Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome back to the FoST podcast. On today's episode I'm joined by Yoni Bloch, longtime FoST attendee and founder of the interactive storytelling company eko. Yoni is a true rockstar, both as a musician and as a tech startup entrepreneur. Ever since he and his band in Israel made their first interactive music video, he has understood the power of giving the audience agency—a role to play. He was one of the first people to see the potential of interactive video, and since founding eko in 2010, he has worked tirelessly with creators, technologists, and brands to usher in a new age of interactive storytelling.

Of course, not all audiences want their media to be interactive. Sometimes even I would rather simply sit back and be told a story, rather than be asked to make decisions within it. But Yoni saw much earlier than almost everyone else that there was something magical about interactive video when it's used correctly. In 2013, eko created the now-iconic interactive music video for Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone.” The video won four Golden Lions at Cannes and earned the distinction of “pretty much the best thing ever” from Wired Magazine. The following year, eko won the prestigious inaugural FoST prize with their short film Possibilia, a collaboration with the director duo the Daniels. And just a few years after that, in 2018, eko surged to new heights with a $250 million investment from Walmart to develop new methods of interactive marketing.

Yoni is one of those rare examples of someone who's both an artist and a technologist, and who's pushed a medium forward while building an enormously successful business. Please welcome my dear friend, Yoni Bloch, to today's episode.

Yoni Bloch, it's such a delight and pleasure to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Yoni Bloch:

Such a delight and pleasure to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, it's really fun whenever we get to spend some time together. So thank you for being here. Let me start by asking you about the origins of your company, eko. I know that you started as a musician, right? Tell me that story.

Yoni Bloch:

My background was actually a combination between a lot of passion to music. My mom was an artist, and she bought me a piano and signed me up to classical piano lessons when I was a kid. My dad was a nuclear physicist, and I think he was also worried—I'm from Israel—he was worried that I'm going to get drafted in the mandatory army service to something aggressive, so he bought me a Commodore 64 and would sit with me on weekends to teach me…

Charlie Melcher:

I had that too, I had a Commodore 64 on my desk as a kid.

Yoni Bloch:

Yeah. And so obviously I loved those things. My dad had an internet account from the university since '89. I joined this audio recording piracy group that cracked… sounds bad now, but it was very cool back then. And I used that to record songs at home that then I uploaded to the internet, to a website that actually one time FoST should feature, because it's a really sad story. It's from 1998, this is pre-Myspace or anything, and it's Myspace and Facebook and YouTube all rolled together, in a world where there is no high-speed internet, where anyone could upload a song or a picture or a text and get comments. And it was a commune of artists.

And I would upload my songs there that I would record at home, and nobody would have the energy to download an MP3 because it took 30 minutes to download at the time. But then I got the… you know, Israel is tiny, and there was only one record company here, that was Sony CBS. The daughter of the CEO heard the songs and told her dad that he should sign me up. She said, “He's big on the internet.” And he said, “What's the internet? What are you talking about?”

Charlie Melcher:

So then you got the record deal. You started to make music. And then I know you wanted to do a music video, but it wasn't a normal music video.

Yoni Bloch:

We were thinking about, how do we do a music video that lets you play with it? So it keeps you interested, and also makes you feel like you're missing out, so you will have to play it over and over again. And the actual birth of the idea was, we had an argument in the studio about who should play the solo to a specific song—in a good way—but then we were like, “Okay, let's all record the solo, and we'll choose in the end.”

And then we were like, “Oh, we live in a world where, why don't we just, like, you tell us which one?” So we made an interactive music video, and one of the things in it is that you have to seamlessly choose who's going to play the solo. It created this desire for people to play the same song more than once. And the average time of that music video, people watching it, was three times the length of the video... and it was cool!

Charlie Melcher:

And what was the name of it again?

Yoni Bloch:

It's called “Pretend to Be Happy.”

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, I loved that video. I remember you showing that to me. I loved the fact that there were multiple storylines. It was in a party, right, in Israel? And you could decide who to follow through the party. And not only were you seeing different storylines, but you're also then hearing sort of slightly different versions of the music as you went through. And you felt this a little bit of a sense of ownership. Like, “I really enjoyed this part of the path that I discovered.” And I fell in love with the song, just as you said, because I listened to it so many times, I was like, “This is a great song. I feel connected to this song.”

Yoni Bloch:

Yeah. It's exactly that idea. I think there is something about, instead of just listening to the song, feeling like you have tried the different versions and this is the right one. They would actually argue about who's listening to the song correctly.

