For this year's SXSW, I worked with the ad agency JWT to devise a survey that would get at what seems an increasingly key question: How do we feel about items in the physical world—books, newspapers, magazines, records, mail—that are rapidly being made obsolete by their digital counterparts? A few years ago, the response in most of the wired world would probably have been, "good riddance." But in talking with people I knew in their 20s and 30s, it was becoming apparent that this wasn't their reaction at all. More and more they seemed to echo Scott Lindenbaum, the 30-year-old cofounder of SPUN, who said to me one day last year as we were talking about music, “Certain objects have memories. In 20 years, I want a token that I enjoyed this album in 2012. I’d hate to have to tell my son, ‘Here’s my hard drive.’”
Is digital supremacy really going into abeyance? Without further evidence, it was hard to say if this attitude extended beyond the reach of the L train. But JWT Intelligence, the agency's research and trendspotting unit, had just listed "Objectifying Objects"—the idea that as objects dematerialize, "people are fetishizing the physical and the tactile"—among its key trends for the year. And the surprise popularity of out-of-bounds theatrical experiences like Punchdrunk's Sleep No More certainly suggests that immersive entertainment does not have to be digital to be exciting. So I met with the director of JWT Intelligence, Ann Mack, and we decided to collaborate on a survey that would explore the issue further. For the next few months we worked with other people at the agency—in particular Marian Berelowitz, from Ann's group, and Mark Truss, JWT's director of brand intelligence—to decide what to ask and how best to proceed.
The poll was conducted in early February using a statistically representative sample of 800 adults (18+) in the US and 400 in the UK. Earlier this week, JWT released the results in a trend report that's available online. Meanwhile, Ann and I presented the results from the US poll at SXSW with Paul Woolmington, founding partner of Naked Communications Americas. Here are a few highlights from that session.
Some of the most intriguing innovations in storytelling these days are happening in the UK, where broadcasting networks, book publishers, and even newspapers have embraced the idea of creating immersive narratives that invite the audience to join in. The latest effort comes from Matt Locke, former head of cross-platform programming at Channel Four, who left television last year to start Storythings, a consultancy that's been developing projects with top brands and media outlets. Storythings' first project, released last month, is Pepys Road, an online story that ties in with the John Lanchester novel Capital, recently published by Faber & Faber.
Capital documents the lives of characters on a fictional South London street as they deal with the fallout from Britain's ongoing financial crisis. Pepys Road is designed to bring all this home to the reader. To experience Pepys Road, you go to the Web site, type in your date and place of birth and the place you live now, and wait for what happens next. Over the next 10 days, you get a series of emails containing, among other things, stories by Lanchester that demonstrate how you might be affected by the economic changes the next 10 years are expected to bring. The experience is immediate, immersive, and highly provocative. Here's what Matt had to say about it:
Capital is a novel about the people who live on Pepys Road, but Pepys Road is all about what happens to you, the reader. Clearly these are meant to be complementary—but what does one give you that the other doesn't?
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at ad:tech Sydney that got written up in a blog post on MarketingDirecto.com, a Madrid-based marketing and publicity site. My Spanish is not so great, but with a little help from Google Translate I could see that their correspondent had gotten my point—that brand marketers need to stop trumpeting their message and start enlisting the consumer to spread it for them. It was the headline that threw me: “Para contar historias, las marcas deben hacer piña con el consumidor”—which Google rather unhelpfully translated as, "To tell stories, brands must make pineapple with the consumer."
Yesterday saw the release of one of the most compelling TED talks ever: Peter Weyland's in the year 2023. Of course, 2023 hasn't really happened yet, and neither has Sir Peter. But both will arrive soon enough—in June, to be precise, with the release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. The TED talk—performed by Guy Pearce, who plays the seriously overreaching CEO of Weyland Corp. in the film—is one of those great in-fiction artifacts that make the boundary between entertainment and reality so fungible these days.
Pearce's stentorian delivery makes him the perfect TED orator: He comes across as a sort of Richard Branson on steroids. As the camera sweeps the stage, he holds its gaze relentlessly:
At this moment in our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals who in just a few short years will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the gods now. For those of you who know me, you will be aware by now that my ambition is unlimited. . . . For those of you who do not know me, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Peter Weyland, and if you'll indulge me, I'd like to change the world.
