mediation

A New Home for Mediation

hey there everyone. a very quick post to let you know that Mediation has a new home. after a bit of a rest I'm back up and running at cwstephenson.com ... please jump there to catch my latest mediations and also subscribe to the new site.

if you have been a subscriber, thanks a million for doing so ... I hope you'll jump to Mediation's new home to continue the debate and deliberations as the past and the future of established and emerging media collide.

catcha on the flip-side ...

Chris x

A Counterpoint for Cannes: Lessons from the Sundance Film Festival

so I was listening, as is my want, to Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode's Movie Review Podcast (which is very good btw) as they were live from The Sundance Film Festival which was visiting London. they were interviewing John Cooper, Director of the SFF who described how the festival first came about:

"Sundance ... was created to find a safe haven for artists to become better and to make better cinema ... then we started this thing ... we called labs, which were basically workshops where filmmakers come and work on their scripts with mentors and there's a whole mentoring process ... very quickly after that [we] were making movies but they weren't getting seen anywhere so we needed to create a platform and that was the Sundance Film Festival and that's how it started" (source)

the festival has seen the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne and Tarantino all hone and develop their skills in an environment where risk-taking is encouraged and protected; a very different environment to Cannes or the Oscars ... where the focus is on subjective judgement by peers and winning awards.

I couldn't help but think and wish that there was a Sundance equivelant for our industry. the Cannes Festival of Creativity (which will soon see the great and good head off to the south of France for the annual networkathon) is basically our Oscars, and it has its place.

but there doesn't seem to be a counterpoint? we don't have a Sundance.

certainly in Australia the Media Federation Awards, like the B&T awards and Adnews awards, all follow the Cannes / Oscars template ... glitz and glamour as the campaigns and ideas judged to be the best allow the people who submitted them to have a fully deserved 15 seconds in the glare of the lights.

how awesome would it be if the above quote read:

"Incubator ... was created to find a safe haven for planners to become better and to generate better innovations ... then we started this thing ... we called labs, which were basically workshops where planners come and work on their ideas with mentors and there's a whole mentoring process ... very quickly after that [we] were creating innovation but they weren't getting seen anywhere so we needed to create a platform and that was the Incubator Ideas festival and that's how it started"

how awesome? very.

When Dove met Facebook: and the illusion of a schedule that controls what people consume

Dove's 'The Ad Makeover' campaign allows women to replace ads promoing low self esteem with something a little more positive

John Hammond: You're right, you're absolutely right. Hiring Nedry was a mistake, that's obvious. We're over-dependent on automation, I can see that now. Now, the next time everything's correctable. Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it'll be flawless.

Ellie Sattler: It's still the flea circus. It's all an illusion.

John Hammond: When we have control again –

Ellie Sattler: You never had control! That's the illusion!

From Jurassic park (1993)

a rather interesting debate is being had over a rather innovative campaign from Dove in Australia. playing out across the fine pages of B&T is a discussion about the relative merits of a campaign that allows women to replace ads that encourage low self-esteem (shut up, we've all seen them) with one of eight encouraging messages, which you can share across and beyond your personal networks.

the bit that's causing the debate is that you can select facebook keywords that you feel describe other women who you think should see the ad that you have selected. You and Dove making-over Facebook one demoralising ad at a time, but in doing so you replace - presumably - ads that would have otherwise been there.

so, obvs, this is really smart thinking.  on message for the campaign and for the brand - with innovative and relevant use of the Facebook advertising platform that empowers people to engage with a brand thru media on their terms. fans all round then? no so much ...

Nick Keenan, department head of implementation planning and investment at MediaCom has commented that "It's very innovative but I think it serves Facebook and not the advertiser ... at the end of the day I'm not sure what kind of surety it gives to other advertisers that are doing things with Facebook."

this most awesome use of the word 'surety' kicks off a real battle between Keenan and chief executive of media agency Fusion Strategy, Steve Allen

Allen: "that's "phooey ... this is the new today ... the new era for advertising and the internet is the first line of that."

