Guest post: Transmedia - Lessons learned

The following is a guest post by Lucas J.W. Johnson from Silverstring Media in Vancouver. It's about trying to launch a project, realizing when to pull the plug, and using the experience to try anew. It resonates with me and some of the stuff I've worked on over the years; key is to fail, and fail often - and learn from your mistakes. With that, I'll leave the floor to Lucas:



Azrael's Stop

Back in January, I decided I wanted to start a transmedia project, something that I could get out there and start building a following. By then the call to “stop talking and start doing” had already begun, and I was eager to do it. And I wanted something that would be easy to start up and easy to maintain while I worked on other projects. In February, the beginning of Azrael’s Stop was released on the world.

A few months later, I found that the project just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. It didn’t have much of a following, I’d found a lot of problems with how I’d set it up, and I was starting to feel like I was producing sub-par content just to have content. So I pulled the plug and Azrael’s Stop went on hiatus.

I knew that I wanted to bring it back, though. Once I figured out how to fix all the problems -- which might either involve a previously nonexistent budget, or a lot of work. But slowly I’ve been building up those resources and preparing for a return -- a return which is now happening, next week, on November 1st.

The process has been an interesting one, and I think makes for a good case study in planning and execution for transmedia or digital media properties.


The Plan

The original plan for Azrael’s Stop hinged on a few key ideas. I wanted it to be something I could (1) start quickly and (2) upkeep easily, with (3) little budget but (4) the potential to make money.

(1) and (2) led me to the idea of Twitter fiction. Daily self-contained stories that fit within a tweet. Each would be about the same characters over time so they built up a world, but would be self-contained enough that you could theoretically jump in any time. I could write 140 characters a day, and do it for free. Twitter would also make it easy to share, easy to measure followers, and free to use. I also felt it was important that I wasn’t asking a lot of my audience -- I wasn’t asking them to give me hours of their time, just about 20 words of reading a day. I also wasn’t asking for money up front.

This stream of fiction would then be augmented by occasional bonus content. This might be a full short story, or a piece of in-world music, or maybe a video or little game. These would add to the story but not be necessary to it, but would provide deeper engagement for those who wanted it. And I would sell them for, say, 99 cents a pop -- to pay for their production, and ideally make a little money.

It’s the typical indie transmedia business plan -- free first level to bring in an audience, with deeper engagement at a price. The theory was all there.

I came up with a cool story -- the setting is a bar called Azrael’s Stop, where people are mystically led when they’re ready to die. The bartender is a 17-year-old kid who’s seen a lot of death and is struggling to deal with it. the story is about him and the people who come to the Stop.

I figured I was set.


The Result

The promise of using social media as a way to distribute or promote content is the potential for it to go viral and reach a large audience, and that was something I was subconsciously counting on. Because for any of my plans to really work, I needed an audience -- the common statistic for freemium business models is that 1-20% of your audience will be willing to pay for things. To quote Jayne from Firefly, ten percent of nothing is, let me do the math here, nothing into nothing, carry the nothing...

I was counting on the adage “build it and they will come.” And frankly, that’s just not true. They still have to hear about it, and my first mistake was assuming that my available networks -- Facebook, Twitter, word of mouth -- would be enough to get the seed audience to let it take off. But beyond talking about it a bit, I did no real marketing or publicizing.

Mistake number two, as Dr. Christy Dena points out in her video “7 Things”, is that your peers are not necessarily your audience. They’re all working on their own stuff, and while they might offer an RT here or there, they’re less likely to be your huge fans -- the huge fans that will pay for content and spread your project far and wide.

But even were I to find some audience and get some eyes -- and I did, to some extent; I had about 50 followers on Twitter when I pulled the plug, which isn’t nobody (how many were bots? don’t know) -- there were underlying structural problems that actively worked against audience expansion and retention.

The first was a problem with the premise -- if I’m only providing tiny pieces of content so you don’t have to spend a lot of time with my project, then you’re not spending a lot of time with my project. You might read a piece in the fleeting stream of tweets and immediately forget about it. Even if you wanted more, there was precious little to engage you.

Pieces of fiction that short have other limitations -- no room to describe people, for instance. So it was very hard to visualize the storyworld.

Twitter itself became a barrier to entry -- individual tweets could get lost in the stream easily, and as much as we digital types might love it, a whole lot of people still don’t use it or understand it. “You just have to go to the profile page and scroll down!” fell on deaf ears. After two months, I finally added Facebook to deliver the same content, something I should have done from the start, but it never garnered that much interest either. It was too hard to figure out what was going on; it was too hard to care.

I made other mistakes. In an attempt to harvest an email list of fans, I made it so you’d have to sign up to access the archives on my blog, which was just creating a barrier to entry for people to check out the story. I tried running a contest to engage the audience and attract more fans, but that still requires an audience to start (I promised the top 10 entries a prize; I got five entries -- which, interestingly, hit the 10% of my followers rule). I gave away a song as the prize, which meant that the only people who might have been willing to pay for it already had it (“It’s creative commons, people will share and remix and it will spread!”). And by month four, I felt I was being too rushed, just trying to keep up with content no one was reading and monthly bonus content no one was paying for. The project was getting away from me. So I pulled the plug.


The Redo

But I wasn’t giving up. I needed time, I needed to figure a lot out and do a lot of work, but I knew I wanted to bring Azrael’s Stop back. But first I had to fix it.

Step 1: Twitter wasn’t good enough. I needed a dedicated blog/website with an RSS feed, and without the slightly-too-constraining 140 character limit; somewhere people could land and consume content and find out more. I also wanted to be as many places as possible -- to not be losing audience just because they’re not on Twitter. So I got a website designer to collaborate with and put up azraelsstop.com; the content will also be available daily on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, and monthly archives on a host of other sites like Wattpad and Scribd.

Step 2: I also needed enough content from the start to draw people in, something that would set up the world and story before being restricted to microfiction. So I wrote an introductory story, a prologue that introduced the characters and setting and hopefully make you care for them. I also collaborated with a couple of artists to have some more artwork associated with the project, to help bring it to life for the audience.

Step 3: Plan. Edit. Raise the quality of the project. Keeping it as something I could do quickly and easily must not stand in the way of quality.

Planning out the entirety of the rest of the project also allows me to know what’s coming when something might require extra production time. And it lets me say that the project will come to an end after one year -- I’m not asking my audience for some unspecified time commitment. And if it’s successful, I can still do spin-offs or future “seasons”. (The storyworld is certainly rich enough for it, as I’m planning to use it for future projects anyway.)

Step 4: Make it as easy as possible for the audience. Any time you put a tiny barrier in, you lose audience. The website will feature a little teaser video, an explanation of what the project is, and a breakdown of where to start -- either full archives where you can easily get all the available content, or a quick summary of the story so far so you can just jump right in if you want instead. I’m trying to make all information and content as easy to find and access as possible.

I’m also removing the paywall completely -- even the bonus content will be available to everyone for free. What does this mean for the business plan, though? Well, I’m a little less concerned about making money than experimenting with the form and finding an audience. But at the end of the project, I will create and (probably self-)publish a collection of all the content (with a bit extra), which I will then sell. An e-book, and album, and maybe some more stuff I have up my sleeve.

Step 5: Market. Get the project out there more. Get it in front of people. Talk it up in guest posts. ^_^


* * *


You can’t count on social media to do your work for you. You can’t rush into something and assume it will work.

Look at it from an audience perspective. Imagine all of your possible audience members. Build it for them.

Make a quality product, and spread it widely.

And always keep re-evaluating the project. Fix it if it’s broken. Who knows, maybe I’ll be back here in four months, with new lessons learned.

Azrael’s Stop will re-launch on November 1st at azraelsstop.com.

Disciplines merging in transmedia

One of the most interesting and at the same time most challenging aspects of transmedia is getting everything to gel flawlessly. It was pretty hard back in the days of interactive television (try telling an MHP programmer that the interactive set-top-box-game he was programming would need to a) look like the rest of the graphics on the show and feel like a natural part of the show, b) be confined to a certain part of the screen abd a certain size to accommodate for video feed on rest of the screen and c) take the show into consideration, not just work on its’ own…phew!) and it’s still a pretty daunting proposition.

It’s extremely important to identify which platforms make sense to use when developing a transmedia project. This in and of itself will give you some minor headaches. Why not use all of them? You really should build an app, or should you? It is a process that needs to be done, and done thoroughly. Will you be launcing and ARG of some kind? Will you have live events? Are you looking at drama webisodes, or do you need television or newspapers or even billboards to cut through to your audience? How about social media, e-mail and so on? The better you know your story (and your target audience!), the better you can choose platforms. The better and quicker you choose platforms, the easier you will have to find the right people to partner with, another crucial part of any transmedia project.