Charlie Melcher:

So you did that, and that was a big success. Why did you decide to stop being a rockstar and start being a tech star?

Yoni Bloch:

All of my band also have a bit of a similar story to me, where besides doing music, they also are either into engineering and computer science, or design, or animation, or the combination of that. But also, we thought of ourselves as artists. When we started, we were a little bit torn between, “What are we? Are we business people? Are we creating a new art form?” We had little issues in the beginning, of how to manage as we grew. Look, we still have a lot to prove, but we've been able to make a lot of strides and advancements in that gray area.

Charlie Melcher:

And what was sort of the first real success that you had with the company?

Yoni Bloch:

We had that funny incident where this unknown musician in the US decided to do an interactive music video with us. Old Navy, the company, gave a $300,000 sponsorship. And because it was the first thing we were doing, we came from Israel, and we were like, “Oh my god! America!” You know, those thoughts. Now we know that it wasn't necessarily the thing that will be that repeatable. Eventually we got Bob Dylan to do an interactive music video for us, for “Like a Rolling Stone,” and it never had a music video.

Charlie Melcher:

That was insane. I mean, that was so good.

Yoni Bloch:

And that's still on by the way, easily, on video.bobdylan.com if you want to see it. It was a bit that kind of artistic approach of, “We are trying to invent a medium, not create a business yet.”

Charlie Melcher:

Yoni, I remember seeing the short film done by the Daniels called Possibilia. And if you recall, that was the winner of the Future of StoryTelling prize, the first year we had the prize. And that showed me the power of branching video as an art form, in terms of real storytelling. I mean, it was an extraordinarily beautiful piece that these two directors created together.

Yoni Bloch:

When people think about branching storytelling, they think about choose-your-own-adventure. And then it's always like, “If you go left, this will happen. If you go right, that will happen.” But again, when you make a choice in life, which is what we're trying to emulate here, it's not black and white, and it's not left and right. It's much more like creating a persona, building a character—which is you, usually, because it’s the choices you make. A lot of this stuff that we've been working on in fiction and storytelling, like what the Daniels did, is about not choosing how the story should unfold necessarily, but giving you some kind of role and control inside the universe that they've built. In Possibilia specifically, it's a breakup, that the more you interact with, the more “breakup” it gets. If you actually make all the choices in it, they break up like 32 different ways while you are watching it.

Charlie Melcher:

Super powerful. It leads me to that question of, what is the role of the people formerly known as the audience? How is that changing today? I use the term “formerly known as the audience,” I didn't create that, but because at one point we only had the option of being a passive consumer of content. We didn't have any other options. Now, there's all sorts of two-way media. The one that you've created, and many others, social media or gaming and others, the idea of the passive audience is going away. We don't even have good terms for it anymore. I've talked about this before. What do you call somebody who is a participant in the story, a player? Like a Shakespearian or gaming term? Or Janet Murray, in her famous book, talks about people who have a role as interactors.

Yoni Bloch:

Obviously there's a problem of definitions here. Definitions create a reality also. Our nature is to participate. There's so many themes to explore. If you look at how gaming answers this idea of personalization and feeling of agency, and try to bring that industry into a much larger world—I think we've never been an audience, really.

Charlie Melcher:

It seems to me that the move towards interactive media or participatory media, is really about getting us back to that human desire to have roles so that we can experience other than our own lives.

Yoni Bloch:

A lot of people have told me before, “Don't you miss being a musician?” And in the last few years until COVID hit, I’ve actually had this resurgence in audience. It's a little bit like how The Office is the most-streamed show in the US now. So, turns out my albums from 12 years ago have been really successful—teenagers now think I'm old school cool. And so I suddenly had this resurgence, and was able to do sold-out shows more than I would be in real time. And it's the most fun I've ever had in my life. But part of the fun is that I get to do both—that I can be a rockstar now, and then I can have a business meeting. And I'd love to also be a football player. You know what I mean? I think I really do. I really want to be a coach maybe. There is something about… we live only once. Why not try to live as many times as possible in that one time?

Charlie Melcher:

When you let the audience have some agency in how the story unfolds, it creates a challenge for those of us who grew up in an age when the author had total control, right? When the filmmaker's vision was just what it was going to be, and that person was supposed to be a genius. And I wonder how you see authors, filmmakers, and storytellers struggle with the idea of giving up some of the agency, giving up some of the control over the story. Is that very difficult for people?

