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. 

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. 

Playing this Saturday, the movie that surrounds you

What if you were in a movie that couldn't be screened because it's taking place all around you? That's the idea behind As If It Were the Last Time, an immersive theater piece by the UK artist Duncan Speakman that plays out in Brooklyn this Saturday, July 6.  

You've heard of flashmobs? Duncan Speakman organizes subtlemobs.

Way-way-off-Broadway: How the immersive theater of 'Then She Fell' resonates with the digital world

Okay, here's an admission: I've never been able to take Broadway musicals seriously. In fact, I've barely been able to take them at all. I did watch the Tonys last night with an actress friend who's in from LA, and I have to admit there were some transcendent moments—Cyndi Lauper performing her '80s hit "True Colors"; almost any time Neil Patrick Harris was onstage; Kinky Boots sweeping the awards and capping it off with best musical. (Drag queens, I've found, can salvage just about anything.) But the good news from my perspective is that conventional, proscenium-arch theater, musical and otherwise, has been getting serious competition recently from the immersive variety—from productions that break down the fourth wall, and with it the barrier between audience and performance. 

Photo: Dariel Sneed 

Rachel I. Berman as Alice in Third Rail Projects' "Then She Fell."

One of the standouts is Then She Fell, an intimately scaled, highly idiosyncratic look at the Lewis Carroll-Alice Liddell relationship. Staged (so to speak) in a grim, featureless structure in Williamsburg that was built a century ago as a parochial school, the performances are limited to an audience of 15—small enough that everyone gets an individualized experience. The three-story building, cramped and institutional, has been re-imagined as Kingsland Ward, a dubious facility that's home to all manner of feverish behavior involving a Mad Hatter, a White Queen, a Red Queen, two Alices, and Carroll himself. As strange and dreamlike as the Alice books themselves, Then She Fell invites you to explore the fantastical world that Carroll created—and with it, the mystery of the Oxford mathematician and the little girl he liked to take rowing, until for unexplained reasons her mother cut off the relationship one day in 1863. 

Immersion 101: How Punchdrunk's "Sleep No More" turns theater on its ear

In March 2011, when London’s Punchdrunk Theatre Company opened Sleep No More in an abandoned warehouse block in New York, few imagined it would still be running a year later. A strangely wordless interpretation of Macbeth as filtered through film noir with a nod to Hitchcock, Sleep No More defies every convention of theater. It has no stage, no seats, takes place in a labyrinth of oddly decorated rooms, and requires audience members to wear Venetian-style masks but gives them no clue how to respond to what’s going on—which can be anything from nothing at all to a naked man in a bloody bathtub.

Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Macbeths in a private moment, as seen in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More