mediation

Of Promise and Production: Lessons for Telstra in Saying versus Doing from Dulux and Coca-Cola

bright shiny and new: the revamped Telstra ad that broke this weekend

much has already been said of Telstra's re-branding effort, which manifested itself over the weekend in print and on TV.  it's all bright, shiny and new, and doesn't look very Telstra at all ... which I guess is rather the point.

I love it.  it's optimistic, bright, clean, modern and very disruptive.  the copy is actually genuinely really uplifting:

today is amazing. connect with almost anything and anyone from almost anywhere. got something to say? boom ... the world can love it. hate it. ignore it. whatever. stop and smell the roses you purchased online from the shop you just liked. because its never been like this before. it's life in full colour. and it's amazing.

it's also much more than a marketing sea-change.  as the below video points out - it's extending into every aspect of the organisation - from the vans to the identity badges...

it's this piece of communication that's much more interesting from a connections perspective.  the inclusion of things like identity badges gives it just a slight sense that it's meant as much for internal as it is external consumption; a communication to Telstra's staff explaining what's changed.

it's as though we're listening in on a private conversation between an organisation and its staff - and it feels a lot more genuine as a result ... if its an accident then its a happy one.  if its deliberate then it's smart, and the opportunity is to go a great deal further.

much of the conversation on Mumbrella's comment thread has debated the value of a revamped brand identity when the product and service fails to match.  but as Mumbrella's indefatigable Tim Burrowes commented in an opinion piece on the site, the product does seem to be improving.

the challenge though, starts now. as the VO towards the end of the second video above observes, "we're doing all of this to help us show all Australians just how amazing connected life can be" ... the promise of a life lived in full colour isn't the same as demonstrating to actual people in real and simple terms, what that means.  the promise can't remain unfulfilled; the bright, clean, modern and disruptive packaging can't be wrapped around an empty box.

of course if Telstra are really smart, then they'll go the step further of actually making life more colourful for Australians ...  what is Telstra's similarly colour-inspired version of this?:

it's a subtle but key mental shift: don't just promise something - produce it.  don't just promise more colourful lives, use your marketing investment to help produce more colourful lives.  the reach and awareness will come for free and will be more credible because the real conversations and voices of Australians will help create it.

it's what Dulux have done with their promise of colour and its what Coca-Cola, with the recently released content below, have done with Happiness.  you can't help but think that the people who created this asked themselves "what would Pixar do?" ... and it's the better for it.

 

Context and Content: Communication lessons from African Drums and Harry Potter

Yoruba ceremonial drums, Nigeria.  picture from here.

so the lovely Emily got for me a signed copy James Gleick's The Information for my birthday (thanks Emily) and whilst I'm only a couple of chapters in, its already proving to be a bit of a treasure trove.  the first chapter discusses the African Drums.  when 18th Century Europeans first heard the drums, they had no idea that they were conveying information.  yet the drumbeats contained detailed and what seemed to be superfluous information.

"Instead of "don't be afraid," they would say, "Bring your heart back down out of your mouth, your heart out of your mouth, get it back down from there" ... the drums generated fountains of oratory"

the explanation for the elaboration is fascinating.

"in mapping the spoken language to the drum language, information was lost.  the drum talk was speech with a deficit ... the drum language began with the spoken word and shed the consonants and vowels.  that was a lot to lose ... consequently ... a drummer would invariably add "a little phrase" to each short word.  Songe, the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga - "the moon looks down at the earth" ... the extra drumbeats, far from being extraneous, provide context"

James Gleick, The Information, Chapter One

there's a beautiful parallel with the world and brands and communication.  the moments in which brands connect with people are fleeting and becoming more so.  there is a very narrow opportunity in which a marketer can convey information.  messages need context, and brands provide it.

so rather than someone hearing "we make cars" (the message) they hear "we make Jeeps" (the branded message).  this context takes the message from a simple "this is what we do" to a more richly imbued communication embodying all the associations someone recalls when they hear "Jeep's cars".