Keenan counters that "that's completely naïve ... how do you plan a schedule for that?"

back to Allen: "it's like serving up Porsche ads to people in wheelchairs, it does more damage than good"

even Mamamia.com.au's Freedman chips in: "The idea of empowering women to create their own advertising landscape is a disruptive one and that always translates to the kind of cut-through required when talking to women in a very crowded market."

as entertaining as all of this is (and it is), it reminds me of one of the key reasons that I started and continue to write this blog. we live and work between two worlds; our media past and our media future. the debate being played out is between stalwarts of those two worlds, as the language used suggests.

Keenan is arguing that people's actions will disrupt bought media impacts. like leaving the room in an ad break to make a cup of tea, or turning attention down to the tablet when the ads come on?

Allen argues that people know what brands they know and only want communications from those brands ("you are better off allowing consumers to select what they want, rather than to try and force them into things. Your impact is going to be much more valuable if they are people that want to know about your kind of product or brand. They are going to be receptive to it") ... which one could argue, and I would, leads to a rather myopic experience of brands and media.

for my twopenneth, its a debate about control, and the illusion that we ever had it.

media schedules are amazing things. I really mean that. to an experienced practitioner a brilliant schedule can sing. it can tell stories and decribe audiences and ideas and phases and roles of media. it can articulate behaviours and pinpoint the most intricate nuances of what a planner is seeking to achieve.

but a schedule can never control what people consume. that, to paraphrase Ellie Sattler, is the illusion. a schedule may be the sheet music but it needs people to play it. this is the illusion that we have, or indeed ever had, control.

that illusion is the great trap of applying 20th Century media planning in a 21st Century media landscape. Facebook isn't like TV, and within a few years TV won't be like TV either. the rules may not have changed as radically as Allen suggests, but they have changed.

we're all of us fighting a war for attention, kudos to Dove for developing such a smart weapon for getting it.

all quotes from 'Ad industry in flap over new Dove app article' on B&T

disclamer: I don't work for Unilever or Dove but I did pitch for their business last year and enjoyed the process very much

 

The Myth of Fragmentation: and the danger of failing to recognise that people haven't just moved, but that they've moved on

a Scout Trooper with a fragmentation grenade: has no bearing on the post other than the fragmentation reference but any excuse ... source

there's a very good opinion piece in this week's Adnews by MediaCom's head of implementation, planning and investment Nick Keenan. if you're a subscriber you can track it down here.

Keenan makes the smart observation that 'fragmemtation' is an overused and too simplistically deployed term: "It felt that unless you had worked out how to speak the new hybrid tongue of 'Tradigital' (my invented language of combined consumers) being spoken across new 'BIG' consolidated/integrated networks you as an advertiser were now hopelessly lost and would never see a mass audience again. We were told and believed we now must grapple with using multiple platforms within traditional media to reach the large numbers we once accessed in single channel environments"

source: Nick Keenan writing in Adnews 3.4.12

Keenan goes further, arguing quite correctly that not only do mass audiences exist, but they have more mass than ever before: "Facebook has over 80% of all people 25-54 ... Google has 96% of all Australians online ... Put simply these examples along with others such as Amazon, YouTube, and eBay have enormous mass audiences, the likes of which we have never seen."

source: Nick Keenan writing in Adnews 3.4.12

whilst its very true to say that mass audiences still very much exist, and indeed exist with more mass than they have ever had (media consumption is increasing overall), there is a very real and present danger that we fail to recognise that people haven't just moved (from Nine to Facebook or Ten to YouTube), but that they have very much moved on too ...

they are no longer the 'passive massive' (as Faris would put it) that they were when mass audiences existed in the broadcast stream, a mass audience on Facebook or YouTube may be as big or bigger than a Nine or Seven audience, but they (1) behave very differently and (2) have very different expectations of brands ...

a mass audience on Facebook or YouTube is in control of what they watch, listen, or interact with. it was Clay Shirky (I think) who observed that whilst in the long tail of content the average quality of what gets made goes down, the average quality of what gets consumed goes up. just landing our content in the new mass platforms is no guarantee that they'll be viewed let alone interacted with or passed on.