In a post called The Transmedia Manifest the so called High Flyers group, appointed by the Frankfurt Book Fair, took a look at how stories will be taught in the future. It’s a good manifest, encompassing most of the features that make transmedia methods so effective to use in a disrupted media landscape. The 11th thesis of the manifest reads:

Collaborative work
The story-universe is developed in collaboration by a versatile and interdisciplinary team, whose range of skills can meet the demands of experience-based storytelling.

In my book, all the other points of the manifest are dependant on this one. There will be no intriguing multiplatform story, if you can’t get the right people in to produce, program and create for the different platforms. There will be no ”taking advantage of the strenghts of a medium” if you or someone else your team does not fully understand and master the different media that are to be used.

Nick DeMartino wrote an interesting article the other day, looking at transmedia through the goggles of classic media scolar Marshall McLuhan. His pronouncement that ”the medium is the message” is one that media students all around the world have been indoctrinated with for decades, and in many a way it’s still an apt description of where we are today. That makes it even more crucial to create partnerships around the development of a transmedia project, to fully understand the media involved and thereby be able to convey the message, the story.

To wrap up this short post, I’ll readily acknowledge that things are not as bad as they were some 5-6 years ago, when my role as a creator and producer to a large extent meant acting as a translator between writers/directors and programmers. Today most writers and directors (at least those who have been working with multiplatform content development) understand the importance of knowing the possibilities and limitations of other media platforms outside their own main field of interest. Vice versa, most programmers can look at examples and best practices from previous campaigns and see how the tech and the software can bring about a much more engaging and immersive experience if integrated with the story from the beginning, taking into account all the demands and the possibilities the story and the mythology brings with them to the table.

And to finally conclude; if I could wish for one little thing, it’d be something like the collaborative film community at Wreckamovie, only for transmedia projects. Anyone?

MIPCOM 2011 roundup

Packing my bags, ready to leave MIPCOM behind for yet another year. Cannes surprised us all with a weather more like mid-July than early October, although as I look out to sea now, some sort of autumn storm is churning up waves and whipping the palms around quite mercilessly.

I don’t know if it was the weather or something else, but this market lacked a lot of the doom and gloom that had been prevalent at most of the MIPs since 2008. Back then we were heading into the unknown of a recession and everyone had their wallets in a tight grip; this year people were a lot more upbeat, seeing possibilities and doling out money in a steady flow. Which is a bit strange, as we’re heading into yet another recession… but on the other hand, TV viewing figures are up, brands are obviously spending, it wasn’t as bad as feared last time around, so psychologically speaking it makes sense, I guess.

To highlight some of the stuff over the week I managed to catch over the week – and we had so many meetings over the week that I missed most of the sessions, (un?)fortunately – the most obvious one is that the term ’2nd screen’ is exciting to most people. It is quite possible that the fact that people are on a mobile device of some sort – be it smartphone, tablet or laptop – while watching tv, is a fact that has finally penetrated the mind of most people in the business. Perhaps they’ve watched their own kids while they watch tv? The only thing I know is, ’2nd screen’ was the buzzword of MIPCOM 2011.

To this I might add that our lab did studies on interactivity during a tv show – we did the first interactive quiz show in Finland, with set top box interactivity and Javabased interactivity for smartphones, back in 2004 – studies that clearly showed that people felt more engaged with a tv show if they were interactive via a set top box. They felt more personal, but also more detached, if they did the exact same interaction on a smartphone. That says something for connected TVs, I guess, but at the same time you need to factor in the value of having a personal experience in a group, like a family.

I saw some funky stuff being presented by Ex Machina, the people behind PlayToTV, for interaction via iPhone / iPad etc. They use HTML5 which helps it run on anything (and I think HTML5 is going to change the game plan for many companies over the next year or so. Imagine creating something that doesn’t need to be ported to 1000 different devices, something that just works, the way you intended it? Nice.). I spoke to a company from Wales, Little Lamb, who are doing tv shows paired with watermarked iPad apps for 3-5 year olds, for them to interact with a tv show on iPads together with their parents. It’s all going more and more 2nd screen, more and more interactive…. And let’s not forget ’social’!

The talks at MIP showed that more and more people ’get it’; where ’it’ is the fact that most of our audiences have already moved into a very social space. We – and most importantly our content, what we’re offering – need to find out logical and natural place in the same social space. Not intruding, as you wouldn’t like someone bursting into your house while your there with your friends, promoting some tv series that’ll premiere in a week. Just being there might be enough, so that the step to engage or interact is as short as possible for any possible member of the audience. There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to create word-of-mouth for your stuff; it’s only a matter of doing in the right way. Here, again, honesty is key. Tell what you can tell. Be open with what you can not tell. And have a plan for how to harness the audience you do engage.

Got to run to the airport now, try to fly home in the storm that’s apparently racking the whole of Europe. Until MIP in the spring, or somewhere else!

Some thoughts on crowdfunding

Last Thursday I attended the webinar ”Transmedia Outsold or Sold Out”, hosted by the people behind the Storyworld Conference. Informative, thought provoking and all around a well spent hour (check out hashtag #swc11 for tweets from the session, or go here to take part of the recorded session (needs e-mail to access)).

There were other people listening to the webinar as well, amongst them Tom Liljeholm from my neighbouring country Sweden. Tom has been involved in The Truth About Marika, in Conspiracy for Good and is now working with new transmedia project The Karada (which btw sounds absolutely fab). Tom asked me if I was going to Storyworld or not. I replied that I’d love to go, but funds weäre not readily available. Tom had the same problem – a burning urge to be at the conference this year where Transmedia would be in utter focus, and that would attract an amazing host of people connected to this form of storytelling, but a serious lack of funds to support such a trip.

I mean, we can bicker on about the definition of transmedia (and I agree that it, for several reasons, public funding one of them, would be good to have a definition to cover all bases) but at this conference chances are some pretty awesome things are going to happen. Not only at the conferences, but at breakfast, at 2.30AM at the Smuggler’s Cove, or somewhere else ☺. Naturally, we want to be there.

The idea sprung within a couple of minutes. ”How about a crowdfunding campaign?” ”…. Well…. Yeah! What is there to lose? Some of our time, perhaps, but who needs sleep anyway? Mead and mushrooms will take us through the next couple of weeks no problem!”

And so the campaign ”Get Tom And Simon To Storyworld” (or ”Where the Wild Vikings Roam” or ”Trip To Transmedia” or a number of other titles) was born.

It’s now on it’s 5th day, and already it’s exceeding expectations. We chose IndieGoGo for no particular reasons (aside that Kickstarter is still closed to non-US ppl). We could have gone with Sposume, or perhaps InvestIn, but IndieGoGo was recommended to us so IndieGoGo it was. We set a goal of 2700$, which is what the actual flights would cost just about, and set it to run for 2 weeks so as not to leave it too late before the actual conference.

Some reflections on the process so far: when crowdfunding, really really think about your perks. What do you want to offer people in return for their support? For us, the Transmedia Viking t-shirt has been the absolute favourite. Perhaps we should’ve gone for the set of underwear as well? Ah, next time ☺.

Also, be prepared to be a bit of a pain in the ass for your social contacts. You WILL be asking for endorsements, for RT:s, for blog posts about your campaign, for just about anything that will give you more exposure. Most people are surprisingly OK with all of this, perhaps because they’ve tried crowdfunding themselves. I will readily say that I for one will always RT the crowdfunding efforts of contacts in the future, and look hard at funding them to some extent as well. It’s a small effort for one person, but it can mean the world for a certain project.

I am looking forward to the next 13 days and hoping for some serious traction and some more funding. I’m already amazed though, as right now we’re at slightly more than 18% funded, so only 82% still to go. Wish us luck!

Our progress so far - actually a little bit to the west of the Faroe Islands right now!

The transmedia format

I recently stumbled (again) upon this good post by Jason from The Connected Set on why television is an integral part of a transmedia format. Coming from a television background much as Jason, I guess it is no surprise that I agree with him on most of his points.

Television is still very much a powerful player with it comes to getting viewers and audiences engaged in your content. That engagement in turn will generate traction for other parts of your transmedia property – or the other way around, as, for instance, HBO’s Game of Thrones showed this last spring. I wrote a piece for MIPBlog at around the same time, wondering if there was going to exist such a thing as a transmedia format. I wrote at the time:

”The one thing that will be sure to stem the rise of the transmedia format at this year’s MIPFormats and MIPTV is simply the fact that very few formats are transmedia at this point. As more and more projects are initiated, more and more tools are made available and more and more success stories unearthed, however, expect this to change, as transmedia simply offers so many logical and compelling ways to engage consumers more fully into your content.”

Since then I have become more and more acutely aware of the need that transmedia can have of television. TV still boasts impressive revenue. TV has tried and tested (and admittedly sometimes a bit outdated) business models. TV knows (again, a bit outdatedly) how to calculate success. TV has a broad reach.

Now, show me the transmedia project that would say no to impressive revenue stemming from tried and tested business models, with calculateable success founded on a broad reach.