this context is crucial ... "we make cars", becomes:

we make Jeeps

we make Toyotas

we make Hondas

it's a useful thinking framework - to separate the context and the content.  marketers work in challenging times.  the potential opportunities to make meaningful connections with people have never been greater; but with opportunity has come complexity.  how are communications cutting-through?  how to create the most distinctiveness in market?  how and when to engage audiences through media beyond which that I buy?

separating context and content helps to address some of those challenges.

creation of context is the creation of brand meaning.  what does my brand stand for?  why does it exist?  what are the associations I want to create (or reinforce) when someone recalls my brand.  this is a long-term process, and it's contribution to a brand's business not always easily measurable.  but it's crucially important context - and the marketer is responsible for continuously creating it.

creation of content is the creation of the message.  we're having a sale this weekend.  new model now available.  we've improved our fuel efficiency.  the role of content is to influence and stimulate an action or a response.  these are shorter term, and the extent to which they permeate and become salient in market are very measurable.  they can also be spread with huge efficiency by media other than that which is bought.

separating these two elements helps navigate increasingly complex waters.  how can I - as marketer - create context for my brand?  a context unhindered by the need for immediate ROI in market.  what platforms (through owned media) can I create to hold and communicate this context?

...and how can I efficiently and effectively deploy my messages into market?  how can I inspire and encourage people to pass-on that message on my and their behalf?

the combination, like the African drums, are simple messages imbued with the richest of context ... so that the content is un-mistakenly attributed to its brand.  the add the pieces together you first have to separate them.

which brings us, of course, to Harry Potter - and this week's announcement that the upcoming Deathly Hallows Part 2 won't be the end of the Potter franchise.

Potter as brand is now established.  seven books and eight movies have communicated the narrative and its characters, all of whom are now familiar memes in our culture.  like Star Wars before it, Potter - because of the human stories it tells - is now firmly embedded in the popular psyche.  but context and content have hereto been one and the same; the experience absolutely binding the two together.  books and movies as one-directional communication of story.  around this controlled narrative a user-generated culture arose, but it never penetrated back into nor influenced the context or content coming from JKR, Bloomsbury and Warner Bros.

that's about to change.  Potter is about to undergo a context content split.

Potter as a brand is now evolving to have two distinct streams.  the context will continue to be provided by JKR and co.  both the ideological: what are the rules and conventions of the Harry Potter universe?  and the physical: in the form of the Pottermore owned-media platform (which will also be the sales platform for HP eBooks).

but content will now, for the first time, be created by JKR and anyone else with the passion and energy to contribute.  the long-term building of the Potter brand co-existing but separate to the short-term creation of Potter content.

the evolution is already apparant ... the above announcement inviting and teasing its audience to "follow the owl" - an ARG element signalling a shift in the Potter brand to one that is co-created, crowdscourced and owned by everyone.

we're all drummers now.

Big Planning and Big Thinking: How Bendigo and Adelaide Bank use owned & earned media to deploy a little utility into the world

Got a big idea that you want to bring to life? Create a plan, share it and make it happen with help from the PlanBig community

so the lovely and awesome Zaac posted a link to my wall of the above effort from Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.  it's called PlanBig and, in it's own words, its...

"... a way for people to get together to make things happen and make a difference.  We [Bendigo and Adelaide Bank] believed that there was some real value in giving people the chance to come together in one place to talk about ideas, share inspiration, offer advice or help make things happen for themselves or someone else.  PlanBig brings together the experiences, knowledge and expertise of people with different skills from all walks of life and all ages to help each other get ideas kick started."

it's a delightful and instinctively attractive platform, which elegantly ticks a range of boxes including - amongst others - socialisation, co-creation, crowdsourcing and gamification.  it also has a elegant and seamless execution that connects with the Book and other social platforms...  the badges-as-reward effort has been borrowed from FourSquare, as has the Book's Like concept (in fact the functionality is a bit like a social network functionality greatest hits, which isn't a bad thing - better to use functionality with which we're familiar ... makes it more, well, functional).

as the site observes, "Bendigo and Adelaide Bank feel so strongly about helping people realise their dreams, they’ve been doing it in local communities for over 150 years" ... so this platform is just a natural extension of a brand proposition that's been in market for over a century.

it's also another example of the owned and earned media combo (note the absence of bought media) to create (1) utility (2) meaningful connections with a community of people and (3) content ripe for the amplification - if even a few of these ideas get big it will be marketing gold-dust.  all of which makes a great deal more sense to me than buying a shedload of ads telling people what competitive lending rates you have.

this genuinely feels like a brand / product extension with sociable and marketable assets built in from the ground up.  it's a communication for people, by people, and its infinitely better for it.  good on 'em.

