The Power of Transmedia

PGA NMC East member Jeff Gomez featured on forbes.com
http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/03/jeff-gomez-advertising-leadership-cmo-network_starlight_runner.html

On the Record with…
JEFF GOMEZ
The Power of Transmedia
Interview by Laurie Burkitt

Though these may be dark economic times, there are certain executives with extraordinary insight and unique approaches who are achieving striking results for their companies. Each week, Forbes.CMO will spotlight one of these visionaries and fire off questions designed to keep you ahead of the curve.

Transmedia is a word that has been buzzing both Hollywood and Madison Avenue, but very few seem to have a handle on what it means, or the potential of its value proposition. For our premiere column, we turn to Jeff Gomez, CEO of New York-based Starlight Runner Entertainment for answers.

A self-described “transmedia storyteller,” Gomez is a producer who specializes in developing and extending entertainment and advertising properties across multiple media platforms. His clients include The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, Hasbro and perhaps most notably, the Coca-Cola Company.

What exactly is transmedia and how did you become interested in it?

Simply put, transmedia is the art of conveying a rich message, theme or storyline to a mass audience using multiple media platforms in concert. Each part of the story is unique and plays to the strengths of each medium, and the audience is often invited to participate and somehow interact with the narrative. We first saw the term used in this way by M.I.T. professor Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture.

In today’s interconnected world, young adults, teens and even kids have become so comfortable with media technology that they seem to flow from one platform to the next. The problem is that their content is not flowing with them. As a discipline, transmedia provides us with a foundation for the development, production and rollout of entertainment properties or consumer brands across all of these platforms. Transmedia creates the flow.

As a mass audience we’re too savvy and too impatient to experience the same content over and over again. There’s too much out there to enjoy. Repurposing sucks! I actually learned this as a kid living in Hawaii in the 1970s, and being exposed to psychedelic Japanese pop culture. The creators of cartoons and kidvid like Ultra 7, Kikaida and Galaxy Express 999 were allowed to turn their stories into animated TV series, toy lines, live events and feature films.

But instead of repeating the plots over and over again for each medium, the creators would continue and expanded their storylines, generating dazzling mythologies and complex narratives. The act of chasing, collecting and searching for new parts of the story made me a participant. I became immersed in these worlds. This was early transmedia storytelling, and man, I knew right there what I wanted to do when I grew up!

Well, it turns out that yesterday’s “cult” is today’s cool.

What gives transmedia its unique power? How do you distinguish it from concepts such as branded entertainment?

What’s so powerful about transmedia implementation is that it maximizes the potential of your story or message, while both building intense brand loyalty and opening up multiple revenue streams.

The loyalty is derived from giving fans more of what they want from your story: more character background, more story mythology, more opportunities to dialog with the story’s creators and with one another. When you know that Samuel L. Jackson will be playing Nick Fury in the next nine Marvel super hero movies, you’re delighted because this ties that whole universe together. It’s a richer and deeper entertainment experience for the fan.

Revenues may be increased dramatically, because you are furnishing fans with more product. The storylines of major films like The Dark Knight, Wolverine and Watchmen are being supplemented by direct-to-DVD animation releases, each of which are selling quite well. The Watchmen videogame serves as a prequel to the movie and contains “valuable” story developments that fans want to know about. New stories set in the same world are alluring, as opposed to repurposed content, so the products become more attractive and in many cases more lucrative.

We’ve seen this with such properties as Hannah Montana, Lost and Heroes, but we’re also seeing it with Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. It’s a growth industry, and it’s an exciting time to be a part of it.

I think it’s important to point out that transmedia storytelling is not branded entertainment. Branded entertainment drives product awareness by sort of tacking the brand onto something else, like whatever brands you’re seeing on The Apprentice. On the other hand, transmedia builds brand mythology, placing the brand front and center and building narrative around it, like the various tie-ins we saw around The Matrix franchise several years ago. Branded entertainment comes and goes in a flash, but transmedia storylines are timeless because they are built on a foundation of classic narrative structure. They’re good stories. Finally, the owner of the brand pays for branded content, but transmedia entertainment is designed to generate revenue because it’s content that the audience wants.

What’s the short history of transmedia?