our expectations of what we want in exchange for our attention have changed. the old mass contract stated that if you give us 30 seconds of your attention we will entertain / educate / inform you. the new mass contract is essentially the same, albeit with an extended list of services (utility for example), only now we have a lot more to choose from and less attention to give.

so I'd counter that fragmentation is one of the most profound shifts in our industry right now - but its not fragmentation to platforms (big audiences, as Keenan rightly points out, are getting bigger rather than nicher); rather its a fragmentation towards individual moments and decisions ... to watch or not, or pass on or not. that's crazy fragmentation that introduces more than a little chaos into our mass delivery systems.

yes the mass audience has moved, but more importantly ... they've moved on.

Australia's digital-fuelled cultural boom: Why established brands and businesses need to close the innovation gap

the above video sets the context for a report released last week by Google and the Boston Consultancy Group, which has some rather interesting findings.  the report's key findings are that Australia's media industry is healthy, however it is the Internet that is providing the "shot in the arm" to growth.  

it turns out that not only do Australians like their 'new' media world, but in said world where our access to, and choice of, media has never been greater, we’re consuming more media than ever before.  so much so in fact that - because we export, essentially, more content than we import - we have a trade surplus in our content that's worth $24bn to the economy.

the report also identified that whilst ad revenues are still (and will be for a while) predominantly generated offline (93% in 2011), its online revenues that are driving more than 50% growth in the sector.

the report came in the same week that the sparkily titled Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia (CEASA to their friends) released it's retrospective of 2011, reporting that whilst adspend was down, it "wasn't as bad as previous years" (let it not be said that CEASA can't find a silver lining in a set of figures).

a 1.4% overall drop was the result of (in descending order) online up 17.5%, outdoor up 3.4%, radio up 0.7% (congrats to them all), 2.6% drop in total TV, 9.2% drop in newspapers, 8.4% decline in mags, and a 20.8% drop in cinema. so both reports point to online as doing not just well, but supporting both ad revenues and the overall economy.

so far so 'tell me something I didn't know' ... but the reports struck a chord with a conversation I've been having a lot with clients and agency-type people recently.  because the reports only tell a truer picture when you ask WHY it is that online is bucking such a downward trend - and I think that the answer is about innovation.

the engine behind online's performance is now only marginally about penetration gains and faster infrastructure, and a lot more about the increased utility and capabilities delivered via the internet. its not the internet that's bucking ad spend trends and fuelling the Australian economy, its what the internet is doing, and more specifically what we can do with the internet that counts.

Facebook and YouTube have now been joined by the likes of Flipboard and Spotify on the Australian media scene, innovations that have come not from the mainstream but from the fringe. and here's where I see the gap. because its not mainstream media or businesses that are driving this innovation, but new entrants. new entrants spotting an opportunity and innovating into it.

when you think about it, many 'online' platforms should have been invented by existing players, yet most weren't:

the music industry should have invented iTunes

the movie business should have invented NetFlix

the radio industry should have invented Spotify

a magazine publisher should have invented Flipboard

a bank should have invented KickStarter

a dating service should have invented Grindr

and for that matter, a media agency should have invented Facebook

the reason none of those organisations invented the new platform is the same reason the American Railroads went into decline:

"The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented..."

source: Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt, HBR 1960

Levitt's question from 1960 is even more pertinent now than it was then. what business are you in? once you've answered that you can start innovating around that business, and once you're inventing stuff that gets shared and talked about, you can stop paying the expensive price of not innovating: buying media.

established players, it strikes me, are the least likely to bridge the innovation gap in their category - we should all we working on plans to change that.

and for those of us in agency land the question is more pertinent than for most ... what business are we in? anyone who answers 'buying media' or 'making ads' should turn the lights off on their way out.