An opportunity not to be missed: what Tiffany Shlain's 'Connected' means for brands as the internet transforms us and our world

so last night, thanks to Disco Davo (thanks Disco), I was lucky enough to be amongst a cinema of people gathered to watch an Aussie-first and unique screening of a movie called Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology.

organised through social media club sydney in conjunction with AMP's AmplifyFestival, Tiffany Shlain's (@tiffanyshlain) film is a narrative on how the internet is fundamentally changing us, interspersed with a personal account of a year in her life.  the result is a fascinating polemic on the nature of our interconnectedness as a species.

much was well-trodden territory for this blog ... but there were two aspects I hadn't heard before that I found particularly interesting.  I hope that Shlain won't object to me sharing here...

one, Shlain described how in her father's book 'The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image' he made the connection between how the invention of the written / printed word had coincided with the rise of men in social, political and commercial circles.  he argued that this was because the written word is processed by the left side of the brain, which is more male.

last century's 'iconic revolution' (Shlain's term) - which saw imagery and images became a more predominant form of communication - coincided with increased predominance of females in society.  images are processed by the right side of the brain which is ... more female.

the interesting conclusion is that the internet, with it's heady mix of words and images, is processed more of less equally by both sides of the brain, and is therefore a mass-communication channel that isn't biased towards one gender or the other...

the other aspect I found fascinating is how the brain and our body chemistry is predisposed to both connectedness and the pleasure hit we get from the stream of information on the internet.  when we connect, we release oxytocin - which evokes feelings of contentment, reductions in anxiety, and feelings of calmness and security.  Wikipedia notes that 'many studies have already shown a correlation of oxytocin with human bonding, increases in trust, and decreases in fear' ... so the more we connect, the less anxious we are, and the internet allows us to feel more connected than ever before...

dopamine is released when we experience something pleasurable, and encourages us to keep performing the action ad-infinitum (as there's no diminishing return from dopamine).  Shlain's interesting observation is that - as dopamine is released when we get a 'hit' of new information ... we are becoming addicted to the internet (or more specifically the infinite content that it gives us access to)

if you get a chance to catch the movie I urge you to do so ... it's a fascinating and beautiful experience.  and it left me thinking about the role of brands and advertising in Shlain's interconnected and interdependent world.  from one perspective advertising and media fuelled the worst of the excessive consumption society that is now placing sustained pressure on our environment...

...but on the other I can't help but think that Shlain's hypothesis presents us with a clear opportunity, an opportunity defined by a simple question that I can't shake.  in an inter-dependent world where billions of people increasingly connect, communicate and coordinate as communities, why do we continue to so readily seek to engage with individuals?

in an inter-dependent world, the only thing that matters is shared agendas and communities of interest.  and more specifically, what matters most is an opportunity for brands to fuel - rather than interrupt - their interconnectedness and interdependence.

its utility, but its more than that ... its potentially brands becoming a key and fundamental part of a dopamine and oxytocin-fuelled revolution in how we live on earth...  it's tantalising enough to warrant asking what you would want of the brands with which you work?  ...  for them to be part of humanity's next giant leap, or reconciled to history as part of the iconic revolution that for a while so influenced our culture and behaviour?

Telling the difference between White and Wrong: why Google's customisable homepage is a personalisation too far

it's strange how accustomed we become to the world...  here I am, comfortably confident in my ability - despite being old enough to remember Return of the Jedi at the Cinema first time round - to live and breathe as a digital native.  I'm down with the kids.  I'm adaptable.  I'm a fluid kind of guy.

only it turns out that I'm not.

above is what my Google search page now looks like.  it's like that because you can now customise it to have any picture you want as a background.  as Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience explains on a post, Google has always "enjoyed making your search experience more relevant, useful and fun through personalization" ... this new feature ... "brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage".