Yoni Bloch:

You're not really giving up the story. You and I are talking, let's say I tell you something and you obviously don't get what I'm saying. I'm going to try to explain again. Or, let's say I make an inappropriate joke and you don't laugh. I won't make any more inappropriate jokes, right? All of these are interactive moments where I understand something. It's not necessarily the bad ending and the good ending. It's more about, how do I tell this story in a way that will reach the other side the most powerful way? And so the idea is one story, many ways to tell it—not necessarily many stories, one experience to encompass them. People a lot of times feel threatend because it's like, “This is not my profession. This is not what I know how to do.” And there's people that are like, “Oh my God, this is exciting. A new toy to play with.”

Charlie Melcher:

Netflix has done interactive video, “Bandersnatch,” right? They’ve done some children's things. There are other big Hollywood producers getting in, or directors, starting to get into this. First of all, is it about time? I mean, you were way ahead on this, but now there's a bunch of other companies sort of doing these types of things. Are you excited by that? Are you threatened by that? Is this going to be the next big thing? Are we going to be going to movie theaters someday when COVID is over and experiencing interactive films there? Where do you see this impacting the industry?

Yoni Bloch:

I don't think there’s many companies who do it. I think Netflix is pretty unique, in terms of the fact that Netflix has a lot to lose by experimenting with this kind of thing, and they still do that, which I think is admirable. Look, eko in its core is a technology company, and a lot of the stuff that Netflix's doing is using the core of a lot of our technology. So it's good for us, the more companies that use that. We have creative backgrounds ourselves, so we're jealous when somebody does something good. But we are excited that the business company and technology sides of it are successful. And that's where we become greater artists, and are excited for the global domination.

Charlie Melcher:

So Yoni, we've established that you are basically just a grown-up kid, and somebody who has all these things that he wants to play and be creative, but yet you've made a company that's a very serious company, and you received a lot of funding, a lot of financing. I think Walmart was a recent major investor in eko. I'm curious, where do you see this interactive video medium going, from a business perspective?

Yoni Bloch:

There was a point where the company was growing, that my COO, who’s an amazing guy just for the fact he has enough patience to deal with me, he told me, “Look, we're growing, we need values and a mission statement.” And I'm like, “Oh shit, that sounds so corporate and horrible. I never want to do that.” And he convinced me in the end, he said, “Look, if we don't find a way to describe what's important to us in one language, then we'll never be successful.” And after that, I took it really seriously. The mission statement we came up with eventually was, “To bring the art of storytelling closer to the human experience, using the power of choice.”

We have a bit of argument, especially as we're doing some of the things with Walmart, which are very focused on... we call them inspiration hubs. So we have a project called Cookshop, which is an interactive cooking channel, but it's starring Jamie Oliver. But instead of a regular cooking show, he cares about you.

Jamie Oliver:

And I'm going to help them get a whole load, more flavor into your greens. Trust me, you won't regret it. Now the best thing about this, is this is an interactive video. That means you're the boss. That means you can navigate through my recipes to give you the ultimate recipe for you. The boxes will come up, click what you want. I tested every single combination.

Yoni Bloch:

And so you choose the recipe. And then he's like, “Okay, first question, are we doing this for you or for the kids?” And let's say you choose for the kids. And he says, “Trust me, I know the challenge. I have five kids myself.” And so people are like, “Oh, Jamie, you get me, you know that I have kids.” Now, in the end, you'll get the recipe that is specific for you, and things like that. And we like it because it humanizes the experience. And I feel strongly that that's the test of the mission statement—that if we work on an extremely commercial project, or we work on something that's really just creative and has no realization of how will it ever be making money, it can both be contained within that same thing. That's exciting to me.

Charlie Melcher:

Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you're using the technology for marketing, advertising? I know there's some interesting things that you're doing to get people to engage with toys, for example. I remember you sharing some of that.

Yoni Bloch:

That is a good example because toys are generally nice, and have a lot of imagination in there. If you go to walmartwonderlab.com, that is a good example. It's actually this thing that just starts—every toy in the wall is there, and you see it, and instead of just how, you know, usually, when you shop for toys online, you would see pictures and maybe depending on what the company added on it… it's obviously not playful or for the kids.