So, as much as television needs to be looking in the direction of transmedia to be able to offer an audience the multiplatform approach many take for granted today (”if this show doesn’t invite me to do something on a 2nd screen (that ties logically and seamlessly into the show itself or the world the show depicts) I’ll just use that 2nd screen to bitch about it on Twitter. Or play Empires & Allies on Facebook”) transmedia needs to be looking at television as an integral part of many transmedia projects. And not as an add-on either, like a reversal of the state of affairs when tv shows should have interactivity at all cost, leading to slap-on, underdeveloped and seriously underwhelming interactive content being published regularly. Nope; just as much as multiplatform or transmedia content need to be developed at the same time as a television show, so must a television show be developed at the same time as the multiplatform and transmedia content.

On that note, see you all at MIPCOM perhaps? :)

Transmedia - 13 months and counting

Greatly inspired by Laura Flemings post "My Year In Transmedia" I realized it’s been over a year since my eyes were opened to transmedia storytelling as a way of developing and distributing stories. Since then I’ve happily embraced transmedia (as I define it (a definition that can be found at the end of this post, so as not to distract from the rest of the post)) in almost every project I’ve been working on. Looking back, I thought it’d be nice to do a wrap-up of sorts.

Background

Briefly about where I come from – I’ve worked in media since the late 80s, when I as a teenager started out in radio. Since then I’ve worked for newspapers, television and for over seven years as a radio show host, editor and producer. I’ve lost count of how many shows I’ve developed over the years, but 50 might be a fairly correct number. I’ve always preferred the immediate and quick nature of radio (not to mention the instant feedback and the interaction with the audience) compared to the more cumbersome nature of television, or the ”telling people what happened yesterday” nature of newspapers (although I love writing).

In 2005 I transferred to my current position as a format developer, originally for interactive television formats (an AFDESI Award nominated quiz show with set-top-box interactivity and live Java-powered mobile phone interactivity tied to the broadcast stream one of the first efforts) but quickly moved on to cross media formats (where our children’s language training game show ”The Space Trainees” was nominated for a Digital iEmmy in 2010). So, that’s where I was in 2010, when I applied for, and got accepted to, the Pixel Lab in Cardiff.

Transmedia – the first contact

I’d blogged some stuff about transmedia (or T-Media as I, for some reason, had called it at the time) but had never really gotten my mind around the concept in a way that made sense to me. The week in Cardiff changed all that. For the first time I understood how powerful a concerted effort over several media can be when trying to tell a story and engage an audience. While there were many brilliant tutors and experts attending – Steve Peters, Michel Reilhac, Christy Dena and so on – I remain deeply indebted to Jeff Gomez. His one hour long presentation, telling about ”the notion of distant mountains”, of mythologies, narrative superstructures and canon is what made my mind click into the right places, all at once.

THE PIXEL LAB 2010 - Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment - Creating Blockbuster Worlds & Transmedia Production

View more presentations from power to the pixel

Jeff's presentation (minus some "secret" slides)

I came back from Cardiff, mind ablaze with ideas and an urge to convey said ideas and concepts to my colleagues, to get everyone on the same page and develop what we’d been working on so far. Easier said than done, I can report in hindsight, but since then, as I said, I’ve integrated the transmedia mindset into almost all projects I’ve been involved in.

Transmedia everywhere

As I see it, almost every aspect of a professional life can be aided by approaching it from a transmedia point of view. Even such a thing as your company’s profile will benefit; traditionally, you are very much supposed to think about what your company is and what it represents, what are your key strengths and what are your strategies. But how to tell the story (or stories) of your company, that’s something that’s often neglected. By transmediating this process – by creating and documenting the mythology of your company, the stories of your personnel and your products, ny carefully thinking about the consumer’s entry points into your company, you can create a coherent whole, that everyone in your company can communicate to anyone outside of your company in the same way, keeping everything intact and keeping the image of your brand within the desired frames.

Building this kind of mythology can also help in unexpected ways when it comes to future strategies (”how does this future possibility fit into our mythology?”) and even product development (”what’s the story of the new product we are about to create?”). For instance, look at Apple’s three year old promotional videos for the first aluminium cased MacBooks – they ooze this kind of storytelling. Now, apply this over different media, using the exact media most applicable for the story you want to tell… you’re there.


Example: The story of the MacBook.

Thinking, developing and blogging

I had been blogging on and off for several years, but in October of last year I felt an urge to start documenting the aha!-moments and the thoughts arising from the development work I was doing. My first post was one aptly called ”Musings on transmedia development”, which I still think fits the bill 100%. Since then I’ve blogged from conferences and s eminars, from fair trades and academical get-togethers; always with transmedia at the forefront.

Funny thing was, whereever I looked, I could see transmedia possibilites. Jeff had talked about using transmedia to create a symphony of stories and narratives; in a post called ”Creating A Transmedia Symphony” I playfully took some online advice on how to create a musical symphony and put all the advice into a transmedia context. It actually worked a treat!

As always, there is a sizeable gap between thinking, talking and writing about something and actually doing and producing something. I was in the fortunate position of being able to do both, as we were working on transmedia development all through the last year, while I was also working on a project of my own (still under development ☺ ), and most of the conclusions I’ve come to, I been conveying via my blog, which at the same time functioned (and still do) as my development notebook, to which I can go back and check on previous thoughts and mirror them on current development issues.

The Network of Transmedia

As with many niche professions, transmedia people are still fairly few and far between. The power of social media and most predominantly Twitter has made it possible to discuss with and learn from some extremely brilliant minds in the field of transmedia. I’ve been most fortunate to be able to travel from Finland to meet some of these people in person, be it at the MIPs or at the Pixel Lab, at SXSW (where the discussion on the term ”transmedia” really took off (and one I won’t be trying to solve in this post thank you very much ☺)) and MPBS. There’s no point in me dropping names here; suffice to say that the network of transmedia professionals is a most generous and caring (not to mention funny, witty, intelligent and creative) bunch of people, one that makes it a joy to browse through the #transmedia Twitter feed every morning. It is also most encouraging to see how many transmedia projects are in development, getting funded on Kickstarter, getting the backing of major broadcasters, brands and studios…

The future

In the past few days I’ve received some notions that transmedia might be vaning. There are conference people debating on whether to include a panel on transmedia or not, there’s industry people fed up with the buzzword. More than a year on from my ”transmedia awakening”, I’m not the least worried. As I see it, the buzzword ”transmedia” might ultimately become redundant, as people (especially people who are supposed to pay for all of it) become fed up with a term that can span basically anything. The buzzword might disappear, but the practice of creating, developing and producing transmedia content, that's a practice that will just become more and more vital, interesting and necessary.


Transmedia: the art and practice of telling stories on multiple platforms. connected via a common story world and mythology, offering different entry points into the same and deepening an audience's engagement and immersion via interactivity and compelling content. This can be one story with different aspects spread over different media, or multiple stories, set in the same world or with the same characters involved. Simple as that.

Transmedia and multiplatform business

I am currently attending the Multiplatform Business School in Ronda, Spain, a five day workshop on, well, how to do business in an age of multiplatform content. It’s been some highly instructive five days, with something like 9-10 projects participants brought to the workshop being constructively criticized and developed further in a timely fashion. An NDA prevents me from going into these projects in any greater detail, but there could quite possibly be some really interesting projects appearing from this group in the coming year.

I usually keep my transmedia goggles as necessary, which it was, for the most part, this week. Looking at transmedia from the business angle is, for me, one of the most interesting ones. As I see it, unless you either have got the backing of a) a governmental fund for an educational transmedia project or one that helps the society in some way or b) a chunk of money from the marketing budget of a film or a tv series or a brand, you will want to be able to create something that can generate revenue in the future, revenue enough for you to be able to keep your transmedia project going, develop it further and/or have money to make the next project you want to do.

It’s basically just like any other business; you wouldn’t be manufacturing shoes unless you were pretty sure you can sell them for a profit. Likewise, I don’t think it makes sense to develop and produce an elaborate transmedia project unless you can see it generating enough revenue for it to be worth it for you (artistic efforts aside, as I can see that happening to an extent).

The five days here in Ronda have given me some thoughts on precisely this matter, some of which I though it prudent to share here (and perhaps initiate a discussion that will let everyone learn more regarding this area):

- Partnerships are important. I could probably rephrase that – partnerships are crucial (unless you’re a mega-huge company, which precious few of us are). When you’ve developed your transmedia idea or project to a level where you can clearly see how it would play out, and once you have material to show and a selling pitch and feel comfortable enough to talk about your project with possible partners, make a real effort to identify the right ones. You might want to partner with a marketing or media agency to find the right brands to work with, you might want to partner with a production company to gain more muscle behind your project, you might want to hook up with an app developer to create the app that is crucial for your project… the possibilities are many. You can find these through Google, through industry contacts and so on; the crucial thing would be to pinpoint WHAT you need and WHOM you’d want to partner with to do it (yeah, and IN WHAT ORDER). Basically: all the areas that you feel you do not master, consider a partner (and take these in the right order; you’re in a more advantageous position when you deal with a brand, for instance, if you have a strong distribution partner lined up already).