I don't like it.  I don't like it one bit.  to risk over-using a pun, it's just not white.

the white Google page is (was) important.  there was a clarity, a sharpness to the site that was an intrinsic part of Google's brand DNA; part of its engram - that collection of associations we all carry around in our heads that captures for each of us what a brand is, means, and does.  Google's white helped define that, but more than that, Google's white was iconic.

but this importance of Google's white seems to have been ignored by the organisation.  this it may come to regret.  personalisation and customisation are great, brilliant things.  but not always.

in an article in Intelligent Life a while back, Jonathan Meades' discussed the pervasiveness of the word 'iconic' from Jesus to Obama (via Marmite and Beckham).  a great article that I blogged about at the time.

Meades outlined four conditions necessary for something to be (or be perceived as) iconic.  condition four is immediacy of recognition.  common in objects - the Coca-Cola bottle, the Eiffel tower, Big Ben - but because of the demand of immutability less so in humans, unless they're dead of course.  Meades asks for "the visual equivalent of an unmistakable catchphrase, such as ... David Owen's "When I was Foreign Secretary" or Andie McDowell's "Because I'm worth it" ... if a catchphrase is a repetitive soundbite, then an icon is a strenuously rehearsed sightbite".

a strenuously rehearsed sightbite, that helps maketh the icon.  and Google just threw it out.

Meades goes on to describe how "in an age of ever-multiplying media outlets, with images disseminated ever more easily, there are ever more potential low-key idols ... virtual villages will increasingly make icons of figures that are peculiar to them, just as real villages did in the distant past when the people in the next valley paid obeisance to an alien gamut of gods and totems.  the more the media grow, the less appropriate the prefix "mass".  the globalisation of localism and, beyond that, of atomisation will very likely mean that such niche characterisations as "a living legend among the vertical matrixing community" [or] "an iconic figure in Gremlin Pastures" can be made without leaden irony."

at the time I noted that its a fascinating observation: a long tail of idolism.  the fewer, globally recognised icons sitting alongside the famous-to-a-few icons of our immediate communities and social groups.  I asked if the always-on proximity and ubiquity of the stuff we connect ourselves to is making icons of the people and places around us?  whether the immediacy of a host of personal - and in this case personalised - icons, devalues the idea of an icon, or adds meaning and value to it?

Google may find out.  the hard way.

Things we never thought we'd see # 15: Why Google's use of press proves that media probably never was and certainly won't ever be simple ever again

great brands don't need to advertise.  right?  great brands generate their own publicity.  great brands grow through word of mouth.  great brands invest in innovation which gets itself talked about.  great brands activate their networks, excite their advocates and set the Twittersphere ablaze.

great brands pity lesser brands that need to resort to broadcast advertising to get their products and services in front of the masses because they haven't mastered the new media economy.  great brands don't advertise, right?  ...wrong:

Emily FK kindly sent me the attached today (yesterday...) from London...  Google.  advertising.  with a cover wrap.  on the Metro.  things we really, really, never thought we'd see.

on viewing it I recalled an ancient Chinese curse that goes along the lines of "may you live in interesting times".  they didn't value change did the ancient Chinese.  boy are we collectively cursed - interesting times indeed.  one of two things is happening here, you can take your pick...

option one: the Google (money) train is faltering.  their core business of search continues, of course, to be a juggernaut that is in very good health.  but could the non-core products and services that are fueled by the juggernaut be feeling a little more heat?

its the only realistic explanation...  despite coming from the fine-tuned stable of Goggle new media marketing, Chrome has failed to get traction in the marketplace.  the very handy market share reports that Chrome's current share is hovering at 3%, compared to Firefox's 23% plus and the collective Explorers' best part of 60%...

three percent.  that's a figure that Google executives haven't seen for a while and no doubt has them spooked.  they need more than 3% and they're going to throw money at getting it, because the information about what we browse, what we do and who we are is invaluable; and in Google's hands its game-changing.

the reasons as to why traction hasn't been hit could be numerous and are almost certainly a combination of apathy, familiarity with existing browser, anti-Googleness ("they've got enough information already" kind of thing), and perhaps even awareness.  one would hope that the latter has some part to play, for I fear for the ability of a press cover wrap to make a major dent in any of the other potential barriers.