Directed by Luke Scott, Ridley's son, and written by Damon Lindelof, who co-wrote the screenplay for the movie, the video is presented on the TED site in deadpan fashion, with an "about the speaker" write-up that details Weyland's role in launching "the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth." In a Q&A on the TED blog, Lindelof says, "I never thought in my wildest dreams we would get the actual TED branding." But he got in touch with TED's Tom Rielly, and pretty soon they were on.
Lindelof has been involved in this sort of thing before, of course. In May 2006, when he and Carlton Cuse were exec-producing Lost, ABC ran an ad for the fictitious Hanso Foundation. This turned out to be a rabbithole for The Lost Experience, the alternate reality game that played out that summer. Two years later, ABC ran a spot and even put up billboards for Oceanic Airlines, whose plane crash kicked the whole thing off.
But Lindelof is hardly the only one to use real-world media outlets to spread an in-fiction narrative. This past December, as part of its viral experience for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 42 Entertainment produced a vintage episode of Hard Copy that contained disturbing allegations about the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. And back in July 2008, a few days before Mad Men began its second season on AMC, Advertising Age published a special issue from 1960 that featured actual ads from purported clients of Sterling Cooper as well as an amusing interview with creative director Don Draper:
How do you think this new medium, television, will change the way advertising talks to consumers--and how will it affect advertising in general?
Well, the first thing I've noticed, it seems to be more about show business, not just putting ads into television shows without irritating viewers. But the ads themselves have to tell stories, have music, have striking images, be entertaining--maybe even more entertaining than the shows. It's going to be a tough one.
In its advertising column, the New York Times reported that Lionsgate, which produces the show, paid for the fake issue of Ad Age (actually a 16-page insert in a regular issue) at the suggestion of its media agency, Initiative. So far, the Times itself has not (knowingly) been sucked into anyone's fictional narrative. I'm waiting.
When Campfire's Steve Coulson set out to create an immersive experience around the HBO production of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, he faced a now-familiar problem: How to simultaneously generate buzz for the show, introduce the story to a new audience, and provide a deeper level of engagement for fans of the book. In this case, the task was complicated by the fact that HBO audiences weren't expecting a fantasy series and that Martin fans were fiercely protective of his work. At a stellar presentation at last week's Transmedia NYC Meetup, he explained how he went about it.
Campfire's Game of Thrones case study
An elfin figure with a shaved head and suspiciously pointy ears, Coulson worked at McCann Erickson, JWT, and crayon before being named creative director of the New York marketing agency Campfire in 2009. At Campfire he's led projects for such clients as A&E, the Discovery Channel, and Snapple in addition to HBO. He began planning the Game of Thrones experience in summer 2010, months before the February 2011 premiere of the series. At last week's meetup, he focused on what he and his team did and—just as importantly—didn't do, while tossing out the occasional lesson to be gleaned from their experience. I'm going to emphasize the lessons.
Several months ago, as I was finishing a video on the making of The Art of Immersion, Paul Woolmington of Naked Communications suggested I use the book's YouTube channel to create a conversation about the issues the book raises—for example, how the Internet blurs the distinction between author and audience, story and game, entertainment and marketing, fiction and reality. It's taken awhile, what with my travel schedule and a bit of consulting work I've taken on, but the idea is finally being realized. First up: Chad Stoller, managing director of the newly opened IPG Media Lab in New York, on the blurring of entertainment and marketing—otherwise known as branded entertainment.
One thing Chad talks about is how hard it is as an ad guy to compete with the average 14-year-old on YouTube. Don Draper never had to worry about this, but it's an issue I'm well aware of. Suffice it to say that I'll be studying a lot of 14-year-olds' videos over the next few weeks and may even start taking lessons from one.
In the meantime, I expect to produce one of these videos every few weeks, talking not just with people in the advertising business but those in entertainment and journalism as well. The first few, however, will most likely be from the ad world. Look for interviews with Scott Donaton, CEO of the branded entertainment unit Ensemble (and Chad's colleague at IPG), and Graham Hodge, director of branded content and creative services at LBi London. This spring I'll be speaking at South by Southwest and ad:tech Sydney, so look for some interviews from there as well. Who else would you like to see? Suggestions welcome.