- The fragmented media world is a familiar concept for everyone. The challenges are many; how to stand out from the crowd and get noticed, how to keep the audience engaged and immersed, how to communicate in a way that does not clash with the tone and feel of the other parts of the project and so on. But to this comes the challenge on how to make money off of all of this. Getting sponsors in is a way (but make sure your value proposition is an attractive one when dealing with them or you won’t hook them), while other possible ways include app purchases, extra types of content accessible in exchange for FB credits… Something as simple as a Paypal button or perhaps even a Kickstarter campaign for some certain aspect of the project could also be effective. But still, all of these need to serve the needs of your story and your mythology, not just your wallet; consider carefully what will be the right solution for you.

- ”Transmedia” as a term is still – unsurprisingly – something that people, also the ones in the industry, have widely different views on. On every aspect for that matter – what it is, why it is, how it should be done, what the advantages are… So, my advice would be – do, by all means, name your project a transmedia one, but make sure your pitch and presentation is clear and without glitches. It’s just so much easier for buyers to say ”No” than ”Yes”, and ”transmedia” is a term that possibly can make people feel unsure about what they’re actually being pitched.

There was a helluva lot of other stuff as well – the importance of emotion in your project, the impact of mobile… Which I’ll be happy to write about a bit later.

The ”Why” of Transmedia

I’m thrilled to see a great many transmedia projects springing up all around the world, in different settings; from marketing campaigns for blockbusters and tv series to crowdsourced international mystery-stories, from web based crime fiction projects to socially engaged documentaries – the powers of transmedia storytelling are being grasped and acted upon my a steadily increasing number of practitioners. The like-button is firmly pressed for my part.

One thing I myself have found to be of great importance to keep in mind when developing stories and content for a transmedia project is the simple question ”why”? It might sound naive, but believe me, it can at times be a hard question to answer, at least in a way that would satisfy yourself, let alone anyone you would like to invest in your project.

A simple ”because I (or we) can” just does not cut it. That’s a sure-fire way of developing something that doesn’t fit together in the seamless and logical way that’s crucial for any transmedia project. There are just too many pitfalls along the way; there is no need to go digging them yourself.

”Because it’s cool” or "because it's what everyone is doing nowadays" are hardly better reasons. Yes, it will be cool, providing you get it right. Chances are you won’t, and it will not, therefore, be particularly cool. Yes, many others are doing it. This does not mean that you, necessarily, should be doing it as well.

If it’s a transmedia marketing campaign for a release of some kind, that makes it infinitely easier. It’s ”to raise awareness of this particular property” or ”to make people engage in the content and get more viewers in through word-of-mouth”. In this sense you know what you’re aiming for and your results are possible to observe, analyze and draw conclusions from.

Another reason, especially if we are talking about a transmedia campaign connected to an existing property (the new Pottermore instalment might be an example) can be ”to extend the storyworld and offer more content to an engaged audience”. This is a reason that probably could be adapted to most transmedia projects, and in that sense needs more clarification – is it ”to offer alternative or complementary stories set in the original storyworld”? Or is it ”to give the audience a playing field, a sandbox, intended for user generated content”? Is it something else?

It can also be ”to explain the background and the history of the main property in the story” or ”to expand on the mythology through new stories” or even ”to act as a behind-the-scenes view of the main property” (especially in the case of transmedia documentaries).

Whatever reason you have for developing transmedia content (and the answers to the ”why?” above are probably as many and as diverse as the number of transmedia projects in existence), ”Why?” remains a good question to ask, at any point of the development, production and execution phase.

PS. It was swiftly pointed out to me that one - perhaps one of the most central - reason for transmedia would be "to generate revenue" and in the long run "to increase the value of the IP". I will concur, although I will add that at the moment I think most of the transmedia projects we are seeing are pretty happy just to break even. Thanks Simon Pulman for pointing it out. DS

Transmedia, Time and Context

I’ve been totally bogged down with work the past few weeks. Sat in front of Final Cut Pro for most of the time, alternating with meetings and social media strategy planning... I can now confidently say that you can NEVER be too prepared to launch a new project. You can also NEVER be too ready to adapt to things that happen around you, that will influence the story you’re trying to tell. We’re up now, though, here, with the first installment. Working on the rest as we speak.

This in turn has led to me not being able to keep up with all the excellent posts on Twitter, all the new projects and seminars and meetups etc springing up all over the world. Will now try to make amends, not guaranteeing anything though!

Still, a couple of posts got my mind working overtime these past couple of days. Andrea Phillips wrote an excellent post on Time and Transmedia, highlighting the challenges facing anyone working in different time periods within a story, in a real world where viewers can start experiencing that story from just about any point possible. In the comments, Scott Walker pointed me to a post of his that I’d missed last year, on the challenges and possibilities of collaborative transmedia storytelling. Many good points, and with so many people moving into the field of transmedia from numerous different angles, these posts are simply required reading.

My point of view on these matters come from the field of creating a transmedia experience from scratch, without any previous brand or franchise to fall back on. It is an experience that is unfolding in real time, which at the same time will live and prosper drawing on the power of the long tail. In this context, context is, as we have found, crucial. There will be many people entering the story from many different angles, and the story might have unfolded to just about any point. As I see it, there are some points that need to be taken into consideration:

- The foundation needs to be solid. In order to attain this, you must have a grasp of the time line of the project, and a general notion of the story archs and the schedules involved. At the same time, you cannot lock everything into place (at least not with a project like ours, that is expected to run and run) or you will be stifled.

- The foundation needs to be communicated clearly and without any discrepancies. This goes for communicating outside the team producing the content as well as within the team. In this matter, the task of simplifying is crucial. Test and try and test again; if the story world and the basis for the stories you are about to create and tell people is blurry, press the ”sharpen” button immediately. This is not to say that everything needs to be told from the start – quite the contrary – but everyone involved, be it a viewer, a user, a programmer, a writer… everyone needs to see the same thing when they look at your story world and your story.

- Once this is achieved, you need to drop the reins, but give some clear options on how to interact, how to create within your world etc. This goes when it comes to letting an audience interact and create, but also when it comes to not locking down people on the project, but instead give them the right tools and the motivation to, themselves, create and interact within your project. It is nigh impossible to put all this on one person’s shoulders – much better (and much more true!) to give key people the mandate to interact with each other and with the audience, within the context of your story and story world. You’d be amazed at what springs up.

- Finally – don’t panic! With most projects you’ll be involved in that are of a more documentary type – like ours – there will be humans involved. Everyone will also know that there are humans involved. Everyone also knows that humans make mistakes. Mistakes can even be beneficial, as long as you handle them in a way that makes sense within the context of your story and your story world. In a life-affirming, warm story and world, you laugh it off and the audience laughs with you. In a dark and brooding and violent story arc, you behead someone on the team with a vicious snarl towards the audience, and the audience winces in terror but nods knowingly (and this is purely fictional then, of course. If you really behead someone on your team and refers to this post in your defense, I will not be held responsible).

All in all, there are soooo many aspects to think about. I won’t even go into the challenges of interacting with different brands and companies, all with their own strategies, or interacting with collaborators, also with their own strategies, as such instances are merely on a case-by-case basis. I will, however, report on findings along the way. And, yeah – comments are open.

Transmedia methods, when and where to use them...

I was asked to write an article for Digital Book World (up here) on transmedia and publishing. As I researched and wrote the article, a debate was on involving amongst others Mike Monello on Twitter about transmedia vs transmedia methods (i.e. transmedia is transmedia, but a lot of projects that aren't transmedia are using transmedia methods). I can totally understand this thinking, even if it will not affect the way I develop stuff in any sense, but it got me thinking about what methods should be used when, and where...

I do not have the time to write that post now, but will strive to in the next few days. Until then, Glada Wappen as we say over here, as we prepare to celebrate the onslaught of spring :)

The Transmedia Gardener

So, spring is in the air, finally. I’ve been holed up in a studio and have had no time to blog at all. Which is perfectly fine, as I’ve instead been able to actually DO something. Always a nice feeling, especially if the end result will be as good as I think it’ll be. Will post on the project in due time!

Spring is in the air, the snow had melted (partially at least :P) and it was time to sharpen all necessary utensils to get to grips with what passes for a garden around these parts. Standing there, looking at the devastation revealed by the receding snow, my mind started turning around the similarities between that and what I do for a living.

See, gardening and transmedia development, they’ve got a lot in common. No no, hear me out! Like with gardening, where the soil is the one most important aspect – more important than, say hours of sun or how much you water your plants – the foundation needs to be strong and needs to be built and prepared in the right way for any transmedia project.