Another two bite the dust: Two very different victims of media wevolution as Encyclopedia Britannica and FHM Australia go down

Encyclopedia Britannica and FHM to cease publication (images via Guardian and Mumbrella)

news reached mediation last week of two very different publications that are set to cease print publication. at first there may seen to be little in common between the 244 year-old Encyclopedia Britannica and FHM - but they are both, in their very different ways, equal victims of media natural selection.

if we have ever needed evidence of the extent of the change that is afoot in our industry, it comes in the form of the fates of these two very different titles, both of which are victims of the impact of the social web.

the fact is that wikinomics killed the print edition of EB. Wikipedia is the primary symptom, but the cause is a great deal deeper.  EB print's demise is a result of the fact that all of us are smarter than any of us, and now we have the tools to manifest that collective knowledge.

talking to The Guardian, president of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc Jorge Cauz counters that "We may not be as big as Wikipedia. but we have a scholarly voice, an editorial process, and fact-based, well-written articles ... all of these things we believe are very, very important, and provide an alternative that we want to offer to as many people as possible".  like many businesses, EB are looking to fight 'free', and win.

the same of which can probably be said for the demise of FHM in Australia.  much debate has been had on the Mumbrella thread, with everything from product quality to porn to blame. but the fact is that FHM face a very similar battle to EB - they're fighting that fact that people are generating content, for free, that competes for the time and attention that men's magazines used to enjoy from readers.

in the magazine sector's case this is translating into very challenging times. the latest SMI figures (courtesy of Lucy) show that across all media, February '12 was pretty much flat YOY (+0.7%). whilst key growth areas for Feb were Cinema - up an astonishing 83% YOY (YTD it’s up 32%) - and Digital, which is up 29%. by comparison Newspapers and Mags are down 12% and 15% respectively.

in the we-fuelled revolution (the wevolution if you like) brands and businesses that don't quickly evolve are being taken down... in the same week that EB and FHM made their respective announcements; Twitter acquired Posterous, CNN was rumoured to be buying Mashable for upwards of US$200m, TED launched a education-based YouTube channel, LinkedIn hit 3m Australian members, The Australian announced that it has 30k paying digital subscribers and Hungry Jacks sold 485,332 burgers in a Scoopon deal that crashed the site, oh and a video called Kony 2012 became - with 100 million (yes that's right) hits in six days, the most viral in history.

blink and you miss it people, blink and you miss it.

here's the question: how is the wevolution affecting your brand and business? how prepared are you for the change that you may not yet have even seen coming? and how do you avoid the fate of EB and FHM?

Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin: Lessons from The Guardian on getting, well, everything right

so I've been roused from a bit of a blogging famine (not self-imposed) by the surfacing of a rather remarkably brilliant bit of storytelling on two fronts by The Guardian. on one hand, the above is (nice one BBH) a wonderfully articulated ad showing what journalism looks like in the second decade of the 21st Century. the second element of storytelling however relates to The Guardian product itself - and this is where it gets a lot more interesting...

because whilst other newspaper titles have faced a digital-fuelled funding crisis by (delete as appropriate) building pay-walls around existing content / attacking aggregators such as Google / devaluing their brand with ongoing price promotions / bundling subscriptions / creating much-hyped tablet-only titles / add as appropriate - The Guardian has quietly gotten on with doing three things rather well.

one, they've developed genuinely channel and delivery-neutral platforms for their product. two, they've defended investment in content. three, they've introduced and demanded fair pricing for their product.

there are people better qualified than me (The Guardian themselves for one) to comment in more detail about the specifics and implications of these endeavours to their title and the wider journalism category.  what interests Mediation is how these three principles apply to brands per se. because those exact things that The Guardian has done so well should be top of the agenda for every brand and client right now.

one - channel and delivery-neutral platforms

for all our talk of bought earned and owned and platform neutrality, we still have some way to go to break the last remnants of the broadcast disruption advert model. 'make an ad and get it seen' is still for too many situations the default option.

our focus should be on a brand's business challenge or opportunity, not on default bought media solutions. channel-neutral is now easily a decade-old idea, and it feels almost retro to talk about it with even a degree of reverence ... but new pressures can fuel flights to perceived safety - flights that more than ever need guarding (appropriately enough) against.

