POST DIGITAL

The Transmedia Approach

Integration is chaos.  With so many agency / channel specialists – clients waste a ton of money paying for redundancies in their big agency fees.  Furthermore, when Kellogg wrote the textbook on marketing integration years ago, I know that what they describe in their scenario planning was not what marketers are attempting to pass off as an integrated marketing plan.

Today, 'Integrated Marketing' is defined as a multi-channel plan using the same message across all channels.  What we know now is that one size does not fit all! The same message or conversation doesn’t work in all media channels.  We know customers behave and consume media differently in each channel and therefore often impressions are wasted.

All brands have a story to sell
While I create television spots, banner ads, mobile apps and websites, I do not believe that individually they can convey a brand’s story or experience.  Nor should we be attempting to try and shove years of innovation into 30 seconds.  It’s plain silly.  In this Post Digital economy, we have the tools, data and know-how to create smarter marketing and engaging brand stories.

Story-selling & Transmedia
Ten years ago, I began a building brand plans based on behavioral insights, media opportunities, and storytelling.  I began calling it Experience Planning. In reality it was Transmedia Planning.   

The basic premise of transmedia is that rather than using different media channels to simply retell the same story, you utilize these channels, their communities and functions to communicate different elements of the story.  Its success relies on fragmenting a narrative and making each platform do what it does best which, in turn, extends the life and longevity of the story.  Contrary to some thinking, this practice isn’t device-driven (Television, Laptop, Kindle, Nook, iPad), but is platform driven as it is the platform that subtly dictates and influences audience reactions, social and behavioral trends and user experiences.   The bottom line is that with a solid transmedia strategy in place everything remains connected by the same central narrative and theme, but each channel excels at what it does best, rather than bending to fit a central idea that’s being repurposed for multi platforms.

Building Brand Experiences with Transmedia Plans
With storytelling at the heart of our business model it’s not surprising that our entertainment and lifestyle clients were some of the first to embrace a transmedia approach. In fact, when working on the Matrix Film Franchise with Joel Silver Pictures in 2001, we used a transmedia approach to connecting our story in film, games and on the web.  We did this to create a story that can only be experienced by engaging with all of the different forms of content. The result, warner bros began using this as a way to put “butts in seats” for years to come.

Once we saw the success of the plan and method we saw it as an opportunity to test the same method to sell brand stories, just the way entertainment properties sell content.
 
Could it work in consumer-packaged goods?
Yes. Here is an example of a transmedia plan we created for Knob Creek.

Could it work on Financial Services? 
Yup! Here is an example of how we used in at Chase.

 

Could it work for a big box retailer? 
Sure it can! Here is a sample of how we used transmedia planning to create a new retail experience for do it yourselfers.

 

What we were doing began to catch on, as we have seen a new crop transmedia story-telling companies emerge.  Some of are some of my favorite examples:

• JayZ’z Decoded: http://youtu.be/XNic4wf8AYg
• Audi’s Art of The Heist: http://vimeo.com/9240242
• Snapple’s Best Stuff On Earth: http://vimeo.com/20479180

Transmedia + Communities
Now that people are powerful media channels on social media platforms like facebook, twitter and google+, a transmedia approach to selling your brand’s story couldn’t be more important.  In the post-digital world, meeting awareness objectives is more complex than running the same spot on TV, YouTube and in pre-roll. In order to have real-time conversations, you have to tell / sell and engage people in a story that is worth repeating.

The latest evolution of the approach is called ARG (alternate reality games). ARG includes a gaming element and encourages community participation. Real world examples of this type of Transmedia planning can be experienced with content properties like: Why So Serious?, the ARG for Batman: The Dark Knight and I Love Bees, the ARG for the Halo 2 game.  We used ARG when we took Dibs to teens.

In a world where creativity is measured by performance, this is an approach we know works.  The greatest part of all of living and working in the post-digital era is that the data and tools exist to create highly targeted transmedia plans that create measurable earned media for a brand.

Does your brand need a social data-driven transmedia plan?  Contact @substanceNYC or shoot us your marketing objectives to newbiz [@] wearesubtance dot com

Social Data Guided Media Plans

With every passing day, the benefit of social listening and data becomes more engrained in how we determine where we reach and market to people.

If you use social listening to identify marketing insights and innovations, you know the power of the outputs.  More than conversations, the data provides us knowledge of where those conversations are taking place.  We can also determine the volume of conversations as well as the influence of the people having those conversations at a particular URL.  That data combined with public traffic records now gives media planners the ability to pinpoint where their customers are engaged with content. 

The power of this data and knowledge can guide higher performing media plans.

Surprisingly, most media planners and buyers use antiquated methods to plan and purchase media.  Today, media buying companies rely on publishers to supply them with traffic stats and standard demographic data.  These are typically combined with third party reporting tools from firms like ComScore. 

Given the power of data @substancenyc is extrapolating out of our social listening exercises we decided to test a new way of building media plans.  Instead of using traditional methods of media planning we used our social listening tools to identify high volume conversations & influencer data to create a media plan that allowed our branded content to reach our target.

First we used social data to identify the right kind of customer.  Then we created a keyword list for our social listening tools to listen for. After that, we created an algorithm to extrapolate relevant conversations.  Once we identified the relevant conversations, we wrapped a volume metric around the URLs & places those conversations were talking place.  Once that was achieved we used a tools to identify the number of social influencers having the conversations.  Using the outputs of these simple exercises we created transmedia plan that effectively told our brand story.