All that soil-work then, is laying the foundation for the planning work you’ll do for your garden. This then, is totally dependent on the location you’ve got for your garden. Is it a spacious one, where you can spread out and imagine different settings, different themes, different … well, yeah, Entry Points? Is it a narrow ledge, with room for only the barest necessities, like some herbs and suchlike? Is it sunny, is it shady? What are your possibilities, and what are your limitations?

In a transmedia setting, this is equivalent to both your a) budget and b) project. Naturally, what resources you have will affect what you can plan for your project. But more importantly, the project itself will tell you what can – or rather should – be done in the context of the project. Do not order an iPhone app just ’cause it’s cool, if it doesn’t fit your project naturally and logically. At the same time, make sure you don’t order that pine tree plant if all you’ve got is a 3 m2 patch of grass behind your house.

Now, if you look at a garden, you need to plan for longevity or short bursts. Is it going to be an explosion of colors in spring that will then fade away, not needing maintenance, or do you prefer a garden where different things are in bloom at different times of the spring, summer and autumn? When developing transmedia, you need to take these things into consideration as well – are you merely marketing a major release later on, so a quick, massive burst will do? Or are you in it for the long run, maintaining your stories and your story world for months and years on end? Be prepared though – it’s extremely easy, in gardening as in transmedia, to underestimate the time and effort needed to complete a vision and maintain it properly.

I could go into how you chose your plants correlates with how you chose your platforms, but I won’t. Instead, I will end by saying that gardening could learn a thing or two from transmedia as well. I’ve yet to see an immersive, interactive, crowdsourced garden, for instance. If there is one, I’d love to see it.

Now then, MacBook and spade in hand – off to the garden! Or was it the study??

MIPTV 2011 Wrap Up

So, Friday and writing this while flying back from six days of MIPFormats, MIPTV and Connected Creativity. I see no real point in going throught the proceedings in too great a detail in this post, as you can find all live blogs, links to videos and pretty great insighty stuff at the MIP Blog pages here. Kudos to James, Angela, Stuart and anyone else involved, they did an absolutely marvellous job of keeping people – including me – up to date with what was happening. I’m going to try – as was suggested to me – to Storify my tweets from the past week. I’ll let you know when I’m up to scratch on that.

Gavin McGarry asked me during his wrap up session what had been the key things I’d seen or experienced during these past days… and in a way, there wasn’t anything really new to get me excited and up-in-arms, not directly. In a way, the Palais was still filled with people selling or buying animated series, drama or documentaries, much as it has been for the past six years I’ve been attending.

A new deal on the horizon

But still, something is clearly afoot. You hear about Netflix commissioning series from major producers, Facebook teaming up with Warner Brothers to offer tier one movies for Facebook Credits, Google earmarking 100 million dollars for low-cost content for re-branded YouTube channels… TV is under pressure. Yet, in my book, it’s a good pressure, as the aforementioned ventures are great examples of cost-effective ways to get content to people via services they use daily anyway. When thinking of combining content with FB and YouTube there are also a lot of possibilities from a storytelling and transmedia angle – challenges, yes, but first and foremost possibilities.

One possibility I for one will be looking into is the possibility to combine content distribution with the very well working platform that BitTorrent can offer. Now, as CEO Erik Klinker pointed out, they offer a distribution platform and over 100 million active users, but they are not going into commissioning or producing. Again, I don’t believe this is the only or ultimate solution, but is is A solution, and one that could work very well in combination with others.

Such a lot of people are touching on the convergence between mobile and televison and online and what have you. Still, these days gave me the feeling that – as I tweeted during the week, with regards to SXSW vs MIPTV – you have social media and location based services people on one side, trying to figure out how to reach the massive audience and the massive revenue streams that television still has to offer, while on the other side are the television people, scratching their heads while trying to figure our how to integrate social media and other new servicese with their shows and online content. What is needed is some sort of translation service and/or facilitating service that would just put the right people together with each other and explain one’s viewpoint to the other . (Need something like that, give me call ☺ ).

Mind over matter

This was what Connected Creativity along with their Experience Hub was about, at least as far as I understood it. To a point it worked well; the talks at MIPCC differed quite a bit from the ones in the Palais. Many of them gave great insights into areas I had been lacking in. Especially Tomi Ahonen’s talk (where the way he delivered it was half of the experience), the talk from Fjord on the future of augmentation and AR, Facebook’s visions… I heard so much good things said about Tiffay Shlain’s presentation, which I unfortunately missed, but will try to catch up on later.

On the other hand with regards to Connected Creativity, so many of the people who would’ve needed to hear those talks were in meetings at the Palais or elsewhere during the sessions – not to mention that there being an extra and pretty substantial fee for registering to MIPCC had deterred a number of people from even registering.

The Experience Hub was a nice feature – a big tent quite close to Lionsgate by the beach, essentially straight ahead if one decended the stairs from Riviera Seaview – showcasing a lot of new technology to, with luck, be part of the entertainment and media toolbox in the future. For example, Emotiv’s helmet with it’s almost magical use-this-to-control-anything-on-the-screen-in-front-of-you-with-only–your-brain powers was pretty amazing. We’re getting one for research purposes – as we have a state-of-the-art User Experience and Media laboratory – so I’ll let you know my verdict when I’ve had the chance to play around with it for a while.

IMHO one of the best speakers at the MIPTV panels was Kevin Slavin of Starling.tv (see more about his talk here). Many others touched on the same subject, but he was the clearest and most to-the-point; what the industry has been thinking of as the ”audience” or the ”consumer” or the ”target group” or the ”ratings” are actually human beings, and they set the agenda. They can be as much a part of your story as any scripted character (or show host, or contestant) that you as a producer choose to show as part of the content. If there is a vacuum – as in there not being any Mad Men characters on Twitter – the audience will fill that vacuum for you (there are over 20 Mad Men characters on Twitter to date, registered and managed by fans). If they like (or even better, love) your content, they will also take extremely good care of these characters.

So, a much frowned-upon term....

This then is where the magic of transmedia would enter. Only that transmedia, in the setting of MIPTV, still is more of a hindrance than a help when trying to get something commissioned. As we all know, it is a lot easier to say NO than YES, if you are in acquisitions, and making people unsure about what they actually are buying is a sure-fire way of making the likelihood of a NO reach 99,5%. And, unfortunately, ”transmedia” is still a term that often makes people at least a little bit unsure of what they exactly are being pitched. As Nuno Bernardo said, many a good sales pitch has been ruined by not stopping in time and instead continuing with the fatal words ”…this is also multi-platform, integrating the web and mobile solutions…”. What we need are a lot more great transmedia tv examples to point to – ”hey, like that one, but a little bit different, yeah!”.

Will try my best to do my part on that account.

So, a mix between the old and the new, this week’s MIP – now more so than ever, in my book. Thanks again to all the great people I met – both old friends and new – and hope to see you all again in the not too distant future!

MIPTV Round Up Day One

The first day of MIPTV drew to a close, as the lawn in front of Grand was packed with people, the beer was as good (and as expensive) as ever and the Cannes night was a very (for a Finn) suitable +15C.

Whereas MIPFormats was a lot about discussing the creative challenges, rights issues and suchlike of formats, MIPTV is, as always, about business. Still, there are a number of interesting panels and talks going on during the day, where creators and industry people share insights and cases. I was quite happy to see a panel on Transmedia, called ”Transmedia Storytelling: How to achieve Creative Excellence?” – especially as the panel featured people like Nuno Bernardo (Sophie’s Diary, Final Punishment), Christopher Sandberg (Truth About Marika, Conspiracy for Good), Tracey Robertson (The Lost Experience), Tom Thirlwall (Kate Modern) and Matt Costello (Polar Productions).

Transmedia at MIP

Now, the live blog of the session is up here, and the whole of the session can be viewed on YouTube here, so I won’t go into detail on what every said during the 1h+ session. Some notes though:

- It seems like the divide is still there, between creatives, tech, marketing etc. ”Sometimes I have made the mistake of pitching a tv show really well, only to – at the end of the pitch – go into multiplatform aspects and possibilities. Then every department must get involved, and no ones wants to assume responsibility for the project”, said Nuno Bernardo more or less. So yes – even though we are getting there, slowly but surely – there is no one person that is a great creative, great producer, knows all the tech involved intimately… Teamwork is a must. We just need to get the teams to work together better and understand each other better.
In my opinion, that is also one of the strengths of thinking transmedially when building a project (no matter if it is drama, game show, news, documentary, kids show…). By building the ”world” of your project and defining core values, it’s place in the world and all actions and reactions that can happen in that world and why they can happen, it is infinitely more easy to explain the content and what you want to achieve to anyone who gets involved, be it tech, creatives, marketing people or anyone involved in the production.
(For example news; they are set in the real world obviously. But to create a good news show, first create the world that is the news show, everyone working with it, all the facilities, all the equipment, building up all the thoughts and the values you want to promote through your news).
- I also can’t help but ponder at the difference between the crowd at SXSW and the crowd at MIPTV – especially, as I tweeted yesterday, the fact that many of the tech-savvy social media and localization service and funky-photo-app-people at SXSW are really really eager to somehow get into television – partly because that’s where some money can be found but to a greater degree because that’s where they can reach an audience better and get involved in ”real” content. At the same time we have a lot of tv and media people here at MIPTV thinking about and wonder how on earth to capitalize on social media and other types of emerging tech and services. I can’t but think these two worlds would need to collide at some point - which will happen, I’m sure, and #MIPCC is perhaps a step in the right direction.