So here, one of my favorite examples is the Lego Star Wars kit. So it starts and you see the box and you choose, “Do you want to open it up with the lightsaber or with the force?” And if you choose the force, a hand with black gloves comes in, and it blows up, but all the pieces are in there. And then it's like, “How good are you at Lego?” And I'm like, “Really good.” And it builds it up. “Do you want to play with Obi-Wan Kenobi, or with Luke Skywalker?” And so you get to actually play. And what we found out is that parents who have kids who are saying, “I want this, I want this,” they say, “Oh, come play with it first, tell me that you like it, and then I'll buy you.” So it becomes the trailer of the toy using interactivity, especially in a world now, where there are no toy stores, really. Regardless, by the way, of COVID, but with COVID, even worse. Those kinds of things allow us to try to bring that experiential in scale by allowing you to interact even when you're in front of a screen, and not just be laid back.

Charlie Melcher:

So let's talk about how little trust there is in the world right now, and how much kind of partisan and alienation and polarization. And you've talked about the technology that you've developed as a way to help create something that is more human. Are you using it in any ways that can help us have greater trust, or greater empathy, or greater connection with other people? Not just to buy stuff?

Yoni Bloch:

We've been thinking about it a lot. There's something powerful about adding choice, because technically, in storytelling, if you're able at any moment to allow the other side to say the opposite, or something like that, then especially when you get into politics and things like that, nobody can ever be angry at you because if they are angry at you, there's a button to press to flip everything around.

There was a project that we did early on to try to show power of the seamlessness of the technology, and we were looking at, in role-playing games, one of the things that's really important to players is this tree dialogue—dialogue trees. You choose what to say, and how to answer, and you choose what to say. And by choosing what you're going to ask, or say, or do, you feel like you're creating your alter ego. And so we had an opportunity with the president of Israel, for his 90th birthday, to film an interview where you get to ask him any question you want. One of the questions that he was asked was, “Does Israel have nuclear weapons?” When you get to ask him that, you click it. “Does Israel have nuclear weapons?” And he looks at the camera and he's like, “I'm not going to tell you!” And because he says it to you, not to the interviewer, you're like, “Oh, I'm sorry I asked.” Again, there's something suddenly that makes it so personal and great.

So we've been thinking a lot about—especially as we've gotten deeper into the business world—how can we use that authenticity, or sincerity, to really create more honest relationships with people you don't trust? And CEOs of big companies were an easy target. And so, specifically because of our relationship with Walmart, we did the first test with the CEO of Walmart, who is, again, it sounds bad, but he's an amazing human being, really, because he also wasn't scared of any question. And part of the idea was, we explained those examples that because you decide which questions you can ask, people will look at it and be like, “Oh, I can only ask the nice questions.” So we were like, “to make this work, it only has to be the hard questions.”

And so we called it “The Honest Conversation Platform,” and it lets you ask all the hard questions. And so it becomes a repository. It started with the CEOs. The way it's being used more from a business perspective is that a lot of companies, like venture capitalists and those companies where it's very human based, but there’s no… like, if you ever look at venture capitalists, they all look the same. You have no idea what's going on. There's also bad stuff on what I said about “they all look the same,” as you can imagine. But part of the idea is to allow people to be humanized.

Charlie Melcher:

What else do you see coming, in the future of storytelling?

Yoni Bloch:

I think I'm ready, and I think the world is going to become more ready, for this to stop being experiments, and start being more real. And I've had the chance to really look at a lot of the stuff that's happening—on TikTok, for example. There's all kinds of sides, obviously, for those things. But the way that generation creates content—even though the distribution is still linear, the way they create it is very interactive. You know, a lot of the stuff that’s like, “same guy dressed up 25 times in different ways.” And so a lot of the things we're thinking with TikTok is, “Oh, why don't we then just also let the viewer pick which one, and not just the creator.” But you can see already, creators that are starting from that thought of, they would want the audience to participate, and then get stuck by distribution, which to me is the step before hopefully everything comes together.

Charlie Melcher:

Yoni, it's really hard to create a new medium. It's very difficult to be a trailblazer, to go out there and show that there's incredible creative and financial opportunities in a space that didn't exist before. It's something that I really respect, that you're doing, and want to see you be hugely, hugely successful. Keep up the good fight, my friend.

Yoni Bloch:

Thank you so much.

Charlie Melcher:

Great to see you. Thank you.

Yoni Bloch:

Yeah. Wait to see you in a human form.

Charlie Melcher:

My sincere thanks to Yoni for speaking with me today. You can find links to watch all the works mentioned in today's conversation by visiting this episode's page on the Future of StoryTelling website, fost.org, or by following the link in the episode's description.

Thank you for listening to the Future of StoryTelling podcast, produced in partnership with our talented friends at Charts & Leisure. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to our podcast, give us a review, and share with a friend. I hope you'll join us again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please stay safe, be strong, and story on.