How to become a transmedia designer for your brand

The following post was commissioned the International Association of Business Communications (IABC) for their May 2013 issue of Communications World, exploring different aspects of transmedia with other articles by Andrea Phillips, Allison Norrington, and many others.

The more the audience can participate in your storyworld, the greater their emotional connection.

By now you’ve heard the buzz about transmedia storytelling, right? Stories that reach fans across multiple delivery platforms, like those created by the big entertainment franchises (Star Wars, Batman, Glee, American Idol, Halo, Harry Potter and more).

Or the big consumer brands, whose inventive story-centric experiences have deepened customer engagement (like Coca-Cola, Audi, Old Spice, Mattel, Wrigley and Levi’s).

Or a new class of independent experience designers who are pioneering this art form with more imagination than money. They are tapping into the power of new digital platforms, devices and social media.

All of which is leading many marketers to believe that transmedia storytelling is the future of brand building and consumer engagement. By using these new techniques, marketers expand their brand campaigns across various media, reach new audiences, deepen engagement, and delight in the story and its messages.

Henry Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California who first popularized transmedia, offers provides the definitive definition: “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.”

More than just a technique to propagate a brand or message (integrated marketing), transmedia storytelling uses narrative devices like character, plot, themes, tone and emotional engagement to create a complete experience.

In other words, a story.

“The reason that we keep saying that traditional marketing approaches no longer work is that the social web has created a new consumer psychology,” writes says media psychologist Pamela Rutledge. “Consumers expect you to earn their attention, not interrupt them for it.

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Theatrics = Collaborative Video Storytelling

I'm thrilled to be involved with the launch of the beta version of a new collaborative video storytelling platform from Theatrics.com

The product features tools that allow a storyteller or a brand to involve the audience in the creative process while providing a host of communications and management features unavailable on other platforms. 

Theatrics is throwing open the doors to storytellers and brands who'd like to experiment with this truly unique collaborative storytelling cloud-based software available.

The goal of the beta is to develop ground-breaking online interactive video productions that will engage their users -- customers, employees, fans, and audience members – in content creation. Use of the platform will be free during the beta trial. 

I'm working with Theatrics and prospective users of the platform to help build exciting new experiences. If you've got an idea, please email me or signup on the site to get a feel for the tools. Just as Wordpress is a tool set for bloggers, Theatrics is a toolset for video-based storytellers. Here are some of the ideas from companies we're working with:

• A successful web video series wants to invite fans to create their own characters that perform and live in a new fictionalized storyworld 
• A documentary filmmaker wants to conduct a contest for audience members to tell their own stories in video and still images
• A franchise chain wants to create a new application that its affiliates can sell to customers featuring video tributes
• A national brand with a salesforce in the tens of thousands wants to build a hub where they can share stories and inspiration
• A sci-fi series wants to provide CG backgrounds for fans to use in creating their own in-story characters
• A meetup group wants to challenge its members to co-create a new story and a new storyworld.

As Theatrics CEO Biff Van Cleve puts it: "Generation C is as comfortable with creating content as consuming it, so the Theatrics video storytelling platform taps into millions of people who are shooting and sharing video on a daily basis, enabling creators to engage their audiences to tell stories in exciting new ways."

Theatrics.com provides creators the opportunity to establish a story world, characters, and plot and the audience to participate by uploading video and blog posts as personas they create themselves. The process is seamless and easy to use. Additionally, the platform offers a second screen experience for studios and networks to give fans the opportunity to engage directly with their favorite shows and films – to actually create and play a character in an on-going, online story world. 

About Theatrics 

With offices in Houston and Los Angeles, Theatrics.com is an interactive entertainment company offering a collaborative video storytelling platform that easily enables creators to incorporate and manage user generated content. The Theatrics.com toolset provides creators the ability to push the boundaries of storytelling by controlling the story, characters, and vision, while the audience adds their own creativity by performing in the show and interacting with the story and other users. Theatrics partnered with USA Network for the launch of PSYCH The S#cial Sector and produced its first series, Beckinfield, as proof of concept. For more information, please visit: www.theatrics.com. 