The games blogger at the Guardian, Keith Stuart, posted an essay recently that started out like a broadside against the whole idea of telling stories across multiple media platforms. "Most big video game releases now come with tie-in books, comics and even movies," the subhead declared provocatively. "But is this really about extending the story or is it just marketing?" Things seemed to go downhill from there:
It has become routine now. A few weeks after the announcement of any big new game release, there will be another thrilling revelation: a tie-in comic book series, a novel, a made-for-TV movie. . . . Of course, much of the excitement revolves around the marketing potential of the linear tie-in: every new story platform is an advert.
This used to be called merchandising, but now we must use the term "transmedia storytelling". Nowadays, developers are aiming to produce narratives so compelling that they transcend platform limitations; a high-tech realisation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk concept.
To my mind, the idea of drawing a line between "extending the story" and "marketing" is antiquated at best. The Internet, which is ultimately what makes transmedia a compelling and contemporary phenomenon, is all about blurring lines, none more so perhaps than that one. As for Gesamtkunstwerk, which preceded all this by more than a century and a half, Wagner's idea of fusing multiple art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, whatever—into a "total art work" is an intriguing precursor, but the aptness of the comparison is not immediately apparent. If anything, the notion of a unified work of art seems almost at odds with the idea of a work of art that finds expression in multiple media. Not that that should necessarily be the case.
It turns out, however, that Stuart isn't so much opposed to the concept of transmediagesamtkunstwerk (to coin a catchy new polylingual phrase) as he is appalled by the realization—by most of the realizations that have been done to date, anyway. And there I'm afraid he has a point:
A key issue is that the linear content is rarely of a similar quality to the source material. Assassin's Creed the game is an astonishingly rich and detailed interactive universe, but the novelisation, Assassin's Creed: Renaissance, is lumbering, stilted and repetitive. . . . Why would I read the novelisation of Quantic Dreams' psychological thriller [Heavy Rain], when I could read Jim Thompson, John Connolly or Thomas Harris?
There's no end of other examples, and they're hardly restricted to properties that started out as video games. Avatar, for instance, was sadly underserved by Avatar: The Game, despite the fact that the game-production and movie-production teams collaborated intensively. And that's a case in which they were actually trying. Game publishers, as Stuart points out—and the same could just as well be said for movie studios, television networks, and any other outfit producing big entertainment properties—often seem all too happy producing spin-offs on the cheap in hopes of slurping up some additional fan coin or luring more bodies to the box office. We're already seeing what this kind of opportunistic approach can do to 3-D.
Actually extending a story into other dimensions is a painstaking and expensive process. An alternate reality game on the order of Why So Serious?, the 42 Entertainment production that drew some 11 million people into the world of The Dark Knight before the movie's release, requires a highly creative team, a total mastery of logistics, and a multi-million-dollar budget. This is about as far from a novelization as you can get.
The truth is that we're still lucky to get a story that's told well in one medium, much less in two or three others. And to move beyond this point is going to mean focusing less on the trans- and a lot more on the gesamt—not to mention the kunst.
Everywhere I go this year, I seem to run into a branded content discussion. From DIY Days in New York, to the “Brisk: Machete” panel I did with Robert Rodriguez and Danny Trejo at SXSW interactive, to the Branded Content Salon I spoke at at LBi London, to Morgan Spurlock’s POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold at Hot Docs and Sheffield, the idea that brands can commission entertainment instead of merely advertising in it keeps popping up. The subject is not entirely new, of course: the term “advertainment” was coined more than a decade ago. It’s the momentum that's changing—picking up in large part because (Spurlock’s clever satire notwithstanding) producers are embracing it as readily as marketers.
The reasons why started to become apparent when two of America's most prolific and respected indie film producers, Ted Hope and Christine Vachon, sat down for a "fireside chat" at DIY Days in March. These are the people behind such ground-breaking and uncompromising films of the '90s and '00s as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Velvet Goldmine, and Boys Don't Cry (Vachon) and Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, The Laramie Project, and Human Nature (Hope). So it was instructive to hear them speaking unabashedly about how attitudes toward commercialism have evolved in 20 years.
