Sit Back and Enjoy the Chat
It was a midsummer evening in 1995, an eon ago by pop technology measures, when Jonas Heller received what he considered irrefutable proof that the Internet was ready, as they say in the movie business, to open wide.
Heller, then working in the new-media department of powerful Hollywood agency ICM, was sitting in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills with Sandra Bullock, about to lead her into an electronic chat room to promote her latest movie, “The Net.”
Heller had created and packaged the interactive chat, a program that was wholly underwritten by Oldsmobile as part of an effort to use cyberspace to revitalize its old-fogy image and reach younger customers.
“Before the show even got started, there were 2,100 people waiting in the auditorium,” Heller said. “Something like 5,000 questions came in over the hour, and then about 1,000 e-mails came in after the show.”
With three months’ experience running the nightly celebrity chats on America Online, Heller was an old hand in the interactive business, but that didn’t prepare him for the overwhelming interest from fans who wanted to get a chance to talk directly to Bullock, even if only through typed keystrokes in cyberspace.
“To see that kind of traffic really said to me that people are dying to talk to somebody in this medium,” Heller said. “And if you position it that way, a business model starts to emerge.”
That night was also when Heller figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up. And though his business card still doesn’t offer a job title, it’s clear what he is: an Internet impresario, a new-media promoter who plans to take interactive media out of the realm of technological curiosity and unrealized hype and into a mass communications medium that’s as powerful and pervasive as radio and television.
At 25, Heller is a child of the computer era; he can talk bandwidth and megabytes with the best of them. But at heart, Heller is more about using new online technology to create a Really Big Show--and not just by booking A-list celebrities such as Michael Jordan or Arnold Schwarzenegger, who typically command big audiences.
Heller believes he knows how to get people--groups that a particular advertiser might want to target--to watch, listen and chat online.
For Heller, who grew up in Los Angeles, understanding the machinery of promotion and placement that pervades the entertainment industry is second nature. So when he got an opportunity during his last year at USC to join the new-media department at ICM, he jumped--even though it meant leaving college a semester before graduation.
At ICM, Heller started to learn about the interactive business. In those days--three whole years ago--most people thought interactive media meant CD-ROMs. But Heller was also working in the small but growing area of online services. He correctly guessed that the online world, with its ability to link people electronically, was going to far surpass CD-ROMs.
To create his own online interactive content, Heller left ICM in 1995 to form Revolution Multimedia, an interactive production and promotion company that produced chats and other live, Internet-based entertainment.
Revolution managed to gross a million dollars in less than two years, he said; the firm has just merged with another Los Angeles new-media production house, Box Top Interactive.
Heller’s overall business goal, though, didn’t change.
“What we were doing at Revolution and now at Box Top is identifying the specific types of guests and how they relate to the overall objective of creating events that can then help create community online,” Heller said. “For your clients, you want to be able to refine your audience as much as possible, so that the people who come to the interactive show are the sort of people and demographics that the sponsors want to reach.”
Like any interactive production executive who hopes to stay in business, Heller recognizes that the current online entertainments are still pretty primitive.
So Heller and Box Top are exploring a range of new audio and video technologies that might enable them to produce more interesting online events and content.
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Karon can be reached at pkaron@pacbell.net
