West Coast US: It's A Cross-Platform Thing

Transmedia marketing isn’t just about blasting out messages across a multitude of platforms, it’s also about exciting an audience by harnessing new technology – such as test driving cars online – and finding new and expansive ways to tell good stories

Transmedia. You’ve heard the term and jive with its concept: a method of conveying messages, themes or storylines to a mass audience through the well-placed and artful use of different media platforms. Play well across media and you’ll enhance a brand’s story and solidify its dominance and pervasiveness in the marketplace. In short you will make it relevant.

Transmedia is used today as a way to advertise in a splintered digital world, but it actually goes back to a concept used by Nintendo to market a new product on its hands. It was the mid 90s, and the company was already content with a strong foothold in the video game market with Donkey Kong and the Mario/ Super Mario series.

Nintendo’s next move was to bring out Pokémon. Initially a “monster collecting role-playing game” for its Nintendo Game Boy system, Pokémon soon became a media franchise of epic proportions with merchandise stretching across different platforms – video games, anime comic books, TV shows and Pokémon’s popular trading cards. All these experiences motivated ever more consumption from bona fide fans.

Digital innovation

Consumers became active hunters and gatherers on an epic scale. Pokémon went on to become the Rubik’s Cube of the 90s and is today the second most successful and lucrative video game in world history, second only to Nintendo’s beloved Mario. Fast-forward 15 years and similar innovation is thriving as progressive companies create exciting work in new digital spaces.

Venice Beach-based B-Reel is no exception. A recipient of five Cyber Lions at Cannes 2010, B-Reel specialises in high-end web productions, film and animation. Working with sister company B-Reel Films (a traditional production company with its own roster of directors), B-Reel operates as a one-stop-shop.

180 Los Angeles recently teamed up with B-Reel Films director Anders Hallberg on the Mitsubishi Live Drive campaign. Teasers were created to entice viewers to take a test drive of the company’s new Outlander Sport – online. “It’s the world’s first online test drive,” says B-Reel exec producer Pelle Nilsson, “we specialise in uncovering new digital outlets and solutions, new ways to reach and influence target audiences through integrated campaigns.” With the growing use of HTML5 and advanced JavaScript there are sure to be similar types of advertising on offering.

B-Reel’s collaboration with Google Creative Lab also illustrates how an audience can be hooked by experiences that engage their emotions. Promoting Google Chrome technology, The Wilderness Downtown is a short online film, set to Arcade Fire’s track We Used To Wait, that marks a successful collaboration between directors Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin through @radical.media. Upon arriving at the site you are asked to type in your home address, then, thanks to Google Maps and Google Street View, the film takes you on a personal journey – via multiple video windows – through your own hometown – while footage directed by Milk plays alongside. It’s an absorbing experience.

Collective creativity

LA-based studio Mothership also delivers media solutions for its film, advertising and gaming industry clients. Launched just under a year ago, it operates through Digital Domain, one of the world’s foremost digital production companies. “We create entertainment marketing and messaging that’s true to the methodology and spirit of each project,” explains Mothership founder and president Ed Ulbrich. “The product is then blown out across multiple platforms because single screen content is a dinosaur. We’re now shaping the work for multiple screens.”

Mothership is also evolving the careers of commercial directors in an attempt to garner longer format work and has a full art department on site dedicated to nurturing talent. “A script isn’t enough to get a movie off the ground anymore, so we help commercial directors make their first film,” explains Ulbrich. “Directors use our digital tools to build a visual sample, a prototype of what their movie will look like and then we put together a creative pitch for them. We’re very focused on expanding and building our roster of directors.”

Last year, award-winning director Guillermo Del Toro introduced unique storytelling opportunities to the media-frenzied advertising world of the West Coast with the opening of creative workshop Mirada. He and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro will run the shop aside director Mathew Cullen and executive producer Javier Jimenez, both co-founders of LA-based commercial design and production company Motion Theory.

Mirada’s collective know-how stretches across many platforms; for example, Motion Theory’s experience in the advertising and music business and Del Toro’s expertise writing novels, creating video games, producing, writing, directing movies and developing television. Cullen describes Mirada as a playground for artists, a workshop to create meaningful stories, “a place where storytelling and pop culture will collide”.

Content or format?

Cullen believes that engaging viewers’ feelings is still key and “requires elaborately constructed stories that have at their core sharply felt human emotions.” He goes on, “the question really becomes what is more important, content or distribution? It’s content because once you plug in and provide a genuine experience for the audience they then share the work with others. People today are using media in ways that have completely changed our business model.”

Consumers will continue to invest deeply in brands, while brands themselves will continue trying to engender trust and loyalty in its customers through multiple delivery platforms. New hybrid agency/production companies will also need to constantly evolve and continue to develop appropriate strategy for an environment constantly in flux. “The most successful strategy is having collaborative leadership,” offers Cullen on the subject. “It’s understanding how to create and manage creation using whatever the specific medium may be. Some stories are just designed to be told in one way; a great book is never designed to be turned into a movie – but there are projects that are made to expand across everything from video games to merchandising opportunities.”

However much a brand’s reputation is at stake, one thing is for sure: at the heart of it, if the audience is entertained they will watch and share. “If the story has heart and the brand has an integrated cross-platform approach and is blown out to the appropriate platforms then the sky is the limit,” says Ulbrich. “The key is to get the message out to audiences using great ideas, creativity and true innovation."