Created in 1951, the Sanremo festival, dedicated to Italian song, returns each year to the stage of the Ariston theatre. For several years in loss of speed and audience, now a game as funny as it is popular, invented in a bar by a group of friends, begins to attract a new public, whose practices are extended online.
Each year, as the month of February approaches, a feverish agitation seizes the Italian media. Revelations and scoops foreshadow the glitter and cheers that will soon shake the Ariston theater, where the country’s main musical event is played for five days. Retransmitted on the public channel Rai, the festival which is held in the small seaside town of San Remo, in Liguria. Its mild climate and the bluish charm of the Mediterranean are one of the reasons that explain its early success: journalists love to cover it.
What was true yesterday is still true today, but behind the media enthusiasm, hides a slow loss of enthusiasm on the part of the public. Often described as old-fashioned, snubbed by young people, intended for an aging audience shrinking from year to year, the show has experienced several crossings of the desert. One of the worst, that of the 2000s, when he chained old-fashioned artists and consensual victories.
Fantasanremo, the game with absurd rules
While the artistic direction tries to go up the slope and reverse the trend, in 2022, a game out of nowhere explodes the popularity of the festival on social networks: the fantasanremo. Its rules are both very simple and super complicated.
To play, all you have to do is create a team, made up of six artists programmed at the festival, one of whom is designated “captain”. To compose his team, each player has 100 Baudi, fictitious currency allowing to buy the artists whose value varies according to the popularity. Once the festival begins, each team scores or loses points based on the performers’ performance on stage. The captain’s points count double. This is where the game gets crazy: the actions to garner bonuses or penalties are far from always serious. +10 if one of your artists goes on stage first. +5 if he is barefoot. The artist kisses the camera? +15 points. Fainted on stage? +50. On the contrary, if the artist falls down the stairs, if he loses his wig or tears his clothes, beware of penalties. And the game doesn’t stop once the lights go out.
This year, a bonus of 20 points will for example be awarded to all the artists who will be seen jogging on the seaside of San Remo in the company of the singer Gianni Morandi (seventy-seven years old). There is nothing to be gained except not-quite-eternal glory, and yet the success is dazzling.
A fantasy game straight out of a neighborhood bar
But where does this slightly absurd game come from? It all started in an anonymous bar somewhere in the Marches, far from San Remo. Caffè Papalina, in Porto Sant’Elpidio, 25,000 inhabitants on the Adriatic Sea, is the meeting place for a group of friends who meet to follow the festival. Like many Italians, they form a gruppo d’alscolto, a listening group, to watch the program together. One of those traditions that we follow more out of habit than out of real passion. They are about forty, most work in the entertainment world.
To reinvigorate these February evenings spent in front of the Rai, they imagine the fantasanremo, with the idea of making everything more fun. Giacomo Piccinini, one of these players from the Papalina bar, whom we contacted by telephone, is pithy: ” sometimes Sanremo is really boring “. We can understand it, when we know that the program lasts five days and that each evening drags on until after one o’clock in the morning. Inspired by fantacalcio, a very popular game in Italy among football fans, they imagine their fantasy game, adding a good dose of humor and their passion for trash culture. This is how they invent the most improbable bonuses and penalties, giving the group of friends a good reason to stay awake until the end, to be sure to count the points correctly.
Play confined
In 2021, confinement prevents the group from meeting again. Giacomo Piccinini says: “ We were almost all unemployed, we had time to kill. So we created an online version of the game, pooling the skills of each other “. Quickly, their initiative spread by word of mouth and went well beyond the framework of the group of friends, with just under 50,000 teams registered online. ” The site was designed for a hundred people, it kept crashing. We increased the servers as we went along, but each time we were overwhelmed “.
For the 2022 edition, they therefore decide to think big. ” We activated our friendly and family networks to create the site, with the help of a cousin in the United States, and to manage the servers, thanks to the brother of a guy in the group, who works in IT in Dubai “. The result is functional, the user experience is clean, everything is ready for the 2022 edition.
This time, the game is truly going viral, thanks to a simple but well-thought-out strategy. It was enough for a singer to pronounce the word fantasanremo on stage to credit the players having him in their team with a generous bonus. Fans then challenge their favorite artists on social networks, the snowball effect is set up. Artists, like the rapper Fedez, more than 10 million subscribers, talk about it in stories on Instagram, the fantasanremo is climbing the trends on Twitter, in short, it is on everyone’s lips, even as the organizers and journalists covering the event still do not know what it is about.
