When developing cross-media content, common practice – driven by funding mechanisms – has indie producers most often pursuing a TV-first strategy by launching on a broadcast platform most viewers and advertisers prefer.

But as many have found, reaching a digi-savvy audience by starting with TV isn’t necessarily the most effective route, despite its mass audiences.

“I can speak from experience. There are no cost savings [to be found in pursuing a TV-first media strategy],” Ken Faier (pictured), president of Nerd Corps Entertainment, a cross-platform animation producer, told a cross-media synergy panel at the X-Summit conference on Tuesday.

That doesn’t mean, however, that TV has no place in a multi-platform plan – its how the dollars you have are allocated, said Paul Bennun, chief creative officer at Somethin’ Else, a UK-based content design and creation outfit.

Success, he said, comes when you use broadcast dollars, rather than the platform itself, to initiate digital story-telling.

Noting that his company assembles projects in a cross-media environment and then chooses how best to launch it, he says effective digital tools used include linear video, flash games, interactive content and even comic books.

“And all of this works together in a website that has some logic in the background, and recognizes what you’re doing and suggests new content to consume,” Bennun explained.

An example is SuperMe, an interactive project by Somethin’ Else for Channel 4 Education that uses a video game engine to teach young people the value of emotional happiness and resilience.

The project is based on positive psychology, something young people won’t address, Bennun said.

“You can’t teach teens that because they don’t want to know. Anything to do with mental health and psychology is uncool,” he said.

So Channel 4 Education had the content producer talk to teens for three months about happiness, before it settled on making an online game about four housemates and their up and down lives, in partnership with Electronic Arts.

Game designer Robin Burkinshaw was recruited to make a Sim City-like soap opera by creating a city, populating it with characters and then letting their lives emerge through dramatic gameplay and improvisation to create a “constructed reality.”

“It feels like a Ken Loach movie that’s been interpreted by robots,” Bennun said of the final product. “The winning strategies for the game are the winning strategies for life.”

Former Decode Entertainment exec Beth Stevenson, who now runs Brain Power Studio, a new media producer, said content development failure in the preschool space springs in part from not connecting with the audience you’re pursuing.

Stevenson recalled a time when content development was all TV-first, about needing 26 half-hour episodes to launch characters and properties.

“That’s how you developed the project. You then hoped to make 200 half-hours of TV,” she told the X-Summit panel.

That was then. Now digital story-telling on platforms outside of TV can be used early on to test whether characters have legs on multiple platforms.

“Use some of the other cross-media tools and develop the characters first, even in a small form, to see whether audiences may interact with them,” Stevenson said.

The economics of cross-platform world building first, before pursuing a broadcaster for a project, are challenging, she conceded.

“Not everyone can spend the money and hope the 26 half-hours come in later,” Stevenson said. “But the nice thing is, when we’re developing a project, is to be able to say, what if we started over here?”

Leah Hoyer, a veteran Disney exec who now works as a creative producer at Levity Entertainment Group, a Los Angeles-based TV producer, said the key is choosing the right property for the right platform.

“If you want a child to take to a hero character, and to be on their team, make sure they’re the right character,” she told the panel.

Hoyer added the TV-first strategy is standard practice at major media producers in Los Angeles, with broadcasters driving the cross-media strategy.

And not always with good results.

“There’s a recognition that it (content) needs to be on the other platforms, but that doesn’t mean it’s done the best way to get them there,” she said.

The X-Summit conference continues Wednesday in Toronto.