 

How did we know this was going to outperform a traditional plan?

We tested it. We tested a traditionally built plan against a social data guided plan. The result, the social data plan out performed the traditional plan by 19%.  The social data plan had more reach and conversion than the traditional plan. 

This test has transformed the way we are going to market for our clients.

What are you doing today that could change the way we do business tomorrow?  Let us know @substancenyc.

 

Streaming #Reality

24 Hours of Reality begins at 7 p.m. Central Time on tonight. Over the course of the the next 24 hours, there will be 24 presentations across 24 time zones in 13 languages.

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Help Us Spread The Word

• Embed the 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast on your blog.
• Link to the live stream.
• ReTweet our content and/or message us directly @ClimateReality.
• Share/tag thoughts about how climate change is affecting your area and ask others to do the same.
• Instruct your audience to use #Reality & [your country] when calling out evidence of climate change.

 

24 Hours of #Reality

Al Gore, whose 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," was the first PowerPoint presentation to ever win an Academy Award, is conducting a 24-hour presentation this Thursday to do what the two-hour film could not: convince skeptics that the link between climate change and extreme weather, like Hurricane Irene, is real.  Visit www.ClimateRealityProject.org  to get the full skinny.

I hope you'll join us here on POST DIGITAL, where we will carry the broadcast. Together, we're going to focus the world's attention on the scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis.  24 Hours of Reality begins at 7 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, September 14. Over the course of the day, there will be 24 presentations across 24 time zones in 13 languages. We need your help!  

The Climate Reality Project's online toolkit is now complete with full resources for your involvement to spread the word about climate crisis online. Below is a list of how you can use the online toolkit to help The Climate Reality Project leading up to and during 24-Hours of Reality.

BEFORE THE EVENT:

• Donate your Facebook and Twitter feeds for 72 hours.
• Embed the 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast on your blog.
• Donate your website's homepage.
• Watch the ads and share them with your friends.
• Share the Denial Hits the Fan microsite.
• Tag yourself Five Times for Reality on your personal Facebook page.
• 'Like' the Climate Reality page on Facebook.
• RSVP for the 24 Hours of Reality live stream event on Facebook. 
• Follow @ClimateReality on Twitter.
• ReTweet our content and/or message us directly @ClimateReality.
• Use #Reality & #[your country] when calling out evidence of climate change.
• Host a watch party in your community for your local 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast.

 

DURING THE EVENT:

• Embed the 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast on your blog.
• Link to the live stream.
• ReTweet our content and/or message us directly @ClimateReality.
• Share/tag thoughts about how climate change is affecting your area and ask others to do the same.
• Instruct your audience to use #Reality & [your country] when calling out evidence of climate change.

 

Cartoon Via The New Yorker

on: digital+marketing

Seven months ago I left Madison Ave.  For years, I preached and practiced, award-winning digital, social and direct methods with the biggest brands on earth.   In the early part of 2009, while working on a new business pitch I observed a disturbing truth. Madison Avenue could not figure out how to make money (profits) at developing ideas.

The combination of antiquated customer research methods, fear, “tried and true channels” and disparate media planning groups seemed to be just a few of the issues that were quickly walking business out the door of digital, direct and advertising firms up and down the street.

A sad fact is that the once great story-selling Mad Ave firms have all become  channel specialists.  They had depleted their planning departments of insightful talent and replaced them with data experts and social media ninjas.  Don’t get me wrong, data is very, very, very important – but the analysis and synthesis of the data by conceptual craftsmen who create relevant ideas is even more important and what seems to be lost art form. 

While they were flipping channels and chasing bright shiny new digital toys, they lost the importance of relevant customer and cultural insights.  Furthermore, we were now in competition with a once friendly face.  The media companies.  Content creators like MTV, Disney and AMC whose audience insights were vast. They also had begun producing brand campaigns for clients that delivered far more reach and relevance than that 30-second ad could produce on its own.

In 2010, one-by-one, the dominos began to fall.  The market changed, the service economy retracted and marketers began asking “What’s the ROI on this agency of record relationship?”. Instead of getting the basics of what made this industry great, some had specialized so much that they had become tactical units with a VERY narrow way forward.  If this scenario sounds familiar, let me know.

Over the last eight months, I have spent my time working directly with a number of big brand CMOs, big box retailers, industry journalists, VCs, data & social start-ups, media companies, politicians, employment analysts and handful of agencies that are winning new business.  There is a new need and an empty seat at the strategic and creative table. It could be yours.

When the old ways begin to give way to something yet to be imagined, we have a choice.  Live in the past or get down to the business of imaging the future.
-- John F. Kennedy

 Today there is an enormous opportunity to not just imagine the future but also take the lead in creating the Post-Digital economy. 

This blog will be dedicated to ideas, insights and people that are making artworks that address the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, between autoethnography and community narrative, and between web-enabled peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration in which the role of the artist, the communicator and the agency is redefined.

There is a new exciting future on the horizon.  You just need to know your customers and accept that basic behavioral observations and insights coupled with new collective art forms.  Welcome to the post-digital era.