two - investment in content

from podcasts (oh my beloved MediaGuardian podcast) to video to applications and beyond, The Guardian's story is not just one of investing in content, but of investing in content despite a reduction in revenues as digital impacts cannibalised (traditionally more profitable) print impacts. there was no retreat, no back-pedaling, no compromise in the investment nor distribution of content.

here too brands can learn.  new models are more content hungry than old ones. in short they require much more than 30"'s worth of content! longer-form video, multi-platform, often generated in real time and in response to a brand's activities are essential if a brand is to capitalise on and exploit the opportunities that new models present. will it cost more? perhaps. will it return more? perhaps? will you get left behind if you don't. absolutely.

three - fair pricing for that content

I'm not suggesting that brands start charging for people to engage with their communications (although Apple seem to do quite well in monetising the best ads they ever made in the form of a retail space that isn't a retail space). rather brands need to acknowledge that for many people the old contract has evaporated...

the contract stated that in return for free content, a brand can interrupt that content as long as they entertain or inform us whilst they do it. for many this simply no longer plays, or indeed pays. The Guardian increasingly, I suspect, relies on a model not dissimilar to an iTunes set-up - simple easy small payments that allow people to access the content they want, when they want it, where they want it. many people are prepared to (micro) pay to do so.

brands face a similar challenge. what are the new contracts you can form with the people with whom you want to connect and engage. what are you offering in return for their attention? value, usefulness, entertainment, information, inspiration? to say that continuing to offer an interuption that communicates what your business believes people should know, hardly seems worth dignifying with a debate.

there's two last things that brands can learn from The Guardian's predominance in their field. firstly, let people in - whether its helping to devour MPs expenses data or teasing people to piece together a story that a super-injunction prevents them from reporting, The Guardian isn't just better by having people be part of the debate, they are - just like brands - increasingly dependent on it.

and secondly, this reporter of fairy tales stands for something. as a brand, as an organisation, as a business, they understand why they exist in the world. they can articulate why the world needs them. and rather than telling people that, they show them...

there is no more powerful navigator for this new world than to have built into your DNA a compass telling you every day in every way which direction to take.

its tempting to say stop the world and ask to get off. to that, I say not by the hair on my chinny chin chin would I want it any other way ...  keep up the good work Guardian.

Letting a little chaos in: Could understanding unpredictability make us better planners?

so as a bit of a Chrimbo pressie I took up a year's subscription to the BBC's iPlayer offering on iPad.  one of the first things that I got my teeth into was a documentary from a couple of years ago on BBC4 about the mathematics of chaos. a particular passage in the above clip, struck me as of particular interest to those of us attending to an ongoing mission of negotiating - of mediating - the future of media and communications.

jump to 3m50s and you'll hear the following passage:

"the turbulence of the 1970's convinced the economists, as well as the environmentalists, that their faith in large scale prediction and control was just wrong.  they came to accept that they would no more be able to control the economy than the weather.  the era of command and control was over.  but there was a second more controversial part of the mathematics upon which they fundamentally disagreed.

Ruelle and others had found that even very simple systems ... could give rise to highly complex chaotic behaviour; and now as they used these simple systems to explore further, they began to discover the rules of this chaotic world.  they found that the more connected and interlinked systems became, the more likely they were to become chaotic and turbulent, and that the more you pumped the system - the faster you ran it - the more chaotic it would become."

source: High Anxieties - The Mathematics of Chaos, David Malone, last broadcast BBC4 in 2008

anyone currently planning media and communications can't fail to observe the parallel: the more connected and interlinked systems become, the more likely they are to become chaotic and turbulent - and the faster you run a system, the more chaotic is becomes...

we enter a new year with a media and comms planning landscape that is arguably less certain than it was last (and I would suggest that this has been the case for at least the last several years). we have fewer certainties, fewer guarantees of success, fewer empirical rules of behaviour that can predict what our investments and strategies will achieve.

it is not for the want of trying.  Ehrenberg et al at the institute that bears his name - for example - have made huge strides in identifying marketing 'laws' ... for example the double jeopardy law which states that "brands with less marketing share have far fewer buyers, and these buyers are slightly less loyal (in the buying and attitudes)" ... or the duplication of purchase law which states that "a brand's customer base overlaps with rival brands in line with its market share" (source: How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp)

but these rules have more to do with buying behaviour than they have to do with how and to what extent media and communications planning influences that buying behaviour. for every one of Ehrenberg's laws there are multiple exceptions that - depending on you point of view - prove or disprove the immutability of those laws.