After the Industrial Revolution, the printing press allowed for ideas and stories to be spread to much larger populations. Thousands of people were reading Stoker’s Dracula or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. With radio, new elements were introduced into the mythos of these narratives. Perry White, Kryptonite and the term “faster than a speeding bullet,” for example, all became a part of Superman from the 1938 radio serial.

After World War II, the Japanese government promoted the cooperation of manufacturers, suppliers and distributors to spur economic recovery. They called this keiretsu. This is what allowed for popular comic strip characters to easily jump across various kinds of media in a concerted fashion. By the ‘60s and ‘70s, this became a sleek machine that exported pop entertainment globally from Godzilla to Gigantor to Speed Racer.

I wouldn’t be the only one to be turned onto this. George Lucas has often acknowledged Japanese cinema for inspiring Star Wars, but I dare say he was also fascinated by keiretsu and Nippon’s pension for celebrating and rewarding creators of cross-platform story epics. He shrewdly held back the rights to his characters and merchandising from 20th Century Fox and launched what would become the prototype for transmedia storytelling in America.

But the true actualization of transmedia arrived in 1998 with a weird website called The Blair Witch Project, nearly a year before the release of the film. Was it real? A hoax? Our curiosity and our dialog made us participants in the narrative, and the whole thing exploded, making the film one of the most profitable in history. Transmedia requires an interactive component.

Transmedia has often been used to promote TV shows and movies, things that already have a story built into them, but how does it work with products?

It’s true, since Blair Witch we’ve seen some progressive television and film execs and producers use transmedia techniques to engage mass audiences. JJ Abrams used the Internet, books and comics to build on the storylines of Lost and Cloverfield, as did Tim Kring on Heroes and Warner Bros. on The Dark Knight. All of these had strong stories to start with, and fans were offered (and often paid for) a “deeper dive” with this additional content.

We’ve also seen companies like Procter & Gamble use transmedia techniques such as extending soap opera narrative. In 2007, P&G commissioned Guiding Light: Jonathan’s Story, a novel that revealed the adventures of a major character that had been mysteriously absent from the show. The book was a media sensation and became a New York Times best seller.

But we’re also seeing transmedia elements in the marketing of consumer products and advertising. With “The King” campaign from Burger King a few years back, for example, audiences became engaged with this bizarre character, watching the commercials, purchasing and playing the videogames. Profits soared for the chain.


Then there’s Victoria’s Secret, a somewhat looser but still quite valid example of transmedia narrative. We start with the mystique of the original catalog, but then the models take on personas all their own. We follow their glamorous and sometimes scandalous lives through the tabloids, on the web and on television. Like living fantasies they’re adorned with the iconography of the angel wings in print ads and commercials. We follow them into their own annual TV specials, and ultimately back into the catalogs and retail stores. A thriving empire has been built here not so much on lingerie, but on story.

In 2002, my company Starlight Runner was tasked to create a storyline around 35 die-cast metal Hot Wheels cars for Mattel in tandem with the line’s 35th anniversary. It had never really been done before. We worked with the company to discern the essence of the brand and watched how kids played with the toys before inventing an elaborate racing universe and driver characters that embodied the messages and themes of the brand. The story was successful, sales across the entire line increased dramatically, and over the next three years five computer-animated movies were released, a videogame, a comic book series, new playsets and an elaborate web site.

How do you know transmedia works? What numbers do you have to prove it?

Well, Mattel sold an awful lot of Hot Wheels DVDs! The entire product line derived a significant revenue bump over those three years. These are hundreds of millions of additional dollars for a franchise that had frankly gotten a bit dusty in the past decade.

Heroes 360, the online component of the Heroes TV series multi-platform campaign, generated an additional $50 million in advertising revenue for NBC-Universal, according to Fast Company magazine, and that doesn’t include sales of hundreds of thousands of hard copy graphic novels and prose fiction all set in the universe of the show.

Then there is Happiness Factory from the Coca-Cola Company. A few years back, Coke consolidated its global advertising with Wieden+Kennedy. The agency’s Amsterdam office came up with “The Coke Side of Life” campaign and one of the commercials featured a wild fantasy world of characters and creatures that existed inside a Coke machine. The computer animation by PsyOp was gorgeous, hilarious and a tiny bit subversive.

