Amazon's crowdsourcing betters Hollywood crowdpuller tactics

In one of the best efforts in recent times, in an innovative use of collaboration technologies and market analytics by exploiting its advantages through customer/user experience, Amazon has converted Blackburn Burrow, a movie script by screenwriter Jay Levy, into a digital comic to draw more consumer inputs.

Amazon has resorted to crowdsourcing - gathering inputs from the crowds online - on its Kindle store for making the movie. The comic itself had recently become the most-downloaded free comic on Amazon's Kindle store; it also comes with a survey for feedback on what people thought about the story, according to Levy who commented on a popular news site.

In a unique approach, in a bid to ensure that the movies are runaways hits, something which viewers would be automatically drawn to, and a better RoI from the huge money to be spent on these, Amazon is crowdsourcing the creation of lot of original content - movies such as "Zombies versus Gladiators" and the children's TV series "Magic Monkey Billionaire".

"If you look at the amount of data Amazon collects everyday, it's incredible," Levy is reported to have said. "This way, they begin to get actual feedback about the story and will create something that people really get invested in."

In comparison to Hollywood where bringing market research to the creative process of movie-making and testing movies with identified viewer groups happens routinely, the Amazon approach is taking this on an open and bigger scale.