there is of course option two...  that in the evolution of media and communication, there's a need for both sides of the equation.  or indeed every side of the cube if you get what I mean.  that its not enough for a brand to be a 'broadcast' brand or a 'networked' brand.  all this could mean that there's a time and a place for one to many, as well as a time and a place for many to many.

option two could mean that there's there's no such thing as old and new media.  there is only media.  media thats owned and rented out at a negotiated CPT by big business.  media that's made by individuals with a passion and an opinion or two.  media created by brands that they can subsequently own and leverage to tell the world why they exist.  media that we respect, share, love to hate, assume credibility, trash, believe, pass on, or - indeed - read on our way to work before logging on and checking out a new browser.

Google advertising on Metro.  proof, like we needed it, that media probably never was and certainly won't ever be simple ever again.

Twitter's ascent: why the emergence of this best kind of media space means brands have never had it so good

and so to Twitter, which - thanks to, in part, Obama, Ross and Fry - post a 27-fold increase in the last 12 months is now the seventh most popular SN site in the UK.  with such growth has come the inevitable and necessary Campaign article on how brands can capitalise on this particular bit of media evolution.

some sense talked by Robin "have genuine conversations with people ... show your real personality and allow people to connect with you" Grant and Faris "we've got to earn attention by being entertaining, useful and also nice" Yakob. 

but also some craziness bounded about by Dare's Flo "create a fake receptionist" Heiss and internet consultant David "don't anthropomorphise it, what if an inanimate object was to Tweet" Bain.  the question of how much fun a social network would be if inanimate objects Tweeted aside, (although its not entirely mad - my fridge for example; "feeling great today post a thorough defrosting and clean out yesterday, brrrrr - life good" or my Wii "exhausted post Chris playing for sixteen hours non-stop on Super Mario Galaxy - still at least he's completed it now and he and I can get back on with our lives"), the question remains why, when and how should brands enter the Twittersphere?

the debate is picked up in a post on Robin's We Are Social blog, where he makes two important points: (1) a brand's Twitter strategy should be built around the business objectives its trying to achieve, and (2) the hard work only really begins when you're up and out there creating and managing the day after day micro-interactions with real people.

its worth reading down the comments, one by Adriana Lukes struck me as particularly relevant:

"If you think about brand as identity and branding as behaviour lots of the idiotic advice rightly ridiculed in the post just looks absurd. Fictional or inanimate characters' behaviour fools no one and is just another tool in the messaging toolbox. And one-way communication is messaging, two-way communication is behaviour. Twitter is rather supercharged on that front..."

the evolution of media and communications and the fragmentation of channels and empowerment of consumers that has come with it, is not a beast to be grappled with.  rather its a gift to be embraced.

we need to change our collective idea of what 'broadcasting our brand communications' means.  from... a single-minded focus on one-to-many (with things like Twitter playing around the edge), to... having and using a tapestry of touchpoints by which to reach existing and potential customers.

TV ads and Twitter should be part of the same plan, because they come from the same place - the brand, and more specifically the reason for being & idea that sit behind that brand.  understanding and continually and consistently articulating that idea is what will align 'one-to-many' as well as 'many-to-many' touchpoints.

Twitter isn't something 'else'... like so many emerging platforms its the best kind of brand space; a space where you're forced to be relevant, interesting and polite, but most of all a space where the people you're so desperate to talk to, can talk back.  we've never had it so good.