The commercial was called Happiness Factory and it was the highest rated Coke commercial in history. People loved it, and Coke wanted to somehow continue working with the premise. Starlight Runner was called in to do some of this creative development and generate multiple touchpoints for the property. Coke had us come up with a transmedia storyline designed to last for years.

The initial rollout in the later half of 2007 was a smash. A second, extra-long commercial was created that vastly expanded the world of Happiness Factory and gave us characters we could connect with. We worked on an elaborate international web site with AKQA that allowed you to become an employee of the factory. Coke joined with its distributors in countries around the world to customize the way people would connect to the property based on culture and budget. There were comics in Brazil, mechanical installations at shopping malls in Denmark, costumed characters lumbering around in Japanese supermarkets, all tied into “event” airings of the four-minute narrative on television.

At last year’s Media 360 conference keynote, Jonathan Mildenhall, Coke’s VP Global Advertising and Creative Excellence, announced the campaign had boosted global volume sales of Coke by 4% and Coca-Cola’s share price from $42 to $60 over Happiness Factory’s initial transmedia rollout period. Although “The Coke Side of Life” campaign is now over, Happiness Factory is tapped to play a central role in the company’s new “Open Happiness” campaign. So the Kissy Puppies will be back!

[Editor’s note: You can see the Happiness Factory commercials at http://www.coca-cola.com/hf]

Why was Coke interested in transmedia?

Mildenhall has said that he was searching for ways move away from brand interruption and boost brand engagement for his company’s flagship product. After the original Happiness Factory scored so well, he started looking for ways to extend the property. But right now, advertising is not built to stretch a story beyond a minute or two.

After learning about our work, Mildenhall had Starlight Runner present our “Blockbuster Worlds” seminar to his exec team in Atlanta, and he immediately embraced transmedia as a strategy for Coca-Cola. The results have made him one of the most vocal and articulate advocates of the process.

Tell us about your work for Coca-Cola and where it is going. How are we going to see Coke’s narrative develop and in what forms of media?

Working on Happiness Factory for Coke was both challenging and quite a thrill. All we had to start with was the commercial, and we were tasked with building an entire fictional universe around it, with a rich history, dozens of characters and wild adventures yet to come.

Starlight Runner has a proprietary technology that facilitates the rapid development and implementation of transmedia properties, and we put it to use on all fronts here. Our first task was to immerse ourselves in the brand. Coke is a part of Americana, with its own archetype and mythos. We needed to make certain that was reflected in all aspects of the narrative. Wieden+Kennedy then showed us about how their “Coke Side of Life” campaign romanced the brand, and we took those themes and imagery into account.

As with most of our clients, our first major milestone for Coke was a franchise Mythology. This is a visually impressive guide to the people, places, history and devices of the fictional universe. We get into the cultures and mysticism, messages and themes, everything you need to know to produce dozens, even hundreds of hours of content from this world.

For Coke we also produced a transmedia rollout “blueprint,” strategizing how Happiness Factory can play across comic books, videogames, outdoor interactive ads and other media across the globe over the course of the next several years. We’re only scratching the surface so far, but the vision is truly ambitious. I’m also hoping we’ll see a stronger presence here in the U.S. soon.

Where else are we likely to see your work in the future?

We’re tremendously fortunate to be working with some of the biggest properties in the world. We’ve worked on Avatar, the upcoming James Cameron science fiction, which is going to blow people away. We have a great client in Disney, where we’re working on the Bruckheimer film Prince of Persia and will hopefully be returning to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise with the fourth film. There is Halo for Microsoft.

Starlight Runner is also expanding its consumer product work. We’ll be speaking with the CMO’s of major brand owners, as well as with the big agencies here in New York as more of them convince their clients that transmedia narrative is both inevitable and, if done right, can be hugely profitable.

As for the future of transmedia storytelling, I think it’s going to become a true art form. If movies are a grand piano, that’s fantastic, you can create beautiful concertos with that one instrument. But if you take movies, television, the Internet, and any combination of other media, you are assembling an orchestra of sorts. The symphonies you can create are almost beyond imagination. To me this is the true potential of transmedia.