multiple disciplines indicate that we are habitual creatures, more sensitive to (for example) loss aversion than that of advertising. and yet we know that communications which are disproportionately awarded / rewarded have a similarly disproportionate return for the brands that invest in them. communications work, and generally speaking the better the communications the better they work.

generally speaking.

which is of course fine, generally.

but the fact remains that while we can all of us mitigate uncertainty (thorough research and exploration; an aligned strategy; integrated thinking; proportionate and focused investment; identification, tracking and measurement of KPI ecosystems ... to name but a few), what we do sometimes seems to be far from an exact science (which is of course part of the attraction)...

but perhaps chaos has not just a key but an increasingly significant role to play. what if we accept that we are no more able to control how media and comms planning affects businesses that we are able to control the weather? ... and what if we accept that an increasingly networked and interconnected media landscape increasingly makes this more not less true?

would such acceptance make us better or worse planners? would it compromise planning or make it stronger? could accepting that there is inevitable chaos in the system provide more realistic and reliable margins and predictions of success? if the only thing we can confidently predict is a degree of unpredictability, perhaps confidently facing up to this reality is the only thing that will truly allow us to move on...

Get Up's 'It's Time' Ad gets on TV: How grass-roots movements are reversing the broadcast < conversation model

breaking news courtesy of @mrbenjaminlaw of twitter fame (thanks Benjamin and Mimi), suggests that the above rather excellent and marvellous ad for Australian marriage equality has secured enough funds to be broadcast on national TV this weekend.

the GetUp! campaign website notes that "this weekend, delegates at the ALP National Conference will be voting on whether to make it their policy to end marriage discrimination. This video has already reached nearly 1,000,000 people -- but a national TV campaign this week would reach double that again, and really put the pressure on!"

mission, it would seem, accomplished.  the ad will air over coming days in Sydney (Channels 9/10), Melbourne (7/9/10), Adelaide (9/10/SBS), Perth (9/SBS) and Brisbane (SBS).

what's interesting from Mediation's point of view (personal agenda aside) is the total reverse of the media model.  from "fund an ad on broadcast TV > start conversation and debate > affect change" to "distribute content online > galvanise support and fundraise for broadcast > affect change" ... the goal remains the same, but (1) the conversation comes first and (2) broadcast becomes an end-point not a starting point.

interestingly broadcast becomes that end-point funded by the grass-roots community - TV not as passive distributor of message but rather an active signal to decision-makers that enough people care enough about this cause to fund its deployment in a broadcast public forum.

it's important that this ad is on TV.  it's important because of the signal it sends to said decision-makers, but also because it will ensure the important message that it contains reaches people who - because of the echo-chamber effect of some online networks - wouldn't otherwise see it.

online networks have brought powerful, timely and positive changes to how we communicate - but broadcast retains it's potent ability to reach all of us.  and, thanks to the efforts of GetUp! and its supporters, it is all of us who will be reminded that It's Time for mariage equality this weekend.

this weekend a grass-roots community is, for one minute and fifty six seconds, taking TV back ... and our TV is the better for it.

The game of the movie or the movie of the game?: The opportunity of choosing the immersive over the immediate

"Several years ago in the video game industry the big buzz word was "transmedia".  it was a term that was coined for original worlds and properties that spanned multiple venues, from the game to the TV series to the movies to the books. everyone was aflutter with this idea; these mega properties were going to dominate the entertainment landscape and change how we consume media.

flash forward to now and it's clear that very few studios were ever able to pull off this "holy grail" of world development. budgets skyrocketed and very few wanted to take a gamble on building a new world. Ubisoft, however, pulled this off with Assassin's Creed, and they did it with flying colours.

let's face it - we live in a digital and connected world. a distracted world. there are always multiple things vying for our attention, be it social media or mobile devices. in this era creatives need to craft games and worlds that gamers "marry" not ones that they casually "date". there are numerous ways to accomplish this, but one of the best ways to do it is to make a game world that is so extraordinarily deep that it takes an army to sort through all of the facts and details. the world of Assassin's Creed is one that is easy to get into but can take years to fully understand and appreciate."