A big factor in that evolution has been economics. As Vachon pointed out, the '90s were the heyday of international co-productions: The path to success was to get a script, wrangle some talent, and cut a lot of deals at Cannes. But eventually, that started to dry up--and then the recession hit. Attitudes changed accordingly. You can view this with cynicism, of course, but you can just as readily argue that artists, who live like the rest of us in a relentlessly commercial society, began demonstrating a refreshing lack of hypocrisy about it. As Hope said, "Who does it benefit to draw a line between art and commerce, marketing and content?" Ultimately, it's all storytelling.
The obvious question is, does the branding sway the storytelling? So I raised it when Ted and I met for a drink a few weeks later. His answer was, sure--but so does everything else. He offered American Splendor, his 2003 biopic of comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, as an example: "I said, I'm going to make a film that's going to win at Sundance." (It did, and the film critics' award at Cannes as well.) "It gave me a higher awareness of market-based writing."
But it's not just artists whose attitudes have evolved; it's also corporate marketers, a point Rodriguez made at SXSW. The panel--staged by PepsiCo, the corporate entity behind Brisk Iced Tea, at its Plugged-In Stage at the Austin Convention Center--paired Rodriguez and Trejo, the Latino star of last year's Machete, with Brisk brand manager Jamal Henderson and Ian Kovalik of the San Francisco ad shop Mekanism. (PepsiCo gets its own branded space at SXSW because it's a "super sponsor" of the festival.) Machete, introduced years earlier in a fake trailer that appeared in the Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, was a hyperviolent actioner in the B-movie tradition--not exactly the sort of thing you'd think would inspire a corporate marketing campaign. Yet PepsiCo was happy to take the leap. A movie with an Hispanic star and a cult following among twenty-somethings, for a "value brand" (99 cents a liter) that hadn't advertised in nearly a decade? "From a brand perspective, it was divine intervention almost," Henderson told me before we sat down for the discussion. "We were trying to get back into the popular culture, and this seemed the way to do it."
The success of their effort was apparent as soon as we ran the spot. People in the room, most of whom must have watched it a half-dozen times or more already, started whooping with delight the instant the reel began. The 60-second video is essentially a parody of a parody--a claymation version of Trejo as Machete, a Mexican federale who wields a wicked-looking pair of knives while yelling "Negotiate! Negotiate! Negotiate!" It's also very, very funny. Rodriguez, who had made stop-motion movies as a kid, not only gave his okay for the spot, he actually tweeted about it when it came out:
Thank you @mekanism for making that killer Machete Lipton Brisk commercial. Fantastic work! Stop Motion is still king. Updated via web at Thursday, January 06, 2011 11:06 PM
Meanwhile, Rodriguez was making some branded content of his own--a six-minute video for Nike's Kobe Bryant Collection, with Bryant in the starring role and cameos from Trejo, Bruce Willis, and Kanye West. The video was presented as a mini-movie--"Kobe Bryant Is The Black Mamba"--and advertised as such, both in 30-second spots and in a giant billboard on the Sunset Strip. Anticipating Spurlock's tongue-in-cheek approach to product placement by several months, Rodriguez framed the video as a director's pitch to the star/brand manager. Sample dialogue:
BRYANT
So. Are there gonna be a lot of close-ups on the shoes?
RODRIGUEZ
Product placement gives us a bigger budget. Bigger budget, bigger explosions.
"I don't usually do ads," Rodriguez said during the discussion. "I've done a couple of European ones with George Clooney, he's a friend of mine--they're more cutting-edge over there, you can do a little more different stuff. . . . And then this one came up because they said you can do whatever you want. So when I talked to Kobe I said, Okay, let's do something that deals with legends and icons--you know, you're a legend, Kanye in the music world is a legend, Bruce Willis is a legend, Trejo is a legend, the brand Nike has its own legendary status. So I wanted to do something that kind of put all that together."
"They're actually cool shoes," Trejo said, putting his right foot forward to show off his swoosh.
"Celebrities don't do commercials here because it's just not cool," Rodriguez continued. "But you make it cool, they'll show up. Nike couldn't believe it."
