Txt in the city

By TIM WATKIN

Max is exactly what you'd expect in a new teenage soap star. She is 18 years old, brash, excitable and endlessly fretful about her boyfriend. And when she is not anxious about her love life, there is always her study and part-time work to worry about.

Just another soap opera, right?

Well, not exactly.

Max is the star of a new series called TXTlife, but if you want to tune in it's not your television or radio you have to turn on, it's your mobile. Each episode comes to you on your phone, written in 160 characters or less. You see, Max, despite being nothing more than a body of words on a screen, is our first cellphone starlet.

Vodafone describes her as a babe who has moved to the city to study and has just hooked up with her first boyfriend. She's what most young texters would like to be - feisty, urban, socially and romantically active and wealthy enough to take holidays to Fiji. What makes her different from other soap characters - apart from the fact that there is no actor who plays her - is that she was dreamed up by staff at telecommunication company Vodafone rather than a scriptwriter at South Pacific Pictures or some LA studio.

TXTlife, the story of Max's life with her boyfriend Josh, boss Abdul and best friend Lucy, is not so much some new piece of programming or theatre as another phone service - such as voicemail or the ability to ring up and check how your shares are trading.

Like TV programmes on your computer or shopping through TV, it's another example of the convergence new technologies are creating, and further fulfils the predictions that the small, portable mobile phone will be one of the main means of receiving new electronic services.

With mobile phones already used by banks to offer customers account statements, priests to preach sermons and governments to urge teenagers to stay in school, it is hardly surprising that someone should use them to tell a story. (Considering the instant and shallow nature of the medium, you might say it's perfect for a soap opera.)

TXTlife's other novelty is that it comes to you via the brash, cool medium of text-messaging. Already changing our language by disregarding the rules of spelling, jettisoning vowels and turning the word text into a verb, this blunt and perfunctory way of communicating is now offering to entertain us.

Made in New Zealand, TXTlife is only the second mobile phone soap created, following a series called SMS-Soap that has been running in Germany since May.

"But theirs is slightly different because they have quite a few characters," says Vodafone's entertainment content manager, Christine Slater, who began developing the idea when she returned to New Zealand from Britain last year. There, she had worked for the BBC's futures division, which was looking at ideas such as putting EastEnders on the phone, so the TXTlife idea made sense to her. Already, Vodafone branches worldwide are expressing an interest in picking up the soap for their customers, suggesting TXTlife could end up with wider syndication than even Shortland Street.

Slater says Max's character is based on a friend who went roaming round New Zealand when she was 18 and wrote her fantastic letters.

"We chose to go with just the one main character because we wanted people to really identify with her. It's like you have a dialogue with a friend and you look forward to those messages."

The story-messages come to your phone around noon every day and have all the dramatic elements of a TV soap, just without the pictures, props and actors. The tone is Bridget Jones-wannabe and the storyline is Shortland Street, circa mid-90s.

The storylines, initially developed by a young male writer, are now written by Kathleen Anderson and Libby Magee, who met when they were writers on Shortland Street. Anderson is a senior storyliner on the TV show and Magee has been writing for documentaries and Queer Nation, Slater says.

The only significant difference between the textsoap and its TV and radio cousins is one of style. TXTlife is written in the first person, with Max addressing you as a friend. She pleads, Dont say NEthing 2 Josh OK?" and "Pse dont tell Josh where I am-know I can rely on U!".

CHPTR BREAK. Once again new technology that hinted at a brave new world has ended up offering us nothing more than the same old flotsam and jetsam in a new format. And once again, there is a ready audience.

In the first six weeks of the series, when it was free, 30,000 people rang Vodafone to subscribe. Last week, TXTlife became a pay-per-view service as Vodafone started charging its audience 20c a day for the privilege of receiving it. Incredibly, 20,000 have chosen to keep Max in their lives.

"To be honest, we did our business plan on much [fewer]. We got three times more subscribers than we bargained for," says Slater. "People really identify with Max and feel passionate about what happens to her. You can text back to her and the kind of replies and supports she gets when she's in a crisis is amazing.

"We've had so many people ringing up saying, 'Can I speak to Max?' It's really disappointing when you have to say, 'Sorry, Max is just a character'. They're really gutted. And we get text messages, 'Are you real?'."

Vodafone responded by choosing staff members to become the faces for Josh (the boyfriend), Abdul (the boss) and Lucy (the best friend). They're now displayed on the company's website. But Max remains faceless, a figure of fantasy. She's an imaginary friend for adults, but better than the buddy you had when you were 6. This one really does talk to you.

TXTlife's hook seems to be no different than any other soap. It's the curiosity factor. One committed fan says, "Some of it's really dumb, but I need to know what happens next. She's part of my life at 12.02 pm each day and I can't not know. It's addictive in a mild way."

But that only begins to explain the consumer appeal. Dr Margo Buchanan-Oliver, a senior lecturer in marketing at Auckland University who specialises in new media, says for many it goes deeper than mild curiosity. Early media events, including soap operas, were mass events. Some, such as Coronation Street, still are. But new technology is creating an ever-more fragmented media market, opening the way for niche events such as TXTlife. And, in a media-dominated world, the niche events you choose to be part of help to define and identify you. In marketing circles, there are groups referred to as e-tribes; groups bound together by their choice of electronic media.

Buchanan-Oliver says TXTlife's popularity is typical of the e-tribe phenomenon. It results from being a secret shared only by the like-minded: You know about Max? Hey, that means you must be up with new media. You must be mobile, hip and in the know. You must be like me.

In the same way that teenagers have always developed their own syntax, interests and trends, new media services like TXTlife are designed to gain cool through their exclusivity and image.

