Deep Media

Absolut Silverpoint: Marketing that takes over your life, not your computer screen

When Advertising Week happened a couple of weeks ago, I joined a discussion about Absolut Silverpoint, a marketing campaign that ran in London for 14 days last April. Silverpoint was noteworthy because it was an app, not an ad. It didn't take over your computer screen unbidden; you had to download it. It was the kind of marketing people actually want to experience, as opposed to the kind they go out of their way to avoid. It was immersive, not intrusive. As Brand Republic put it, "Absolut's Silverpoint app has taken over our lives." Which makes it a sort of model for what marketing has to do in the future. 

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On Thursday, October 15, Afdhel Aziz, brand director at the idea incubator Absolut Labs in the US, will join Paul Woolmington and me as a special guest at our seminar in Digital Storytelling Strategy. For more information, please visit the Columbia University School of the Arts or Columbia Business School Executive Education. 

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How did it work? It started off as a simple iPhone game you could download from the Apple Store. As you played it, it morphed into a story—a mystery story about a woman named Chloe who has gone missing. New bits of story were unlocked as you moved up through the levels in the game. Finally it morphed into a live theatrical experience staged by Punchdrunk, the company behind Sleep No More, the immersive theater production that's been running in New York for more than four years now. 

 

Burberry: How a failing English luxury brand managed to turn itself around

"Great brands and great businesses have to be great storytellers too." So begins a video that Angela Ahrendts, then CEO of Burberry, prepared a couple of years ago for New York's annual Future of StoryTelling summit. Before she left last year to take over retail operations at Apple, Ahrendts and her creative director and eventual successor, Christopher Bailey, led one of the most remarkable luxury brand turnarounds in business history. And they did it on the power of story—which is why Paul Woolmington and I use Burberry as a key case study in our Columbia seminar on digital storytelling strategy (details below). 

Lots of marketers are talking about storytelling now, but few really understand how it works or why. Burberry does. They're using it both literally, in videos and store displays that highlight the heritage of the brand, and in a larger sense, by creating a "story world" that customers can step into at will. Because we understand stories by projecting ourselves into them, humans have an innate desire to inhabit stories we find meaningful. And because what we wear says so much about who we are—or at least, who we aspire to be—this can be as true of a fashion brand as it is of, say, Star Wars. 

 

How to harness the power of immersive media [infographic]

In an article in Admap a couple of years back, noted branded content guy Graham Hodge said some very nice things about The Art of Immersion but observed quite rightly that the book "stops short of offering advice to brands." Since then, I've spoken at marketing conferences in cities from London to Lima to Ljubljana and teamed up with Paul Woolmington to launch a day-long exec ed seminar on Digital Story­telling Strategy at Columbia—so I figure it's time to fix that.

To that end I worked with Art Kleiner, the editor of strategy+business, to develop an article that would explain immersive storytelling from a brand perspective. What does it really mean? How does it work? How does it compare with conventional advertising? And what makes it so effective? The result is "The Power of Immersive Media," which just went up on the s+b Website and will appear in print in the spring issue of the magazine. To sum it up, I've developed the downloadable infographic below, which is being published by Columbia's Digital Storytelling Lab.

 

Cooper Hewitt: Bringing museums into the digital age

It's a happening time for museums. The Louvre, the world's most-visited, drew 9.3 million people in 2013. American museums get more visitors than theme parks and major league ball games combined. In a world of ubiquitous electronic screens, this puts the lie to the notion that we're growing divorced from the physical world—or so it would seem. In fact, the appeal of museums goes beyond the objects they hold. Their popularity has a lot to do with the way they're merging the digital and the physical—and shifting their focus from object to experience in the process. 

Case in point: New York's Cooper Hewitt, a branch of the Smithsonian devoted to de­sign, which reopened last No­vember after three years of rein­ven­tion. I talked to the key peo­ple there for an arti­cle in the cur­rent issue of The Magazine An­tiques, and what I found was a place that had completely re­jected the idea of the mu­se­um as time cap­sule. Instead, this new Coop­er Hewitt sees itself as something quite different:

 

From VR to HBO, the top 7 meta-stories of 2014

For anyone who follows not just stories but meta-stories—that is, stories about storytelling and how it's evolving—2014 was a pretty big year. Along with twelve months of shootings, bombings, protests, invasions, and epidemics, we've witnessed profound changes in the way journalism and entertainment alike are being presented to us. Some of these developments have been building for years; others came out of the blue. Before we go rocketing into our next revolution around the sun, let's pause for a brief recap. 

1. Virtual reality gets almost real

Atop the 700-foot wall of ice in HBO's "Ascend the Wall"

New from Columbia: Why I'm offering a full-day program in Digital Storytelling Strategy

On Tuesday, October 21, I'll be partnering with marketing and communications expert Paul Woolmington to offer a special one-day program in Digital Storytelling Strategy. Co-sponsored by the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Columbia Business School, the full-day session is designed for business executives who need to know how to get their message across in a world in which the way we communicate is being totally redefined. Why is digital forcing a trans­formation in the way we tell stories? How can marketers, producers, and strategic planners lev­erage these changes rather than be left behind? That's what we'll be addressing. 