Animation and Non-Fiction Filmmaking Event

The Producers Guild of America

New Media Council

presents the

2008-2009 Panel and Salon Series

ADMISSION IS FREE! BUT AN RSVP IS REQUIRED.

RSVP to: rsvp@pga-ny.org

TIME

7-8:45 PM panel, followed by a wine and cheese reception.

LOCATION

Theresa Lang Auditorium at The New School

55 W. 13th Street, Second Floor

Between 5th and 6th Aves.

New York City

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

WHAT'S UP, DOCUMENTARY?

Animation and Non-Fiction Filmmaking

The increasingly popular use of animation in documentary and non-fiction filmmaking will be examined in this panel discussion sponsored by the New Media Council of the Producers Guild of America East and the New York Film/Video Arts Council. Producers, directors and animators will show clips and discuss a range of projects, explaining how and why they chose to use animation, the positives and negatives in terms of time, budget and skill sets, and the artistic or interpretive contributions animation can bring to a project.

Speakers (alphabetically):

JOAO AMORIM is a Brazilian director focusing on animation and documentary filmmaking. He is currently represented by Curious Pictures, New York. Joao has worked worldwide as an industrial designer, animator, and Animation Supervisor for many years prior to directing. He was the Animation Director for "Chicago 10", Brett Morgen's feature doc. that opened Sundance 2007. He has also directed commercials for BMW, Panasonic, Oceana, among others. He is currently working on ³2012, Time for change², his first feature documentary, highlighting ideas on sustainability and consciousness.

BARBARA ATTIE and JANET GOLDWATER have worked collaboratively since 1990 making widely acclaimed documentaries that have been broadcast nationally and internationally. In 2005 they were awarded the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Their newest documentary, currently in post-production, is Mrs. Goundo¹s Daughter, about a Malian mother¹s fight for asylum in the U.S. to protect her two-year old daughter from female genital cutting/mutilation.

LISA CRAFTS is an animator whose work is characterized by richly rendered imagery and a quietly quirky sensibility. Her independent animated films have ranged from a meditation on the role creativity plays in the survival of the human spirit, to a funky romp through the land of human sexuality. These works have been shown in Europe, Asia, and throughout North America. In addition to animated films, Crafts also paints quietly disturbing psychological landscapes which capture the dreamlike dissonance of the American roadside.

LUCIEN HARRIOT Is founder, director and visual effects supervisor of Mechanism Digital, a full-service production resource in NYC specializing in digital production. 2D/3D animation, visual effects, broadcast design, and green screen shoots. Mechanism's work ranges from commercial to entertainment; their award-winning team of artists, directors, and producers write, design, storyboard, shoot, animate, edit, and integrate visual effects for film, television and new media.

CINDY KLEINE is a film and video artist whose prolific career began when she was an undergraduate at The Museum School and at the legendary (and long-gone) MIT Film/Video Section, studying with Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus, and among a legion of future filmmakers in the program, including Ross McElwee, Robb Moss and John Gianvito. In line with Boston peers, Kleine has developed a central body of documentary work which are family dramas: camera visits with her grandmother and her sister, and intense probes of her parents¹ fifty-nine years of a dubious, fractured marriage. Additionally, Kleine has gone outside of family for films about odd artists and off-the-wall musicians; and she¹s gone inside herself for some deeply personal, poetically framed psychodramas about love lost, the spirit gained.

MARK MARABELLA is an Emmy® nominated executive producer and founder of Marabella Productions. His award-winning, independent production company specializes primarily in current affairs, history, and science programming for Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic Channel and PBS. Mark has more than 15 years experience developing, writing, producing, and directing over 90 hours of factual series and specials that have aired in nearly 100 countries. Prior to founding Marabella Productions, Mark was the series producer and writer of 60 hours of The Discovery Channel's top-rated prime-time series THE FBI FILES for three and half seasons.

The event will be introduced by documentary filmmaker Howard Weinberg of the Film/Video Council and moderated by digital media producer Trilby Schreiber of the PGA New Media Council East.

For more information about the PGA New Media Council and to access a membership application, please visit: www.pganewmedia.org.