Fighting the Future: reaching a rose-tinted concensus at the IPA 44 Club's Future of Advertising in a Networked Society

A short history of marketing from jabi on Vimeo.

the rather lovely above video - by jabi - neatly sums up the collective dilemma of how brands, marketers and, specifically, agencies address the challenge of social media.  the issue was the topic of discussion last night at the IPA 44 Club's inaugural event of 2009: The future of advertising in a networked society.  quite the session it was... here's the gist:

part one - report findings

• social media = the online tools and platforms people use to share information, thoughts, opinions, content etc
• problems is that brands are "crashing the party rather than hosting it" (Russell Davies)
• many brands are experimenting but not getting traction in the area
• we need a model of comms that reflects 'ME' as opposed to 'brand'
• a model that's about conversation and participation rather than interruption and engagement
• a model that incorporates David Armano's thinking about 'influence ripples'
• Johnny X by Dare is a cracking example
• which succeeded in concentrating the feeds into and out of it's online space (64% of upstream and 84% of downstream feeds came from 10 sites each)
• planning social media should focus on targeting the few, that demonstrate: (1) expansiveness (propensity to chatter), (2) popularity (propensity to filter and target) and (3) reciprocity (likelihood to act)
• network size is predictable, as is network flow, as is circulation

part two - agency survey

• brands in a socially-networked world are more responsible for creating and disseminating the right information - brands should be more discretionary in what they produce [Mediation found this less than substantiated and at odds with Clay Shirky's comments at the MGEITF this year on filtering in a content-abundant world being after the fact, ie produce then allow the network to filter]
• the way to reward brand advocates is not through financial incentive
• the industry disagrees on two areas: (1) that advertising principles are the same in a networked society and (2) that social media behaves in a fundamentally new way
• it is believed that most revenue is up for grabs in content creation, then data & insight, then market research & insight gathering (amongst others)
• these new revenue streams represent £11bn of additional revenue opportunity, with another £5bn potentially
• ...which would be (exactly!) enough to meet the £16bn shortfall in industry revenues by 2016 predicted by the IPA's Future of Advertising and Agencies report of two years ago (£16bn = the difference between the IPA's 'Central' and 'Consumer' Scenarios)

part three - the discussion

I won't bullet this because it's getting late and you had to be there, but this was the better part of the evening with discussion ranging between philosophy of brands in a social media space to the (inevitable) measurement and accountability of such activity.

for me a kind of rose-tinted consensus was reached; consensus that went along the lines of:

• marketing has always been about great social networking, the challenge is the same - getting the right content in the right place, its just that...
• (1) people power is more potent (we have 500 networked connections not 50 disparate ones) and (2) we need to react to the context our message are in rather than control the context our messages are in
• it's brilliant because we can react to real people in real time in the context of a real conversations
• social media isn't a bolt on, it has to be woven into every brand touchpoint
• brands need to behave differently, and understand that their relationship with consumers is - to consumers - much less important than consumers' relationships with other consumers

so in a nutshell social media is great because it's as old as the hills, better than the disruption model, measurable ...and there's a freak-off big commercial opportunity for the brands and agencies that get it right.

I just don't think that it' that easy.  our industry is woefully unprepared for the future.  there's some brilliant thinking and debate going on, but the commercial models, joined-up industry measurement systems, and marketing best practice principles - from a 'what works' as opposed to a 'self-regulatory' point of view - just aren't moving fast enough.

most importantly, not enough consideration was given to the integration of broadcast and social media.  they're not going to exist in isolation and broadcast media is going nowhere. iTunes didn't kill CDs and Amazon didn't kill Waterstones.  social media certainly won't kill mainstream broadcast media; the same mainstream broadcast media that in the vast majority of instances provides social media users with the content they comment on, pass on, or reappropriate for their own ends.

the other interesting question is how the behaviour of digital natives will evolve...  we're familiar with the media 'hubs' that are the current crop of adolescent's bedrooms; they're multi-tasking away across ten devices and infinite bits of content.  but what happens when they grow-up?  how much of their social media behaviour will they take with them into adulthood and how much will they replace with the aggregated broadcast consumption of their parents?

we live in interesting times; and I guess we wouldn't have it any other way.

one last word, I urge you to read JVW's post about the event and specifically his debate on how the IPA can use social media to get their social media report into more people's hands whilst not impacting on revenues.  a pleasure and a joy.

From theory to practice: the challenge of planning Transmedia

Keith Arem's graphic novel Ascend, for which a game is currently in development

it's now been over two years since Faris bought transmedia planning to our attention in his post of the same name on TIGS.  the theory has been well expounded in the period since then; with a post by Jason Oke at Leo Burnett Toronto which explored the TP concept within the context of a single ad quickly kicking things off.

