Talent imitates, genius steals

The Paper Part

This is the paper part of the transmedia presentation - it was published in Campaign the day of the conference.

Some people found the presentation via the piece, and vice versa. The live part was tailored for the INFLUENCE theme. I'll see if that feels like a good thing to post later.

I talk about the nature of the experiment and then finish off by pointing out that major advertisers are actively following the model Jenkins established and I stole:

When I first started talking about this, people would question whether it would work for all brands. It requires a lot from people – it attempts to distribute identity and knowledge, to drive the formation of brand communities who piece the brand back together, together. Fine if you’re Nike  - but how would this work for fast moving consumer goods?

Last month, at Media 360, Jonathon Mildenhall [Vice President Global Advertising and Creative Excellence] outlined the thinking behind Coke’s Happiness Factory as transmedia creativity.

A non-linear brand world, accessed via multiple accretive touchpoints: adverts, building towards a feature length film, an online virtual world, and from here comics, games, mobile applications and so on.

You can download the whole thing here

[Again you might need to change the file extension to .pdf]

And learn more about the Coca Cola transmedia vision here - it includes a virtual world of the Happiness Factory created by Starlight Runner.

Transmedia Presentation

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This is kind of an experiment in distributed presentations.

This deck forms one part of a transmedia presentation [which is, itself, in part, about transmedia planning] - the one I'm giving about now at the WARC Influence conference in London.

One part is the presentation I'm giving live now - it builds on the same foundations as this, but has a different ending, talking more explicitly about INFLUENCE. [I'll post about that later.]

Another part is an article that is in this week's issue of Campaign - it also comes out on Thursday, at about the same time this post will be published, while I'm presenting - which explains the idea and expands on it a bit, with reference to a more recent example.

And this deck is the backbone - it's the alternate ending to the live version.

[It mostly contains ideas that I wrote about in my thesis - so you can read the long hand version here.]

All the elements are different access points into the ideas, and they are all connected, they have different things in them, they let you come to the larger discussion in whatever you want.

I'm not sure if this will work, but I'm hoping it will, at least, be interesting.

I Believe the Children are our Future

A while back I was doing this thing called the IPA Excellence Diploma, the culmination of which was a thesis on the FUTURE OF BRANDS.

I ended up writing about the newly participative idea consumer and transmedia planning and that, borrowing heavily from the thinking of Henry Jenkins and other great minds, on the back of which I picked up the President's Prize, which was pretty cool.

They've just published it in Campaign in the UK and I was intending to put it here first in its original form since so much of the thinking was crafted and honed here. But in the end I didn't get around to it.

There is definitely an irony in the fact that the paper preaches treating active online audiences differently, and usually first, that I didn't 'launch' it online.

Ah well.

Anyway - you can download it here - I'd be very interested to know what you think.

You can see all the other published papers here - enjoy. 

Ooo Squidoo

A chap called Jean has set up a Squidoo Lens on Transmedia Planning and that, collating the pertinent posts from the plannersphere and sundry other links.

PS3 Launch: A Transmedia Campaign

The PS3 launch campaign has broken and it has the hallmarks of a transmedia narrative in the offing.

Obscure, high production LaChappelle-esque film on television and cinema leads the curious to thisisliving.tv.

This place holder site gives nothing away but asks you sign up for updates, insisting on another layer of involvement and permission, the first of which I received today and you can see here.

The email introduces you to Bubba, who appears to be our guide. You can watch him dance here and this guy is another character. Apart from that nothing else is very clear - the narrative looks to be gearing up to begin in earnest and has the look and feel of Wild Palms, which is remarkably appropriate.

PS3 is a perfect client to put transmedia planning ideas into action for. Its audience is exactly the type of active media consumer that wants to get involved with with complex ideas and meshed media narratives: a generation brought up on gaming that wants worlds to explore,  challenges to be rewarded by and an intrinsically participatory relationship with ideas.

As the Passive Massive slowly cease to be the mass and the youth of today become the mainstream of tomorrow, these sort of ideas will become dominant vehicles for brand communication.

Are you Lost?

My mate Rachel found Lost and sent it my way. Lost.eu wants to sign up 7 million players to become the "largest online game ever" and it all started with a URL left on a napkin in a cafe in Oxford.