Grammars have rules—so what are the rules that will determine how brands tell their story in the 21st century?Obviously much of this was inspired by The Art of Immersion, the book I published in 2011, but we plan to go considerably further than that. The book was largely anecdotal—a series of stories from movie directors, television producers, game developers and others that sought to describe what I saw as a newly emerging grammar of storytelling for the digital age. Over the past year or so I've been working to develop a much more systematic ap­proach—one that not only reports how narrative is evolving and gives it historical context but explains how we can put it to use. Grammars have rules—so what are the rules we'll use when telling stories in the 21st century? Well, to a large extent they're still being made up. But that's what I'm working on today. 

High Valyrian, anyone? What the 'Game of Thrones' conlangs tell us about language and world-building

Behind the savage bloodshed, naked power lust, and epic betrayals that make HBO's Game of Thrones so enthralling to watch are the languages created for the show. The Game of Thrones conlangs—short for "constructed languages"—were developed by David Peterson, the 33-year-old linguist who co-founded the Language Creation Society, an organization based in Orange County, California, not far from Disneyland. Aside from devising Dothraki, the native tongue of the nomadic horselords of Essos, and Valyrian, the family of dialects based on the language of the lost empire of Valyria, Peterson is best known as the linguist and "alien culture consultant" for Syfy's Defiance. So far, however, nothing he's contributed has matched the use of Valyrian in the stunning scene at the finish of "And Now His Watch Is Ended" (season 3, episode 4), when Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen—she who hatched the fire-breathing dragons—takes command of the Unsullied, the 8,000 warrior-eunuchs of Astapor, from their slave master, Kraznys. 

Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor: “A dragon is not a slave.”

Want to try it yourself? Later this month, Peterson leads a workshop in language creation at the first annual Filmatic Festival, an exploration of the future of movies at UC San Diego, the school where he earned his masters in linguistics. Thanks to an introduction by Rebecca Webb of ArtPower!, the campus arts organization that's sponsoring the festival, I was able to put some questions to him by email. Here's what he had to say about Dothraki, Valyrian, and language in general: 

 

The big question at the Future of StoryTelling summit: What's the audience got to do with it?

After last fall's Future of StoryTelling summit in New York City, founder Charlie Melcher asked me to write a short essay summing up the experience for a book that would be sent to attendees. As a member of FoST's board of advisors, I was happy to do so. But since the one-day summit featured nearly two dozen roundtables headed by people ranging from Robert Wong of Google Creative Lab to Shannon Loftis of Xbox Enter­tainment Studios to Eddy Moretti of Vice, it was impossible to sum up the entire thing. So here's what struck me: 

Every successful conference puts an idea in play. For me, the second annual Future of Story­Telling Summit was all about rediscovering the audience. During the last century, mass media—news­papers, magazines, radio, television—forced audiences into an increasingly passive and marginalized role. To the extent that audiences mattered at all, it was as consumers—“eyeballs” to be lured to some destination, sorted into demographics, packaged by the thousand, and sold to advertisers. Those days are ending—and one of the most important things we can do is explore the im­plications. 

Behind the immersiveness trend: Why now?

When JWT Intelligence announced its "10 Trends for 2014 and Beyond" recently, trend #1 was "immersive experiences." Certainly you can feel this in New York: From Punchdrunk's Sleep No More (now running for nearly three years) to MoMA's Rain Room to Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room, people are willing to pay top dollar or line up for hours to experience something all-encompassing and beyond the ordinary. But why? 

JWT: 10 Trends for 2014 - Executive Summary from JWTIntelligence

The new report—based on a survey of Internet users in the US and the UK, on as­sessments from JWT planners around the world, and on in­terviews with outside observers (myself includ­ed)—lists six key reasons. Interestingly, only two have anything to do with advances in technology or production techniques. The re­maining four stem from broad societal shifts—shifts that are tied to, but in many cases a re­action against, the always-on nature of the digital world. 

 

From 'Oliver Twist' to 'Game of Thrones': Six serials and how they've deepened the art of storytelling

For a couple of years now, “transmedia” has been the buzzword most people use to define story­telling in the digital age. But while telling a story across different media formats (video, text, game, what have you) can be an effective way to engage people in a narrative, it's not the only way—nor is it necessarily the best. One of the most effective means of creating an immersive narrative is in fact one of the oldest: by serializing it. 

I was reminded of this recently when I went to Turin to speak at the Scuola Holden, a “school of storytelling and the performing arts” founded 20 years ago by the novelist Alessandro Baricco. Named after that world-class narrator Holden Caulfield, this unconventional institution (no teachers, for a long time no tests, and certainly no phonies) was intended to be a place where young Caulfield might feel at ease. Instead of hiring professors, the school brings in professional storytellers; and instead of focusing on technical skills like journalism or filmmaking, it tries to foster an aptitude for telling stories in any medium. 

Nonetheless, students are expected to spend about half their time during the two-year program in one of six “colleges”: Scrivere (writing), Filmmaking, Series, Crossmedia, Acting, and “Real World”—that is, stories inspired by actual events. In the first month of the school year, people like me were brought in to describe what these different disciplines were all about. I was asked to talk about Series. Then I was handed this map, which I decided to redraw a bit. The point was to show how serialization can create a sense of immersion.