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Puppet talks about the issues, gets people watching, gets people talking. 50,000+ for each of the puppet rants.

The Rant Puppets is another show being created by Hoggworks Studios. Chiefly featuring the Brian character from dotBoom, the Rant Puppets features, as the name implies, a rant about an issue of importance to Brian, and it is being met with wide acclaim.

The Rant Puppets is inherently topical, with a focus generally skewing toward tech-related news, and Apple-specific complaints. Because it’s topical, when a new episode comes out, it spreads quickly, with each episode averaging at about 60,000 views. This is achieved almost entirely through word-of-mouth, and with no advertising to speak of.

The success of The Rant Puppets can be attributed to several factors, such as the quality of the writing, size of the videos – at only a few minutes each, they’re short enough to be sendable, but long enough to contain a good amount of content, and a proper, coherent argument – but a large one is the likability of the host. Brian is loud and frustrated, but he’s never negative. The things he talks about are things he cares about. And when he starts yelling, and gets so frustrated that his extremely cogent, and well-thought-out arguments dissolve into a guttural scream, that’s just because of how much he cares. But he never tears apart a thing without a reason, and he never does it without love. His frequent attacks on Apple, for example, all centre around the limitations of the products he wants, and the availability of those products. He spends five minutes yelling at Apple, and is genuinely upset, but it’s only because he’s being prevented from buying a product that he really wants, and that sense of frustration is something that many people can empathize with.

The success and popularity of the Rant Puppets also speaks to the strength of puppets as avatar. Brian the puppet is a stand-in for Brian the person, and Brian the puppet can say more, in a more extreme manner, than the person ever could. If Brian the person ever stood up and started screaming incoherently at anything, he’d be flatly ignored, but when the puppet does it, it’s entertaining. It’s hilarious. Also, because it’s a puppet, it’s very distinctive. In a recent criticism of Ben Stein’s behavior surrounding his documentary “Expelled Exposed,” Brian the person decided to have Brian the puppet level his scathing criticisms rather than himself, because another person making a blog entry, be it video or text, would go largely ignored. A puppet, by contrast, stands out sharply. And once people stop to see the puppet, they view it more openly, and less critically. Often a person will decide to agree or disagree with a person before they’ve even heard their argument; this happens all the time, not just with opinion pieces, but with advertising in general. If a commercial annoys you by its existence in your favorite show, you’re going to ignore it out of spite. But if you put a puppet in that commercial, or in that opinion piece, the equation changes sharply. And so it is with the Rant Puppets; in the case of the episode about the “Expelled Exposed” documentary, tens of thousands of people watched it, and judging by the comments left, even those who disagreed with the content of the criticism actually listened to it, and in many cases, seemed to have thought about it.

The Rant Puppets is a very cost-efficient show to create, and has gained an impassioned audience with no advertising, and essentially zero budget. It is, also, a perfect example of how to utilize the puppet medium to gain attention, to set yourself or your creative apart.

What we Did

Performances are by Brian Hogg, using puppets created by Brian Hogg.

Credits

All things (so far) by Brian Hogg.

You can watch the rest of The Rant Puppets at: http://www.rantpuppets.com/