too much.Clever does not equal good.Sprite did an interactive video sponsorship/promotion with music artist Katie. Cost as much as a television commercial, but actually hit their demo and considered it a success.Engagement: 400,000 people went to the Antoine Dodson game. 459,000 played the Lindsey Lohan. For the American Idol one, 463,000 played.How do you keep people playing longer? Be clear, very quickly what the instructions are. Explain that there are a lot of combinations, so you want to play multiple times.A video game shouldn't be over 2 minutes long.Within YouTube, use invisible hyperlink annotations on top of the graphics that you create within Final Cut or Photoshop.There is no limitation on the number of annotations you can put on a page. So, for example, 20 wouldn't be a problem. Good use for an end slate, link to all your other videos rather than the YouTube recommended videos default. Anyone can use annotations, don't have to be a techie to do that; use the spotlight tool to do this. For the YouTube demo, the font can never be big enough. With annotations, you can only link to other YouTube videos. There is a new annotation that allows for linking to Twitter, but they look totally different. The work around to that is to put a bit.ly link in the top of your video description.Currently, these don't work on mobile.Using YouTube video for produced video, but will lead you to UStream for live streaming pieces of the story. Eventually leading up to live meet-ups.White label player experience.Not currently getting permission to use others' likeness in parody. If anyone featured wanted the videos taken down, they could get them taken down and we would have to counter sue, which is probably not worth it.Advice: keep a foot in traditional media for now. Major brands just don't take solely digital executions seriously. Need both for now.Advice: pick a lane, pick a demographic and focus there. Can't get everyone with same execution. What am I trying to accomplish? Don't just aim for "hits on YouTube."Check out Chad, Matt and Rob on YouTube.