I'm sure that the idea of TP has cropped up in most media, comms and ad agencies by now...  it certainly has in Mediation's.  but we've yet to see - as far as I can make out - a significant campaign emerge based on TP principles.  the same is actually true of the entertainment industry; in an interview with Games TM magazine(edition 75), Henry Jenkins - the Godfather of TP - concedes that truly persuasive examples have yet to arrive.

they're doing better than us though.  transmedia planning should be everywhere by now.  the theory is familiar and is not only relatively unchallenged, but is offers the very solution to some of the biggest marketing challenges of the moment.  of its many advantages, the primary benefit has to be the extent to which it pays back on the time taken to consume it.  Jenkins goes on to observe that "regardless of the commercial motives behind it, transmedia entertainment done well also provides rewards for fans".

so why is getting the theory working in practice so difficult?  here's some starters for ten...

firstly, the financial investment required.  the reason the best examples of TM largely remain in the entertainment arena (the Matrix, Cloverfield, Heroes, Lost etc) because it takes a significant chunk of investment to develop and then create the content often required.  the commercial models for Fox or Paramount are set up to do this, the commercial models for marketeers often aren't.

but this is a bit of a cop out.  for the cost of making three 30 second ads you can certainly afford to make an episodic drama for online distribution.  and no it doesn't matter if it's not going to go on broadcast TV because those people who consume AV content online are exactly those people most likely to 'get' transmedia narratives...  this means of course that the media budgeting has to evolve just as much as the production pot.

no, the real issues in making TP happen lie much closer to home than 'we don't have the budget' territory.  they are twofold, the first of which is we're bound to the conventions of the media spaces we use.  in the Games TM article mentioned above, Keith Arem discusses the TM principles behind his graphic novel Ascend (the image above).  he observes that:

"if a project requires a 30-minute budget introduction, games can do that, but the medium could just as easily offer six high-budget five-hour episodes to revolutionise the story.  film and television are still limited by rigid series structures and minimum lengths".

advertisers on those channels are bound by those same conventions; conventions we as an industry - planners, buyers and media-owners (and indeed Ofcom) alike need to start challenging.  it's the limitations of the spot model that in many cases is preventing transmedia's breakthrough into broadcast channels; and as long as transmedia only exists online, it's unlikely to capture the imagination of marketeers or the budgets of FDs.

but the final barrier to making TM happen in brand comms is the closet to home of all.  Jenkins notes that TM experiences can "be a source of ... frustration [for consumers] if it's inconsistent, undermines the coherence of the work, or promises insights it never delivers".  Arem's solution is simple: "have a good team of like-minded individuals around you ... my philosophy for all of our projects is to have a core team to supervise all creative and technical aspects of the production.  the main focus of that team is to keep the story and assets consistent, and integrate them with the entire franchise".

I think you know where I'm going with this.  agency structures are lucky if they can do this internally let alone with other agencies, resulting in the presention of a joined up and unified transmedia solution to a client.  not only might different creative agencies have to work to one vision, but that vision has to be molded by the space planned by its media agency, and of course vice versa.

the reality is that as long as the conversation with a client only gets as far as "how big is the pack shot?", both agencies and clients will be bound to a dynamic that not only acts as a barrier to transmedia planning, but actively works against it emerging into the mainstream where it so surely deserves to belong.

Red Cups have arrived: how Starbucks attach themselves to winter festivities

'White is out for the season' according to Starbucks who today roll-out their red cups across the land.  in store promotions as well as press campaign have been reminding us all that Gingerbread lattes et al will once again be available from today and for the duration of the season.

I don't want to like this, but you really can't help but admire the simple communication which not only taps into the very physical markers of darker nights and colder mornings, but also the emotional anticipation of the festive season to come.

as far as Chrimbo commerciality goes its right up there with Coca-Cola's trucks and the now (very quickly established) M&S effort.  and quite right too...  brands - whether you like it or not - are part of the Chrimbo spirit.  some brands are as emotionally connected to Christmas celebrations as the products they sell are to the physicality of it all.

it may just be a red cup, but the emotive place it comes from means much more.  it's a signal, a kick start, an announcement that holidays truly are coming...