Transmedia is “The art of conveying messages, themes or storylines to mass audiences through the artful and well planned use of multiple media platforms” (Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner).
Transmedia’s key tenets are the primacy of your story above all else, and an aversion to repetition across media. In this way it differs from integrated marketing, social media marketing and franchising which focus on spreading one message across as many platforms as possible. It’s not a new concept, and the term is unlikely to stick around forever – this was one of the main conclusions drawn from Transmedia Next LONDON 2012, a three-day event I attended and helped organise at the beginning of this month – however, the potential for learnings from and with the world of Transmedia is huge, and Engine, with our integrated model and cross-industry connections, is in a unique position to take centre-stage in this transitional period.
There are three avenues which we are starting to think about with regards to the world of Transmedia. The first is to take all learnings we can from the way filmmakers and storytellers are interacting with new media opportunities. Mobile Apps, YouTube, AR, ARGs, Connected TV, Gaming – all of these are platforms we want to embrace, but that can be difficult to incorporate into campaigns. The notion of Transmedia Planning and story architecture offer useful insight for certain projects.
The second is to follow in the footsteps of Bing’s Decoded or Audi’s Art of the Heist. These are huge, cross-platform projects that require highly complex planning to pull off, but that can create the kind of engagement, brand awareness and creative satisfaction that make people famous.
The third is in some ways the most simple, but also the most ambitious. To partner with content producers out there who are trying to make Transmedia Projects themselves. The potential for brand alignment with projects is very exciting, offering brands the opportunity to communicate with their consumers in a novel environment.
There’s a 16th Century adage that goes multa novit vulpes verum echinus unum magnum, which translates as ‘the fox knows many things, the hedgehog one great thing’. Engine is a collection of experts, people who know their ‘great things’ very well. We are also in a unique position of collaborative potential, where there are enough foxes about to bridge the gaps between all the hedgehogs. Out of this building could come some fantastic transmedia, cross-media, whatever you want to call it, thinking with the opportunity to set precedent in a world that is, as yet, relatively unexplored.