Social TV panel at Digital Hollywood

I'll be speaking again at the Digital Hollywood conference, which runs from April 29th to May 2nd, at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Marina del Rey, California

The panel is on Wednesday, May 1st, 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM in Salon III, and entitled:

The Social TV Ecosystem: Smart TVs, Guides, OTT Content, Tablets-Smartphones and Apps

There is no separating it - TV viewing and social media have joined hands. TV shows are posting tweets and encouraging an immediate social relationship among viewers. TV celebrities are reaching out to their fan base and viewers are creating a host of social media-TV relationships. As most major websites, from Facebook and Twitter to the TV sites themselves enable their communities to reach other, all roads lead to the further interaction between the TV viewer and social media technologies.

Moderated by Mark Ghuneim, CEO, Trendrr, the panel includes:

Jeremy Toeman, CEO, Dijit Media
Rebecca Baldwin, VP/GM, Zap2it
Nash Parker, Director, Emerging Technology Commercialization, Alcatel-Lucent
Nick DeMartino, President, Nick DeMartino Consulting
Benjamin Chen, Chairman, Viggle Inc.
Marc Scarpa, Producer / Director x factor digital, Grammy live, incubus hq
Diane Bernard, CEO, FLM.TV

Transmedia Alliance @ SXSW

SXSW 2013 featured at least a dozen transmedia sessions – more, depending upon the degree of elasticity you confer upon that very elastic term.

Among them, the first officially sanctioned meet-up of transmedia meet-ups from around the world, organized by Paris-based Karine Halpern, including folks from groups in New York, Paris, London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, as well as producers, tools-makers, broadcasters, academics, and technologists interested in the transmedia movement -- altogether about 50 attendees.

The session’s call to action announced the intention to form a Transmedia Alliance in order to formalize ties between transmedia groups under the umbrella of an international non-profit. Its goals would include: sustaining the global transmedia community, promoting best practices, helping newcomers enter the field, and sharing knowledge.

The idea of an alliance was stimulated by the upsurge of activity by local transmedia meetups since the first StoryWorld Conference in San Francisco in October 2011, when a similar meetup of meetups was held. Informal ties between groups have continued, including groups on Facebook and Linked In. For many activists like Halpern, something more structured is required. Her model is Transmedia Europe, which launched last January.

The session at SXSW lasted only an hour, barely enough time to get through introductions, so the hard work of organizational structure, governance, and operational process remains to be achieved. It’s hard to do that kind of work at a crazy conference like SXSW, that’s for sure. And harder still across thousands of miles.

On the other hand, the session relocated to the bar, which I skipped in favor of something I needed to do for a client. So I cannot report on what next steps may be contemplated, or whether incorporation, bilaws, membership eligibility or structure have yet been formalized for the Transmedia Alliance.

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Future of TV -- yes, there is one

I was asked to give a talk at the weekly meeting of the Long Beach Rotary Club. I was invited by Philip Smith, who is pals with my pal Suzanne Stefanac. I have never been to a meeting of any Rotary Club, much less one in the grand ballroom of the Queen Mary, which is, of course docked on the water across from downtown Long Beach. 

I peered into my crystal ball again to delivery a lightning round on the topic of the future of TV, framing it in terms of ten questions to ask if you want a good answer to that preposterous question. I've done a version of these slides before, but there is new material if you would like to take a look. I left the notes off the slideshare upload, only because I ad-libbed like wild. It was fun. Based upon the Rotary Club in Long Beach, I think the premise of "Bowling Alone" may be a bit off. These people do bowl, and they do a lot of other stuff to help their community.

And a good number of them were cord-cutters, I learned. Rotary International Cord Cutters.

Future of tv long beach from Nick Demartino