Please do watch the video, or read the live blog, some nice takes there.

Content 360

I had a look at the pitches for the Content 360 competition in the Fremantle/RTL category (which was called Interactive & Cross Media but was quickly rebranded ”Transmedia”, much to the surprise of the people pitching). Four pretty good efforts – one location-and-app-based national treasure hunt, one build-communities-with-music-and-extreme-sports-and-compete-between-communities, one make-your-online-profile-your-lottery-ticket-in-an-online-game-show and one convince-audience-to-part-with-their-money-and-give-to-you-for-your-cause. Not bad ideas at all, will be interesting to see who wins – revealed tomorrow, Wednesday, night.

Fresh?

The Fresh TV Around The World showcase was actually not all that fresh, IMHO, as much of the stuff on display was things looking a lot like stuff we’ve seen before. Here’s the list of the shows shown, from my Twitter feed:

1. Trasformat (Italy) - decode disfigured pics of celebs
2. Honey Pack the bags (Banijay)
3. The Shuffle (Shine) – sort stuff in right order, get clues by performing challenges
4. The Call (Zodiak) – based on prank calls, must prank call friends to win
5. The Recruits (Talpa) Find recruites to finish challenges to go on and win
6. You Deserve It (SevenOne) - main contestant gives money to someone who deserves it (mother etc)
7. Holding out for a hero (ITV) - three contestants play for prize to make someone else's dream come true
8. Still Standing (Armoza) - 1 against 10, and a bit of Million Pound Drop as well
9. The Magicians (Shine) Three magicians in pairs w/celebs compete
10. Impossible (2waytraffic) - 1 couple against 1 magician; is the trick impossible or not?
11. Lady Burlesque (Veralia) - talent show, next burlesque star
12. Dance Cam Slam (MTV) - compete in dance contest via web cams
13. Ano 0 (Canal 13/Chile) - apocalyptic game show, 22 ppl have survived devastating flood
14. Family Explorer (Zodiak) - 5 families out in the wilderness, competing for cash prize
15. Flashback (Warner Bros) - physical game show + memory skills
16. The Village (All3) - couples must charm villagers to win a home in the village
17. A Farmers Life for Me (BBC) - 9 couples compete to get a farm for a year, through farming challenges
18. Love Triangle (Eyeworks) - contestant must chose between two lovers
19. Man Up The House (Eyeworks) - man & friends get to renovate the home, w/o wife getting in the way
20. How to live with women (DRG) - Men go to bootcamp to learn how to live w/ women
21. Service w/ a Smile (Shine) - mentally disabled persons working in a hotel, fulfilling their dream of a real job
22. Beauty and the Beast:Prejudice (Zodiak) where "beauty junkie" lives together w/ disfigured person #miptv
23. It Gets Better (Shine) - 8 celebs who've been victims help other victims
24. Sun, Sex and Supsicious Parents (Zodiak) - parents peeping in on kids doing naughty stuff
25. Meet The Parents (All3) - boyfriends must impress potential in-laws, only thing is, they are actors + hidden camera

I had unfortunately missed out on all the fun that happened in the Experience Hub tent outside the Palais, but went there for a quick look; lo and behold, I saw a fairly interesting product, showcased by Metaio from Germany – a slick app-based participate-in-television-through-AR-tv solution that I think I need to examine a bit closer; might be good to integrate in some format in the future.

Finally a quick CONGRATULATIONS to the Emmy winners of yesterday, nice party and SO nice to see Shankaboot from Lebanon pick up an Emmy. Well done!

Second day starting now, with meetings, meetings, and then the kick-off of the Connected Creativity – will be back with that later.

MIPFormats Round Up Day Two

So, second – and final – day of the MIPFormats are done and dusted, and it’s time to evaluate what became of it. Generally speaking, I’m very much in favor of there being a weekend dedicated to formats (which I would, being a format developer by trade). There was reportedly 600 people signed up for this years MIPFormats, but I doubt all showed up at the same time, as I don’t believe there were that many people in attendance at any of the panels I took part of.

I will say that I was slightly disappointed in the lack of fresh-thinking stuff on display during these two days. The winner of the Fresh Talent Pitch was basically dating for seniors, with a bit of elimination and some sexy young bodies thrown in for fun. Not to take away from the creators of that format – I believe it will get produced, and I believe it will get ratings. It’s just doesn’t ooze newness in any way.

Furthermore, the formats that were shown later on in the day under different circumstances – from showcases by big companies to Fresh Format-looks at new stuff – not really much caught your imagination. Just twists on things we’ve seen before (while the Hypno-surgery format was a bit new, I’ll admit that, not that I’d probably watch it…☺ )

Some light

So, you say, do something better yourself then, eh? Yeah, I am trying to. I believe that the next-to-last panel I witnessed, which was the second part of the MIPFormats Interviews sessions – featuring Scott/Ogilvy, Morley/Sony, Brickle/Monterosa and Fenton/Zig Zag – talked the most about where we are heading. Brands are increasingly looking to integrate themselves into content. Producers NEED to look at how to integrate these brands, so that it is done in a natural, logical way and not forced upon the end consumer in the bullyish kind of way we’ve witnessed before.

We all know that the money that was in the TV industries – from the broadcasters that is – isn’t really there anymore. So fresh money needs to come into the game. IMHO this is where transmedia storytelling enters the fray, as this gives any creator a multitude of options to integrate brands into a storyworld, and brands a multitude of options to connect to content that fits in with their core values.

An example

A very simple thought experiment – what if one of the side characters in a television show blogged about her life outside the show? And what if she, in that off-tv life, got a job at a certain brand? That brand could naturally be integrated in the show, and have it’s own, scripted life on the blog. Where it could tie in to real life events; when the character tweets about an upcoming promotional event – the next day the event is launched for real… blurring the lines between real and fiction, and creating engaging content.

I won’t delve further into the takes from the day, as you can see the sessions and read the comprehensive live blog by the competent people of ReedMIDEM and MIP here. Instead, I’ll have a beer and tend to that bloody foot of mine :P

Remember, it is a kindness to buy formats from people with crutches!! ;)

MIPFormats Round Up Day One

So, MIPFormats occupies the two days pre-MIPTV, showcasing a lot of up-and-coming formats, discussing format rights and format disputes and during this first day taking a look at the future of the format business in general.

Format Futures

The day started off with a look at the Format Futures 2011, where David Jenkinson from C21 begun with a brief look at which conclusions the C21 Formats Report 2011 had drawn. Amongst the facts – 91% of buyers say they will buy as many formats or more than last year, 60% say they are going to buy more (which is nice if you are selling formats of course). Top three in format genres are thought to be Constructed observational documentary, Expert-led factual entertainment and social network-related formats, while elimination-based reality formats and cooking/food formats are seen to be waning. Happy to see that Finland is thought of as the 6th hottest country when it comes to new formats (behind the US, the UK and Holland, but ahead of Israel and Japan). I’m pretty sure the formats report will be available online at some point, as it was shared to all attendees at MIPFormats, will notify when I know more about that.

The talk featured Karoline Spodsberg from Banijay, Nicola Söderlund from Sparks Network and Jan Salling from Nordic World. Big take-aways from that was Spodsbergs opinion that "We will be moving away from constructed formats to less constructed, more story driven types of formats" (which resonates well with the creation of more transmedia type formats) and Sallings very true take on the questions of rights and revenue splits - "Big challenge is to retain rights for producers; no plug-and-play solution. Need to give more back to producers" (so true, more shares to the one creating will mean that more and better will be developed and produced in the future). There was also a big concern about the consolidation of the business – everything is becoming one big company, so whom should new concepts be pitched to? David Jenkinson wasn’t too concerned - "as companies consolidate, the people that don't like it leave and found new companies".

The session about mediating format disputes was set up as a sort of play where two fictional production companies went head to head regarding two very similar formats. I had to leave the session before the end, but I will echo Mikko Silvennoinens opinion: “Let's discuss real cases please! Come Dine vs Four Star Dinner. Survivor vs Celebrity Get Me Out of Here”. Key point, try to come to some sort of solution and not go to court.