"That thing was so cool, people were actually waiting for the movie," Trejo added. "People were asking me, Are they gonna do that as a movie?"
Obviously, not every bit of branded entertainment is going to be stuffed with legends. But it can still be fun, as Philips demonstrated with the Nigel & Victoria Web series it showed off at LBi London. Created for the Dutch electronics giant by Hoot Comedy, a London shop that specializes in, yes, branded content, Nigel & Victoria is another arched-eyebrow production that seeks to tout its brand and mock it too. What makes it particularly intriguing is the way the whole series acts as a none-too-veiled metaphor for the increasingly if sometimes awkwardly intimate relationship between brand and content.
The series focuses on Nigel, the handsome young "Philips guy" who's overseeing the production of some commercials for the company's consumer line, and Victoria, the comely blond actress who's been hired to star in them. Nigel has developed sort of a thing for content--er, Victoria--and his bumbling courtship seems destined to go on indefinitely, or at least until the end of season one. (Season two, which began two weeks ago, takes a different tack.) Will Nigel win Victoria's heart? Will his clumsiness turn her off completely, or can he charm his way into her affections? Will they ever make squalling, red-faced little brand-content babies? Stay tuned for the next episode.
If there's a lesson in Nigel's courtship of Victoria, or in Rodriguez's pitch to Kobe, or in Machete's exploits for Brisk, it's that you can never bullshit the viewer. Forget the sales pitch: Nobody cares any more. The litmus test, the thing brand managers have to accept if they're to survive in this cool new world, is that branded entertainment has to work as entertainment if it's to work at all. Don't take your brand too seriously. Go with your gut, assuming you have one. Otherwise, you're just making television spots for viewers to TiVo through.
"Creativity, Celebrity and Brand Strategy: A Brisk Discussion of Ozzy and Machete" takes place at 4:30 PM Monday at the Austin Convention Center's PepsiCo Plugged-In Stage.
What happens when you blur the line between advertising and entertainment? In the case of "Brisk Machete," a minute-long stop-motion video in which Danny Trejo reprises his role in Robert Rodriguez's Machete on behalf of Brisk Iced Tea, something very funny indeed.
On Monday afternoon at SXSW I'll be talking about how it went down with Trejo, Rodriguez, Jamal Henderson of PepsiCo, and Ian Kovalik of Mekanism.
The "Brisk Machete" video, which first appeared on YouTube in late December, kicked off a campaign for Lipton Brisk iced tea—a brand that last advertised ten years ago in a still-remembered stop-motion campaign. Last summer, with sales already rising dramatically, the brand managers at PepsiCo decided to kick things up a notch. They went to Mekanism, a San Francisco-based creative agency well known for its animation work, with the idea of reviving the stop-motion campaign.
Henderson had just been to the downtown LA premiere of Machete, where he saw Trejo ride up on his chopper at the head of low-rider procession. So when Mekanism suggested a Machete take-off to launch the Brisk campaign, it seemed like serendipity.
Trejo was game, and Rodriguez gave the project his blessing. But as Trejo eventually discovered, there are responsibilities that come with being a spokesLatinsuperhero. The other day he was outside a 7-11 in the San Ferdando Valley when a little girl walked by with her mom. When the girl realized he was drinking a Pepsi, she did a double-take and declared in the most gravelly voice she could manage, "That's not Brisk, baby!"
Just in case 3-D wasn't immersive enough for you already, Oakley has come up with a way to make it even more so: polarized specs with wraparound lenses that minimize the chance any pesky non-3-D imagery will get to your eyes. Two years in development, the glasses were ready just in time for the $150 limited edition Tron: Legacy tie-in that was announced in late October. Since then they've been made available in a non-Tron edition as well. Either way, the point is the same: "to create a better immersive experience," as Oakley CEO Colin Baden put it, by minimizing distortion while widening the field of vision.
The arrival of high-tech 3-D eyewear represents a milestone of sorts, both for 3-D and for Tron. For 3-D, glasses that aren't throwaways are yet another sign that the illusion has arrived, or at least that manufacturers are willing to bet on it. As for Tron, offering a pricey 3-D tie-in is a nifty way to underscore the retro-futuristic appeal of a movie that's obviously intent on making Atari-era computer graphics look hyper-cool.