For more information about the PGA and to access a membership application, please visit: www.producersguild.org.

For more information about the New York Film/Video Council, please visit: www.nyfvc.org.

Previous events in our series can be accessed in both webcast format at: www.scribemedia.org/pga.

For more information about ScribeStudio Productions, please visit: www.scribemedia.org/about

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POLITICAL SATIRE CHANGES THE (NEW MEDIA) WORLD

POLITICAL SATIRE CHANGES THE (NEW MEDIA) WORLD:
An Evening with Ben Relles, Founder of BarelyPolitical.com
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The political arena has been one of the heaviest contributors to the social media revolution. The 2008 presidential election saw a groundbreaking new media campaign from President Obama, including mobile marketing, liveblogging, and online video, but was also at the epicenter of a groundswell in online political satire, including 'The Last Republican,' endless user-generated parodies of candidates, and one of the most compelling viral video campaigns of all time – 'Obama Girl.' The singular creation of BarelyPolitical.com's Ben Relles, the Obama Girl phenomenon captured the public fascination with candidate Obama and helped lay the foundation for online discourse that, in many ways, rivaled mainstream media's attempts to keep up with "netizens".

Ben Relles, founder, BarelyPolitical.com
Ben Relles launched his political satire website BarelyPolitical.com with the hit video "I Got a Crush on Obama." In total, he has produced more than 150 online videos, which have been viewed more than 200 million times worldwide. Recently, Ben launched BarelyDigital.com, an online video network satirizing the world of technology. He has spoken at conferences that include: Forbes MEET, Streaming Media East, and NATPE; has guest lectured on college campuses nationwide, and appears regularly on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. Born in Wisconsin, Ben was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After college, Ben co-founded MarketVision, Inc., where he was a partner from 1997 - 2002. Later, Ben received his MBA from the Wharton School, and has spent time working for Omnicom marketing agencies.

Moderator: Chris Pfaff, President, Chris Pfaff Tech/Media LLC; board delegate, PGA NMC
A board delegate of the PGA New Media Council since 2006 and a PGA NMC member since 2004, Chris Pfaff leads a consultancy – Chris Pfaff Tech/Media LLC – that represents some of the leading service providers, audio/video technology firms, networking vendors, and media companies in the world, from PRIMEDIA and Eastman Kodak to Cantor Telecom. A veteran of the venture world, Chris helped launch more than 20 ventures from the Lucent New Ventures Group, including iBiquity Digital; Flarion; Lucent Digital Video, and GeoVideo Networks, among others. In addition, he has helped launch AT&T's Internet strategy; the Viacom New Media division of Viacom, Inc.; Sony Electronics' Digital Betacam format, and Sharp Electronics' LCD product division.

7pm – 7:45pm – Networking mixer with wine and light refreshments
7:45 – 9pm – Conversation with Ben Relles
9pm – 9:30pm – Mixer continues/wrap up

The Core Club
66 East 55th Street
Between Madison and Park Aves.
New York City
www.thecoreclub.com

Space is limited; RSVP required. Please RSVP to rsvp@pga-ny.org.
NOTE: PGA members are encouraged to bring a qualified prospective member as a guest. Guests required to reconfirm their RSVP 24 hours prior to event.

Broadband Video Leadership Evening

VideoNuze, in conjunction with NATPE, will hold its Broadband Video Leadership Evening on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, from 6:00-9:00 pm at the Hudson Theater, 145 W. 44th Street in Manhattan. Will Richmond, from VideoNuze, will be presiding.

The evening includes a networking reception from 6:00-7:30 pm, followed by a 7:30-9:00 pm panel featuring senior executives (read: not producers) in the broadband video industry, including:

Albert Cheng, EVP, Digital Media, Disney/ABC Television Group

Greg Clayman, EVP, Digital Distribution & Business Development, MTV Networks

Karin Gilford, SVP of Fancast and Online Entertainment, Comcast Interactive Media

Curt Hecht, President, VivaKi (Publicis Groupe)

Tom Morgan, Chief Strategy Officer, Move Networks

Moderator: Will Richmond, Editor/Publisher, VideoNuze

For more info VideoNuze