Fresh Formats in the Factual vein

In the Fresh Formats this Saturday (there will be another tomorrow) the focus was on Factual Entertainment. To recap, I will make it easy for myself and copy my tweets from the sessions. Here are the 12 featured formats:

1st format: Shedding for the wedding, from CBS, engaged couples losing weight
2. Coming Soon: Love, 5 single/famous women search for true love (Israel/Endemol)
3. Threesome, where three ppl share a flat and experiment sexually (Norway, DRG)
4. The Joy Of Teen Sex, from Zodiak. Advice on teen sex in walk-in clinic
5. Teenage Boss (DRG, Norway) teenager takes responsibility for family financies for 1 month
6. Hijos de Papa (Plural, Spain) 8 rich kids kicked out, must adjust to tough jobs to manage
7. Working Girls (endemol, UK) lazy ladies (WAGs?) whipped into shape by biz women
8. Junior Doctors (BBC) 7 newly qualified doctors, their 1st month documented
9. Toughest place to be a Paramedic (BBC) ordinary people go abroad to test themselves in hardest jobs
10. Cover Me (2waytraffic) 2 music stars create new hits based on each other's work
11 The House That Made Me (BBC) Celebs back in reconstructed childhood homes
12. You can't take it with you (Fremantle) following families as they prepare wills

All in all, not all that many really exciting formats. I did get the feeling I’ve seen most of them before, in one take or another. The Threesome and Teen Sex ones were slightly interesting, but then again they would, wouldn’t they?

The Freshest of Talents

The Fresh Talent Pitch was the last session I went to, where six formats had been chosen by The Wit to be presented to a jury consisting of Anniea Wegelius from SVT/Sweden, David Lyle from Fox Look and Colin Jarvis, formerly BBC. The six formats were BuS STOP from Spain, Crossword is coming to town (Germany), Dracula Tour Challenge (Romania), My Baby's Name (France), On the Wave of Love (France) and Queen of Style (Germany).

Of the six formats the Dracula one was the one with the richest story possibilities. I believe it didn’t win mainly since it was not really thought through to the end – there is a great backdrop, but the icing on the cake (and parts of the filling as well) just aren’t there yet. I’m convinced it will get made though, just need some more work. Bus Stop was a dating format based around a bus driving to different cities – definitely needs some work – while Queen of Style had “possibilities in any direction” (which is never a good thing to say in a pitch, as a potential buyer can think in a lot of directions and, like most people, dislikes to be confused, especially in a business meeting) which probably was it’s downfall in this competition.

My Baby’s Name had a complex game setup that I didn’t quite get – about guessing the name of an unborn child – and didn’t feel quite thought through either. As Colin Jarvis said, he thinks it may be better as just a part of another show. Crossword is coming to town was about painting a giant crossword on a town square and have a team try to solve it, with the help of the town’s population. It was a good public service-minded idea, and rightfully won the creator, Uwe Stanz, the Entertainment Masterclass scholarship. Nice one!

The winner then, was a French format called “On the wave of love” from NeweN. Seniors have a right to love too! So they are put on a cruiser with five suitors each, and one is eliminated in every harbor. Tricky things pop up as well – Mystery Suitors for instance, and the fact that the crew on the ship are sexy little young things (male and female) that can try to woo the seniors as well. Now, I don’t know if I would watch it, but as the jury also obviously saw, it does have potential. So, congratulations!

The last word

More tomorrow, but as a conclusion, and having been banging on about the powers of transmedia storytelling (and blogging for ReedMIDEM today on the possibilities of transmedia formats) I will say that I’m not surprised there are no transmedia formats on display. Not surprised, but I would have liked to be surprised by there being some. Perhaps ours are featured next year ;).

Until tomorrow!

TransMIP 2011 - a first look

Tomorrow sees the kick-off for a week of MIPness in Cannes, France. Leading out are two quite different events: MIPDocs is focused on documentaries, and is an established part of the MIPTV setup, where producers and buyers sell and buy a multitude of documentaries over the course of two days. I am not registered for MIPDoc, so even though I would be utterly surprised if not a large part of the documentaries featured could (and perhaps should) have a developed transmedia side to them, I will not be able to comment in detail.

MIPFormat, on the other hand, is merely a year old and already branching out over two days, not one as was the case last year. The format business is reportedly worth upwards of 3 billion euros now, which makes formats a viable part of any discussion around the media industry. Transmedia formats are still few and far between, but this is something I convinced will change in the near future. One featured session is the Fresh Talent Pitch, where a number of chosen formats are pitched to the attending crowd. Amongst the finalists are formats such as Dracula Tour Challenge, which simply feels made to be transmediated. From the description of the format:

«Dracula Tour Challenge» is an adventure competition show in which foreign participants are brought to Transylvania to confront the myth of Dracula and the evil spirits that lurk in this land. The purpose of the show is two-fold. One, to create an entertaining, frightening and thrilling competition for viewers. And two, to provide a unique history of vampires, Dracula and other mythical monsters that originated in this extraordinary area.

Now, what storylines could not be spun from this story world? We’ll see what happens with the format.

There are a number of interesting talks during MIPFormats, many who have some connection to transmedia, be it about rights and disputes or creative workshops. But we have to wait until Monday and MIPTV before transmedia is really on the agenda.

At a talk called ”Transmedia Storytelling: How to Achieve Creative Excellence?” Jesse Cleverly from Connected TV moderates a panel with, amongst others, Nuno Bernardo (beActive), Tracy Robertson (Hoodlum) and Christopher Sandberg (Company P) in a session that will ”talk through their strategic thinking, their creative development philosophies, and their multidisciplinary production processes.” I can see many ways this panel could go, but I dearly hope, from an admittedly personal POV, that it will go in-depth on development and design matters.

Hot on the heels of that panel will be a screening of the four finalists of the Fremantle/RTL Content 360 category ”Interactive & Cross-Media Digital Entertainment Formats”. I have no idea what to expect from this, but one can always dream of a quartet of beautifully crafted transmedia formats that take your breath away, right?

There’s a slew of other interesting talks and panels as well, of course – like ”Monetising Content on New Platforms” or ”Multiplatform Engagement Through Apps” or why not “Connecting to Tomorrow's Audiences”. All of these have the potential to not only touch on transmedia but go a lot deeper into that sphere (which should be normal, as that would help keep content and story world in line etc etc). At the very least I expect to get a lot of interesting notions and hints that I can take back to my drawing board after MIP.

There is also the MIPCC, the Connected Creativity, happening at the same time as the ”regular” MIPTV. Here I’m hoping to hear more about mobile, apps and their ties in to the television industry. A highlight will be Gavin McGarrys wrap-up session on ”Building Cross-Media Strategies” on Thursday.

So, be warned, there will be a lot of tweets coming from MIPTV in the coming week. If you decide to unfollow precisely because of these tweets, do refollow back in a weeks time, ok? ☺

Transmedia – it’s kind of everything

This weekend has been about recouperating from SXSWi, physically as well as mentally. Time zones are still playing havoc with my sleeping patterns, but slowly but surely things are settling into place again. Which is good, as there is much to be done.

In hindsight, SXSWi took the field of transmedia at least a couple of steps forward. I read this well written article in The Guardian, by Oliver Burkeman, on takings from this year’s SXSW festival, and one thing in particular resonates strongly with transmedia today, as I see it. Burkeman writes:

” It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"? Or "design thinking"? Or "open source government"? What is "content strategy"? No, I mean, like, specifically?

The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. "Well, from one perspective, I guess," he said, "it's kind of everything."

The many requirements

That’s what transmedia is evolving into as well, in my opinion. No longer is it good enough to know one field well, like television, or film, or online portals, or how to write a good story, although all these are still important. It’s just that it’s not enough anymore. When writing a story, you need to have a notion of the possibilities that story can give to an online entry into your world, or as an ARG, or as a graphic novel. It's like a CEO of a trucking company; today he needs to know the basics about SEO as well, to keep himself in business. Or the florist who needs to get savvy in the ways of Facebook, just to pick up on all weddings being planned.

When in pre-production for your tv series, you need to have an understanding for how the interaction with viewers can take place on Twitter, Facebook and so on. Most people – great people at what they do – really do not have that inkling yet. This again leads to examples of bulky, unwieldy transmedia that does not connect logically and seamlessly, as it has been assembled from the same set of pieces but with everyone involved looking at their own blueprint that they themselves have drawn up, without talking to each other overly much.

TAG

Here is where I think the Transmedia Artists Guild has made a timely entrance onto the transmedia arena. Because we have to learn, each and everyone of us. And the best way to learn is by doing, and talking to people who have been there, done that and got a number of t-shirts. Whether it’s about best practises or how to engage an audience, about how to connect an ARG in the best way or how to use characters Twitter accounts for best effect, I see the TAG forums as a great place to interact with other creators and developers and get their invaluable insights. If you haven’t yet, do sign up – it’s a place to talk and a place to find other people to discuss with that you do not first have to spend 30 minutes explaining the concept ”transmedia” to.

See you there!

