During last week’s presentation on Advertising & Transmedia Storytelling, I touched upon a wide range of topics, examples and people, and didn’t have enough time to do most of them justice.  So, as promised, this post provides some further detail, as well as links to additional resources and recommended reading for anyone who wants to know more about the topics that I mentioned. (Apologies in advance: this is longer than most Think posts, since there’s a lot to cover.)

BACKGROUND ON MY APPROACH & PERSPECTIVE

While I generally dislike talking about myself in presentations, in this particular case, it seemed important to establish how I became interested in transmedia storytelling first as an academic, and then as a practitioner/marketer, since most of my thinking occurs from the tensions between these two perspectives.  To that end, the first part of the presentation outlined some of my own experience with transmedia, to help give some context for how I now approach the topic.

The Matrix & Transmedia Storytelling: As I explained in the presentation, my own interest in the opportunities and challenges of transmedia storytelling began in 2003, during what was sometimes described as “The Year of the Matrix.”  Over the second half of the year, the Wachowski Brothers supplemented the first chapter of their film trilogy with two more films (complete with midpoint cliffhanger); Enter the Matrix, a video game that revealed critical events and interactions offscreen before, and during, the events of the second and third films; The Animatrix, a series of animated shorts from acclaimed anime directors that covered critical background events and introduced minor characters featured in the later films; and a compilation of Matrix comics from renowned comic artists and writers.

This crossplatform blitz was generally interpreted in one of two ways: either as a major advance in digital-era storytelling (“The audience can choose how deep to go!”) or, more often, as a major advance in exploitative licensing and marketing (“You mean I have to buy comics, video games, animation AND see two movies, or I won’t know what the hell is going on?”)

To me, it seemed like the answer was somewhere between the two – a topic that I addressed in an article for Salon, and which was addressed in far greater detail in “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” the third chapter of the ground-breaking Convergence Culture.

MIT & Transmedia Storytelling: This interest would also form the basis for a lot of the work that I did as a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where I studied with Henry Jenkins, and worked as a researcher in the Convergence Culture Consortium (or, as most people called it, C3).  Within C3, I spent more than a year researching and analyzing Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), a project that culminated in an extensive white paper entitled This Is Not (Just) An Advertisement, which was intended to help marketers and advertisers understand the significance and opportunities of ARGs, and was supplemented in a follow-up paper, Deconstructing The Lost Experience, which provided an in-depth analysis of a summer-long ARG designed to retain audience interest in ABC’s hit cult-drama Lost.

Lost & Transmedia Storytelling: This second paper was somewhat self-serving, since I was also using Lost as the main case study for my graduate thesis, Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium.  Looking at the wealth of transmedia extensions developed to promote, expand and monetize Lost, I argued that the franchise developed around the television series was demonstrating the need for more sophisticated models of thinking about, defining and “measuring” audience engagement with media.

Big Spaceship & Transmedia Storytelling: My research on the transmedia extensions around Lost, in turn, brought me to Brooklyn, where several of my (now) colleagues took the time to talk with me about Big Spaceship’s work on an experiential website for the show’s fan community, as well as the first generation of “official websites” for Lost‘s fictional Oceanic Airlines and Hanso Foundation.  This conversation led to an ongoing relationship, and when I finished at MIT, I joined the crew here at Big Spaceship to help develop experiential campaigns and transmedia stories full-time.

Our most recent “transmedia stories” include What Happened in Piedmont?, an alternate-reality experience introducing the narrative events of A&E’s recent remake of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, and The Institute for Human Continuity, an extensive website for an organization dedicated to preserving human life if the world ends in 2012.

CASE STUDIES IN ADVERTISING & TRANSMEDIA

The presentation then reviewed three specific examples of “successful” transmedia stories developed as advertising or marketing campaigns.  While these are not the most current examples available, they were selected to demonstrate a range of different approaches to building transmedia narratives that specifically market brands and products. While there are plenty of examples showing how transmedia stories can be used to promote films and television programs, it is far more challenging to develop stories that help promote brands and products, which — unlike movies, television shows and video games — generally do not have their own fictional narratives to use as foundations.

BMW – BMW Films (2001): For anyone entirely unfamiliar with the BMW Films project, start with the basic overview in Wikipedia, and see how the film series was supplemented with a small ARG and a limited run of graphic novels expanding the adventures of Clive Owen’s protagonist.  Several of the short films are still accessible on YouTube, including The Star (with Guy Ritchie directing then-wife Madonna) and Ambush. BusinessWeek has good coverage of the campaign’s impact, and Ad Age reported that comic sales generated enough revenue to completely offset the cost of producing them.

Audi –  Art of the H3ist (2005): Again, Wikipedia has a good basic overview of the campaign, but you’ll get a much better sense of how Audi’s ARG unfolded from this video at Campfire’s website.  Tangible results from ARGs can be difficult to calculate, but there are some good details and quotes available here.

Coke – The Happiness Factory (2007): Inspired by the success of their brilliant (and award-winning) television spot, depicting the fantastic world and creatures that exist inside each Coca-Cola vending machine, Coke has been taking steps to expand “The Happiness Factory” into a full-fledged transmedia franchise, complete with an interactive website and “Open Happiness,” a new commercial track recorded as a collaboration between several popular music artists.  A more complete rundown of the plans to expand Happiness Factory is available here.  To actually expand the Happiness Factory from an animated spot into a full-fledged transmedia world, Coke leaned on the world-building expertise of Starlight Runner Entertainment; their CEO, Jeff Gomez, offered some valuable insights about the campaign, and the future of transmedia storytelling, in recent interviews with Forbes and BusinessWeek.

CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT ADVERTISING & TRANSMEDIA

ADDITIONAL LINKS & READING

While the links above cover most of the material included in my presentation, there are a number of other resources and articles that should be of interest to anyone grappling to understand transmedia storytelling, and how the concept of transmedia storytelling is reshaping entertainment, marketing, advertising and branding.

The Extratextuals is a fantastic blog from media scholar Jon Gray, and a reliable source for insight and examples of current transmedia campaigns being developed around television and film projects.  (Full disclosure: I am also an occasional contributor.)

The Alchemists is another great blog dedicated to transmedia, where contributors include Faris Yakob (mentioned above), Mark Warshaw (the creator behind transmedia campaigns for Smallville, Heroes, and several forthcoming projects). Be advised: some entries are in Portuguese.

Christy Dena, a PhD candidate based in Australia, does an astonishing job of gathering links, data and insights around all things cross-media and transmedia.

Lotte Witty, a graduate student in Amsterdam, and one of the organizers of the event where I gave my presentation, maintains a comprehensive Twitter feed with links to transmedia-related articles and resources.

Anyone interested in deeper insight into transmedia storytelling should also take a look at two other Master’s theses from Convergence Culture Consortium researchers: Geoffrey Long, who examined both the aesthetics and business of transmedia entertainment, and Sam Ford, who explored the transmedia work being done around the long-running soap opera As The World Turns.

And, last but not least, I encourage anyone interested in transmedia to keep tabs on an annual event that the Convergence Culture Consortium hosts at MIT called Futures of Entertainment, where there is always at least one all-star panel of transmedia experts and practitioners.  (Big Spaceship CEO Michael Lebowitz participated in the “Transmedia Properties” panel in 2006, available via podcast here, and I moderated the “Franchising, Extensions and Worldbuilding” panel in 2008, available as a streaming video here.)

Of course, that’s just my collection.  Know of a great resource on transmedia and advertising that I didn’t include here? Please let everyone know in the comments.