The inventors also have a solid armada of social networks, from Instagram to TikTok via Twitter, where they offer video, live and tweets content related to the game. At the end of the festival, for its second online edition , the fantasanremo can boast of having registered more than 500,000 teams. ” Even Amadeus dubbed us at a press conference “recalls Giacomo Piccinini, evoking the benevolent words spoken by the presenter of the show about the game.
A mirror held up to Italian society
This is not the first time in its seventy years of existence that an external element has disrupted the course of the festival. Eddy Anselmi, freelance journalist and author of an anniversary book on Sanremo, released on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary, is in Bologna when we talk by phone. ” This is not the first time that the festival has been hacked from the outside. Twenty years ago, the trio of comedians Gialappa’s band had the artists repeat the English word situation, to the great perplexity of the presenter Pippo Baudo. With the fantasanremo, the game is taken to its climax, and becomes total “.
Because for the author, who also writes for television, the Sanremo festival is above all a reflection of Italian society, so it was logical that social networks, with their new practices, take over this old media object of one way or another. Viewers, who have also become Internet users, need new ways to interact with the programme. This is the case of Carolina Boldoni, Carol.oide on Instagram, a network where she shares her life as a doctoral student in anthropology with her twelve thousand subscribers.
Last year, she created a league — a space where players can challenge each other — to interact with her community. ” When I talked about my league on my Instagram account, it was a pretext to talk about the folkloric dimension of the Sanremo festival, which interests me as an anthropologist. I didn’t expect more than 80 people to sign up for it “. Strangers, with whom she also shares a Telegram channel, where to comment on the game via messages.
For her, ” Sanremo is both a reactionary program, but also a cultural product capable of reinventing itself, following the trends of its time. He knows how to be both nerdy and cool. That’s why it always feels like he’s at the end of his life “. This year, it is preparing for the 2023 edition with a strategy. ” I study the artists on the program and the list of bonuses/maluses in the smallest details before composing my team “. A way also to take a different interest in the artists, who take advantage of it to appear closer to their audience.
Like her, many players federate their community at various levels through social networks. Some have thus started watching the festival to participate in the fantasanremo, intrigued by a veritable tide of memes, incomprehensible to the uninitiated. By multiplying cryptic references and inside jokes inaccessible to non-players, the fantasanremo creates the irresistible desire to enter the community, at the risk of missing the topic of the moment.
From a simple game to an exemplary marketing operation
It’s not just the players who answer the call of fantasanremo. This year, for the 2023 edition, sponsors are flocking, and not the least. From the jewelery brand Pandora to the Lavazza coffee shop, brands have understood the potential of the game, which dedicates special bonuses to them. An artist dressed entirely in white will earn his team 10 points thanks to the Philadelphia bonus, an immaculately white cheese.
” During the festival, we work up to sixteen hours a day to be aware of the actions of the artists and to correctly credit the penalties and bonuses. Not to mention that for some of us, fantasanremo has become a full-time job. We needed funding admits Giacomo Piccinini. Under the name “Quelli di fantasanremo” (those of fantasanremo) they opened a communication, gamification and event organization agency. Among their clients, the Sky TV channel, which entrusts them with the gamification of the X-factor program in 2022.
The impeccable account of this dazzling success, however, raises some doubts. Is it really a brilliant idea from an anonymous bar, or a script written in a marketing office of Rai, the channel that broadcasts the program? If some think so, Giacomo Piccinini humorously denies it. I always dreamed of being involved in a conspiracy theory, now it’s done! “.
Eddy Anselmi doesn’t believe it anymore. ” The first time I heard about the game, nobody was interested, it was a buddies thing in a bar, that’s all “. For him, the success of the game should teach a lesson to the festival, which is currently limited by its Italianness, which makes it a cultural product that is too self-referential. ” With Tiktok or other networks, songs cross borders without our being able to predict it. Even without a promo, a title can go halfway around the world and go viral in the blink of an eye. The festival should take this opportunity to expand its audience, go global “. Is it the destiny of fantasanremo to take the festival beyond Italian borders? Nothing is less sure.
Because as the 2023 edition approaches, many fear that his popularity is playing against him. Now that everyone, artists, journalists and the public know where to check the list of bonuses and maluses, the show could become cartoonishly predictable, each pathetically seeking to gain points – and therefore popularity – in the hearts of fans by following at the letter bonuses worth points.
Subscribe to Numerama on Google News to not miss any news!