Down The Rabbit Hole
When Mister Three Sixty first wrote about transmedia storytelling here, he didn’t realise what a rabbit hole he’d fallen into. Once in the hole, you find more and more people are talking and writing on the subject. Rather fewer of them are actually doing anything about it.
So here are some of the best examples of the thing in action;
- Star Wars – original movies and franchise, prequel movies, Clone wars animation, comic books, toys and on and on.
- Heroes – TV show, with weekly online comic (sponsored by Nissan), graphic novel , fictional website for Primatech, a front company in the series (sponsored by Cisco), ‘create your hero’ mobile phone competition (sponsored by Sprint), weekly online and mobile trivia games, blogs written by characters and on and on.
Entertainment properties do it well because media businesses own a range of platforms and have the impetus to extend their IP as widely as possible. Unfortunately this model isn’t exactly replicated in the marketing world.
Some good brand examples;
- Coca-Cola’s ‘Happiness Factory’ –a fictional world behind the original ad spot.
- Audi’s ‘The Art of the H3ist’ – Alternate Reality Game meets Advertising.
Mister Three Sixty is still working out a practical framework for marrying business strategy with transmedia story development, but this chart from Gary Hayes seems like a promising startpoint. Thanks to Robbie and Sven for some good thinking and ideas – they really helped Mister Three Sixty’s journey.