SXSW Round Up Day Five

My own participation in the SXSW line up this last day of SXSWi was cut short by a forced visit to St Davids Hospital in Austin. As a side not, let me just take this opportunity to accolade the medial service provided; all involved were extremely professional, kind and efficient. Wait to get in was 15 minutes tops. Kudos! On the other hand, waiting 2h for a taxi was slightly irritating; in the end a collague got a cab down at the Convention Centre in one minute flat and came up to get me.

So, even though being in Austin, this last day I had the opportunity to follow SXSW in the way most people actually do, those not attending that is; by trying to follow the right persons, read the right blogs and figuring out the essential hashtags.

ARGs tell your story

Adrian Hon from sixtostart held an – apparently – well attendend talk on ”Project 314: Putting the Game back into ARG”, which was about looking at ARGs as stand-alone experiences, can it work or not? As said in the description of the talk – ”we found that there are enormous advantages in creating an ARG that's attached to an online game; for one, you can avoid the irritating friction that always occurs when switching between media; for another, the ARG feels completely natural.”

So, ARGs promise to transform the world of entertainment and storytelling, but often end up not really delivering. They’ve been overhyped and oversold and are now in a state of disillusionment – on the other hand, that means the only way is up! One great way of scaling ARGs is to automate them – example is www.smokescreengame.com - but this comes at the expense of the ‘magic’ of the story. And, which must be remembered, every extra action a participant needs to do in order to advance the story is an opportunity to just say "screw it, I'm giving up".

Adrian advocates, and I’m with him on this, not making ARGs so hard to play. The charm of ARGs isn't in the hoax - it's in the experience. Knowing how long a book is doesn't spoil the experience of the book. If you’re wondering how to make an ARG - steal success strategies from other types of games to improve the ARG experience.

All in all good advice. ARGs are a brilliant way to engage people, but just as Andrea Phillips talked about in her Hoax or Transmedia talk, with some of the examples she showed us, hoaxing might feel tantalizing and fun, but most of the time it’s seriously counterproductive. Trust your story and the way you’ve built your experience, let the people get immersed, and there will be no need to try to fool them. Above quotes were a condensed version of the #project314 hashtag.

The Transmedia backlash

Now, a big trend this year was the transmedia backlash which was very apparent during these days at SXSW. From @feliciaday stating being really tired of transmedia, to @jaybushman jokingly suggesting that he’d submit a panel to SXSW next year about everyone who hates the term transmedia, the term has gotten some severe beating from a number of sources – including @kevmoss, putting up this page on “Should I Feel Embarrased to Use the Phrase Transmedia?” for people to slug it out around the term.

In my opinion this is a very natural backlash. I second @glecharles who tweeted “Interesting to see the #transmedia backlash building. That's good; it's the step that comes before awareness and proper adoption. Go!”

It is also a question of so many people having to come around to the term, from developers and designers to marketing people and producers – it is quite natural that the term gets thrown around a lot and a bit battered in the process. I had a discussion with @geoffreylong over Twitter (before phone batteries and wifi connections let us up) and I totally agree with him – “Abandoning #transmedia because the buzz is wearing off is like abandoning the Internet after the dotcom collapse.” There is no need to abandon anything yet, but I can see where Geoffrey is coming from, as he is anxious not to abandon terminology that can help us build a standard for creating transmedia, a standard similar to “close-up”, “POV” etc in regular film-making. On the other hand I would argue that much of that terminology is moving away from technically-based and into more experience-based terminology.

All in all, we’re getting there – and I still think it’s nice that we do not have a definite definition of Transmedia yet. It’s more interesting like this ☺

Conclusion

I will conclude by saying that SXSWi is a blast. It’s also exactly what you make of it – at any given point, dozens of people are talking about interesting things, just go listen… or chat to the guy next to you; he might be the online traffic analytic from Canada that your project has sorely been missing, or the venture capitalist that is looking for exactly a project like yours. Almost guaranteed though, he or she is a nice and friendly person whom you can have an interesting discussions with. And yeah, find the right parties via Twitter, Yobongo or any other app you’re using, and try not to bust up your foot ☺

I’ll add some links to this post as soon as I am somewhere where the wifi connection is a bit better. Here's a link to Guardian UKs look at the tech presented this year. This is Fast Company's list of the most innovative companies in 2011. More links coming in the near future. Thank you SXSWi, and goodbye! Hope to see you next year!

SXSW Round-Up Day Four

This Monday started out on a personally slightly unpleasant note, as I apparently had managed to get some sort of inflammation going in my foot. Basically, it hurt like hell with every step I tried to take. But, well, staying at the hotel didn’t really feel like an option, so after a prolonged an unsuccessful search for a crutch or a walking stick (and a visit to the First Aid centre at ACC – ”what’s your status sir? Do you have an insurance?”) I just decided to hobble along (but discounting sessions at Sheraton or even the Hilton, as I really didn’t feel like walking a lot.

15 minutes of transmedia blast

So, first session was a short and intensive one, as Anthea Foyer held a talk on Transmedia – Formula for Success at the Future15 track of the SXSW (which is basically everyone talking getting 15 minutes to talk on their subject). Now, hats off to Anthea for this session, which from my point of view was the most condensed and to-the-point one so far.

So, as Anthea did put it, there are five aspects to creating a transmedia property:

• provide your audience with new and exciting ways to participate with your content (as an example, their own Time Tremors)
* create multiple points of entry, maximize audience exposure and uptake. And yeah, it really doesn't matter if the audience understands what transmedia is; it is enough if they are comfortable with the platforms used
* drive content and audience through a number of interconnected platforms and channels. An example would be Cisco's The Hunt
* create a momentum of audience participation that is both sustainable and far reaching. There might be audiences you had no idea of, but your audience will find them. And yeah, gone are the days of forcing the consumer to consume what you want them to. Just remember, be agile - let people come in and tell their stories.
* make sure you create meaningful content and a great story. When you're in the story, you don't care about platforms or tools as you're immersed.

A fast and furious take on transmedia, and perhaps the best 15 minutes I spent in Austin this first time I was here. I sincerely do like when people who have done something can come and talk about their experiences and their conclusions from that. Thank you Anthea.

The future of television

I then - mostly because of said hurting foot - remained seated in ballroom E to hear more Future 15 talks. Richard Bullwinkle, Chief Evangelist of Rovi, talked about the Connected TV and about how the television is not a PC, however much you would like to make it into one. In fact, Rovi has pulled data from boxes in a lot of houses, showing that 86% of viewers have no idea what they are going to watch when they start watching television. Bullwinkle's point was then, naturally, that no matter if you didn't know, your box should know what you would want to watch and suggest those things to you (where I'm more inclined to think that it would be nice to open the box and immediately choose between two options - the "I handle this myself" option and the "OK then let's see what you'd suggest for me" option). Bullwinkle's take on it is to have a second screen be your navigator - your smartphone, tablet - and use that for better interface, personalized ads etc. Well, I don't know about ads - I'd much rather have it as one entry into a transmedia project, use it for storytelling... Fine, if a brand can fit into that without messing things up, why not? But story first.

A little while later, Utku Can from Mint Digital delivered an interesting quarter of an hour on TV vs the Web back channel. Now this is one trend being discussed at several sessions here, about The Hills and their backchannel, about the Twitter streams around the Oscars etc. And yes, TV is social, and the social has moved from the sofa to the web, just as @utku pointed out. Fact is that 52% of all people use the Internet while watching TV (and a staggering 77% in the age group 18-24). With chatter being inherently competitive, and much content lending itself beautifully to chatter, this will just grow and grow - so design for that, design for split attention! But recognize that the viewer will choose how to watch.

@feliciaday and @garyvee

The keynote with Felicia Day was a bit interesting; she is an entrepreneur and she's good at what she's doing. Basically what she said was "Do your own thing, find your audience, let them advocate you, have great content, don't sell out". All good advice.

Rounded off the day by hobbling into Gary Vaynerchuck's session on brands. The man is a maniac to be sure, but a lot of the things he says makes sense - brands have got to become humanized; less like that friend who calls you all the time to tell you stuff you don't really want to hear, but more like the friend YOU call when you want to talk to someone or needs to ask advice. Give first, worry later should be a motto. And yeah, like many others I've encountered during these days, @garyvee is a big believer in context. To quote: "if Content is King the Context is God. I'm obsessed with context." This holds true for transmedia stories as well; don't forget the context. And keep it real, true - authentic, not necessarily realistic.

...and an un-cooperative foot

All in all a pretty packed day, not to mention meeting such a lot of awesome people, also at some parties later on... Yesterday evening I ended the post thus:

(at this point I’m going to have to stop for the moment, as foot is killing me. Hospital next I think, which sucks majorly… I’ll be back with the rest later, bummed to (probably) miss the last day)

And to update - yeah, the foot was x-rayed, nothing broken, muscles and soft tissue getting an inflammation going basically. So, on crutches and following the last day over Twitter at the hotel, unfortunately. I'll blog about that tomorrow, I think :). And yeah, thanks everyone who've expressed their concerns and offered help - you're all brilliant. My foot says hi.