Transmedia Brand Narrative - 360 Planning Evolved

BY: SEAN MACPHEDRAN  |  Branded Entertainment, Media Planning

In Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson made a lot of great points about how our threshold for simplicity in entertainment is increasing. By making comparisons between shows like Dallas and 24, it became clear that the intertwining plots and complex character relationships in entertainment have vastly increased in hit programming. So too has the level of complexity in that other entertainment medium - gaming. Stories are more complex, and more is demanded from players - this is necessary to keep the audience entertained. While not a new “law” - Nintendo has done the opposite with simple gaming - it makes it clear that both our capacity and desire for living in deeper, richer entertainment worlds has grown.

With few exceptions, two being the classic Taster’s Choice campaign, that made TV spots into a soap opera, and “alternate reality game” campaigns like I Love Bees, which created a narrative through multiple channels for Halo 2, this complexity has not been carried over to advertising. Typically, each execution stands alone, bound together in a 360 campaign by an overarching look, theme and core message. A consumer may see 1 or 14 executions, each simply reinforcing the other from a different direction. They may engage through cleverness (sometimes very well) but they don’t engage across one another in any meaningful way.

Pretend you work in Hollywood, and you’ve just been given a challenge. Tell a story across multiple media, and by the way - it’s about Brand X. Very likely, you would reach a different outcome from an ad agency.

The problem would become, how do you drive a compelling narrative across all those different channels? Not in a figurative way - but in a literal way. Not common themes, but common characters and persistent story arcs that leap from one chapter into the next, and laterally into other media. People have to need to tune in, right? The entertainment has to be good enough that people want to know - what happens next? What did I miss? They have to be looking forward to learning more about the story.

But wait - this is about soap, or pop, or a dishwasher. Who cares, right? You can’t make an engaging narrative around that! It’s a crippling argument, and one that while fundamentally incorrect, is incredibly preventative in a creative industry where we are trained in an alternate school of conceptual development. Run the communications checklist and make it as simple as possible, is what we’re taught.

So don’t let that smarmy Hollywood writer in you die. If you look at all the trends it makes a lot of sense to keep him around. You can build a branded entertainment property as your bedrock advertising strategy, letting it snake out through every channel, telling a little more in each execution. I’m looking forward to tuning in for your premiere.