Yep, designed. TXTlife's trendiness - any feeling that you identify with the characters and want to be like them - is not an incidental spin-off from the story. It's the reason for the soap's existence. Why? Because this soap's primary goal is not to tell a great story, it's to market mobile phones.

Alison Sykora, a Vodafone communications executive, is candid.

"The bottom line is that we're a business and we provide great services for people so that they spend money with us."

She won't say how much Vodafone has invested in the series, but it's easy to work out that if they can keep 20,000 people paying 20c a day for the story, the company's earning $20,000 a week from it. Add in Max's requests for advice, which happen about once a week, drawing more than 3000 texted responses, and that profit grows.

There's also the potential for product placements: "met Josh @ Burger King last nite" or somesuch. Slater says they've had one approach for such a deal but are treading warily. "It would have to have a purpose."

Then there are the partnership deals being developed. For example, Vodafone has decided that Max and Josh need a song, so is asking for texted suggestions. The top three ditties will then be played on Juice TV and viewers will text-vote for a winner. The revenue-earning possibilities go on.

But even profit isn't the core reason Vodafone has created this soap, says Buchanan-Oliver.

"It's really about continuing the notion that texting is a way of keeping in contact with this e-tribe. It's driving the use of the medium and the brand."

A product like TXTlife is meant to make your phone - or, to be precise, your Vodafone - part and parcel of your day, your life. "It's locking you into the brand and the technology."

The characters are all part this sales pitch. Max, the phat urban babe, is aspirational. She exists to tell you that if you're cool enough to belong to her e-tribe, you have to text.

The plot, too, is a marketing tool. Characters text each other, a text message from someone called Jo made Max think Josh was cheating on her and, hey, Max and Josh actually met via a misdirected text message. The subtext is simple: texting is what friends do, texting brings drama and revelation, texting can even find you love. Texting is an essential part of life.

This goes one step beyond the television soap where the goal is to gain ratings and attract advertisers. With TXTlife, the story is the ad.

The target market for this soap/ad is suggested by the mass text-out Vodafone did announcing the launch of TXTlife. A message was sent to all its subscribers aged 15-24, plus women aged 24-30. A paying audience of 20,000 suggests considerable success, but not everyone is certain they're really connecting with their target market.

Channel Z youth talk host Martyn "Bomber" Bradbury says the reaction from his listeners is that you would have to be one sad individual to pay someone to send a story to your phone each day. The week Vodafone announced TXTlife the station gave it its dumbest thing of the week award.

Bradbury says young people quite like Vodafone, and so are treating the company just as they treated Madonna when she released her version of American Pie: "You're usually cool so we'll cut you some slack. But this is dumb. Don't do it again."

Bradbury's not surprised by the numbers subscribing. After all, he notes, in this country you can get more than 20,000 people to ring tarot card lines or watch Ricki Lake. Besides, he suspects many Max fans are what he calls tourists - those from outside the target market - checking what it's like to be an 18-year-old babe.

"I would doubt it's mainly 18-year-olds reading it. It's going to be tourists; 11-year-olds or dirty old men in raincoats."

Vodafone hasn't done thorough research on its audience yet, but Slater agrees the audience might not be exclusively 15-24-year-olds.

"When you're not 18 anymore, and I'm certainly not, you look at people living their lives differently to yours [and] it's almost like voyeurism in a funny sort of way."

The range of ages with access to the series means the writers have to be careful about the content's salaciousness. According to chief censor Bill Hastings, the series fits the definition of a publication under the Films, Video and Publications Classifications Act, and could be penalised if it was deemed to be injurious to the public good. It might also come under the Telecommunications Act, which forbids profanities and indecent language.

It's new territory, he says, "but it's going to be more familiar territory as the convergence of technologies picks up pace".

Lines such as Max saying, "I sed less lip but more of that tongue plse - things improved afta that!" might be too suggestive for some, but Slater says how you read that line is "a matter of interpretation".

"It's hard to know what will be accepted. It's funny, one guy when he de-subscribed rang up and said it wasn't racy enough," says Slater. "But we take our cue from the public and I take that responsibility seriously. It's got to be real."

However, while Slater describes Max as "a typical 18-year-old", Bradbury says her obsession with relationships is patronising and decidedly unreal.

"Those little dramas in life, sure those are issues, but most 18-year-olds today can't afford this stuff to be the entirety of their life. Their lives are way more complicated."

Slater is promising more complications for Max, including exams and a death in the near future, and says that now people are paying, she, Anderson and McGee are particularly concerned to make it as good as any other soap opera.

"It's an art to pack your storyline and thoughts and everything in [to 160 characters]. Man, we've agonised over so many things."

Slater says TXTlife will continue as long as the interest remains. If texting becomes more common, the series might take off. But if other technologies, such as voice recognition, make texting obsolete it might be consigned to the bin of early 21st-century fads. Like any 18-year-old, Max's future is an open book. Or should that be an open phone-line?

Wot Max sez

Max6: BULA! Im n Fiji! Josh turnd up Fri night 2talk. Told him @Abdul-he gave me sum jib. I sed less lip but more of that tongue plse - things improved afta that!

Max7: Hi! Last time I had sex on the beach it was with U - & it was n a glass ;) Josh distant-hope he's still not mad re Abdul. Has he said NEthing 2 U? Max x

Max8a: Weather hot but Josh GLACIAL. I want 2 patch things up but all he wants 2 do is sit & txt people. Reminds me how I met Josh. Tell u bout that l8r.LOL

Max8b: Hi. I met Josh when he accidentally txtd me! Msg sed: "Ur dumped" so I called & sed "but I'm single". He sed "OK, Y don't we go out then?" Rest is history : )