Cliff Bleszinski - Design Director, Epic Games

it's strange reading the above commentary outside of a media planning text, the parallels are so similar as to be striking ... "buzz word was 'transmedia'", "change how we consume media", "a digital and connected world. a distracted world" ...

Bleszinski's comments were written for the prologue to the Assassin's Creed Encyclopedia, a beautifully designed hardback book included as part of the Animus Edition of Assassin's Creed Revelations.

Ubidoft's unboxing video of Assassin's Creed Revelations Animus Edition and images from the Assassin's Creed Encyclopedia: careful, spoilers alert

that games now come with encyclopedias may be news enough for some readers, but the fact that Assassin's Creed does (in fact there's an audio CD and a short movie in the Animus too) bears testament to just how evolved some game worlds now are.

evolved, and big business.

a Guardian article last week reported that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had set a five-day worldwide sell-through record, with sales of more than USD $775m.  it went on to comment that "the number also far exceeds the opening revenues from any movie or album release in 2011 – the biggest film of the year, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, made $202m in its first five days. It is likely that Modern Warfare 3 will join the select group of £1bn-grossing entertainment properties by Christmas."

some digging courtesy of the same article notes that DFC Intelligence puts the 2010 global games industry figure at USD $66bn, whilst the LA Times puts the 2010 global cinema box office figure at USD $31.8bn and eMartketer estimate recorded music revenues at USD $35.1bn.  games win.  by a long shot.

the article ends however by observing that total reach of cinema far exceeds that of games, and comments that "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is big, that's for sure, but as a mass cultural event, it still has a looooong way to go" ... the fact that this observation is disputable aside (include social and casual gaming and there's plenty of examples of games with scale and 'cultural event' status - Angry Birds anyone?), the difference between movies and gaming audiences is a reflection of the difference in the type of content/context between movies and gaming.

movies are inherently lean-back, immediate and assessable. games (casual and social aside) are inherently lean-forward, immersive and require time, effort and energy. it's no surprise that the former has a bigger audience footprint than the latter, but that the latter generates significantly higher revenues per head than the former...

what's interesting from a media planning perspective is the choice that it presents - ask yourself what context/content we in the advertising and communications industry generally create?  is it lean-back, immediate and assessable ... or lean-forward, immersive and demanding of our time and energy.  advertising was born and grew up in the mass-broadcast era - its no surprise that we predominately not only produce in movie-mode, but have extensive metrics and marketing theories (Byron Sharp anyone?) to prove its validity.

and yet we know we have to move on.

we take our content and we re-purpose it.  we're media and channel neutral, we create experiences and promotions and we socialise and innovate around our movies.  we create the games of our movies.

and in doing so we're missing a huge opportunity.  because Assassin's Creed and games like it don't create games from movies (that would inherently limit their scope - search for 'successful movie-based game franchises and you'll see what I mean) ... Assassin's Creed creates movies from games, and more specifically, from an imagined world in which that game is set. they start, always and every time, with an immersive and lean-forward content/context - after which spinning out lean-back immediate content is childsplay.

the point is that we have a choice.  stay as we are - create in movie mode and spin out the immersive and engaging game stuff off of the back of it ... or we can decide to more often start in gaming mode.  what world do we want to create?  what are it's rules and stories and mythologies? (all brands have them - we just don't think of them in these terms) ... then how do we create lean-forward, immersive and rewarding ways into our worlds?  and then, and only then, how do we create content - of thirty seconds or three hours duration - that expands the penetration of our worlds, and of our brands, via more immediate and assessable means.

it's harder to do.  it's expensive to fund.  it's difficult to measure.  and it takes longer to produce.  but that's our choice ... and as anyone who has ever completed a game will tell you - it's more than worth it.  speaking of which...