It works like a kind of social pyramid scheme - you find an invite and then join the game. Once you join you then invite people yourself - the more people that join via your invitation - a unique URL - the more points you get.

It's an interesting experiment - challenging individuals to find ways to actively spread the idea, which has led to urls being scrawled in the sand on beaches in Puerto Rico, written on balloons released over Chicago and slightly disturbing pictures like the one above.

It taps into the transmedia strand we're calling propagation planning - creating ideas that contain their own mechanism for peer to peer transmission. Its creator says  "it is not about content but about spreading an idea" which, when married to Heath's new thinking on the impact of message content being negligible, begins to suggest how brand communication might successfully utilise the power of peer transmission.

As Jenkins has pointed out, you don't need to control the conversation to reap the benefits of the exposure.

I've signed up so if you want to have a look feel free to use this invite: www.lost.eu/31e12

If I get loads of points and win the grand prize of $5000 I'll buy the drinks at BeerSphere until the money runs out.

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia Planning

This is pretty exciting.

Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture from whence I stole the idea for transmedia planning, has been posting about it!

Unsurprisingly, he has some very interesting things to say about the idea and how it has developed, and how the transmedia / brand discourse has grown from the gaps in his text - itself an iteration of transmedia branding:

Will transmedia branding make a lasting contribution to contemporary marketing theory? It's too early to say. As an author, I am delighted to see some of my ideas are generating such discussion. As someone interested in marketing my own intellectual property, these discussions are themselves a kind of transmedia branding: after all, the more people talk about my book, the more people are likely to buy it. I don't have to control the conversation tobenefit from their interest in my product. The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do. In that regard, the book may have had greater impact on the discussions of branding because I didn't fill in all of the links between branding and transmedia entertainment, leaving the blogosphere something to puzzle through together.

I think he's hit on something really interesting about how ideas propogate that I've been mulling over but not yet articulated. Not controlling the conversation, letting ideas develop outside of your brand guidelines as it were, seems to be essential if we want them to grow.

Ideas that can be modified spread better - every conversation about transmedia planning develops the idea further but the totality of all conversations becomes what transmedia planning is.

It's like releasing brand communication under a creative commons license - allowing the ideas to be modified and built upon as long as they are attributed, which ensures the brand still receives the benefit but acknowledges the part that consumers play in constructing it.

As Henry puts it:

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do.

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part One)

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part Two)

Transmedia Planning

I've been reading Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. It's brilliant - lots of great ideas to steal and required reading for anyone with an interest with how the relationship between consumers and media is changing.

One of the forms of convergence he covers is something we've discussed before - the flow of content across multiple media platforms. He dedicates a chapter to The Matrix as a transmedia narrative - a story that unfolds across different platforms.

Rather than there being a film narrative that has spin offs, key elements of The Matrix story are in the video game, the animations, the comic books. He argues that few consumers will be able to dedicate the time required to get the whole picture, which is why transmedia storytelling drives the formation of knowledge communities - communities that share information – and triggers word of mouth.

Since there are so many elements to the story, every member of the community is likely to have something to share, some social currency to trade, so communities form and information is passed around the network.

This got me thinking about how brands might operate in this convergence culture.

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been media neutral planning. In essence, this is the belief that we should develop a single organising thought that iterates itself across any touchpoint - this was a reaction against previous models of integration that were often simply the dilution of a televisual creative idea across other channels that it wasn't necessarily suited to.

Media Neutral Planning then looks a little like this:

 

Let's not get hung up on disciplines I may have missed out - the important point is that there is one idea being expressed in different ways. This is believed to be more effective as there are multiple encodings of the same idea, which reinforces the impact on the consumer.

Now then, let's think about transmedia planning. In this model, there would be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels could be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create an larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves.

The beauty of this is that it is designed to generate brand communities, in the same way that The Matrix generates knowledge communities, as consumers come together to share elements of the narrative. It has a word of mouth driver built in.

So transmedia planning looks something like this:

I think alternate reality games, like Audi's Art of Heist, are early examples of this form of communication. And while I accept that some brands lack the depth that this model requires, or simply don't require engagement on this level, I think that in a convergence culture, this is how converged brands will engage with a new kind of active media consumer.