In 2007 she launched AdBroad, an AdAge Power 150 blog covering her corner of the advertising industry. Then, at SXSW 2009, she coined the term “brand fiction” to describe her unique hybrid of branded entertainment and fan fiction and launched a boutique content agency, Brand Fiction Factory, shortly thereafter.

The idea behind brand fiction is to give brands a life of their own on social media channels, growing the brands’ mythology along with their number of followers.

Her unofficial, Webby award-winning @bettydraper Twitter feed tops out at 31,000 followers, illuminating the inner life of the fictional 1960s housewife in AMC’s Mad Men.

Other Mad Men characters have Twitter profiles as well (some voiced by Ross, some by other fans), creating an ongoing conversation that draws on the show’s plotlines. This develops their personalities while giving new and die-hard fans something to chew on between episodes.

But “Mad Men on Twitter” extends beyond Twitter. Klein Ross and her cohorts even put together a Twepisode titled “Don takes Sally to the Beatles” that imagines how the characters in Mad Men would have experienced the legendary Beatles concert at Shea stadium if Twitter were around in 1965. There’s also a blog, Welcome to the Drapers. (Mad Men’s creator, Matt Weiner, and AMC have given their blessings but declined to officially endorse the project.)

During this year’s StoryWorld Conference in San Francisco, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Helen Klein Ross, who explained what brand managers and TV producers stand to gain by bringing some fiction (and fun) to their brands.

I’ve been working in this digital storytelling industry for over 15 years now so in my perspective, it means the same thing it did 15 years ago. It’s just the new word for it. What I like about transmedia is that it’s not about duplicating content; it’s about sticking to the essence of a story and expanding it to different platforms.

Coming from a public broadcaster angle at the BBC [editor’s note: Allimonos left the BBC last month to pursue a career in branded content], where we’re not purely concerned with profit, I see transmedia as the new art form of this century.

You’re known for developing BBC’s “mythology engine.” Can you explain what that is and how it’s being used?

As BBC’s multiplatform drama commissioner, I wanted to create this transmedia repository for everything to do with Doctor Who. The show is about to celebrate it’s 50^th anniversary, and it being the longest running science fiction show in the universe, a huge mythology has been built up around it.

So we constructed this reusable framework that we could apply to Doctor Who and to another iconic program, EastEnders.

Essentially, the mythology engine is a video-rich transmedia Wikipedia for TV shows with great mythologies. What’s great is that there are a few predetermined pathways through the stories, but the audience can still go in and play around like they would on the web.

Are there any stories that don’t work well across platforms?

With the BBC, I was mostly involved in fictional programs and figuring out how to extend them across the web, mobile, IPTV, etc., in a way that would reach millions.

Being public broadcasters, BBC needs to create content for everyone, so we try to avoid the niche. We’ve done a lot of experimental broadcasting but over the last few years, the BBC has been trying to ask, “what are the shows and moments that are really going to capture the attention of the nation in a non-TV format?”

That’s why we focused on Doctor Who as well as EastEnders, which deals with a lot of important social issues through drama.

For EastEnders’ 25^th anniversary, I got together with TV execs to create a spin-off drama, E20. It starts in the main program, where the drama centers around a community of people, and then it moves online for a couple of weeks until the characters move back into the show. So we had to help audiences navigate the content and move from one medium to the next seamlessly.

Was there an interactive element? 

We’ve created a Facebook following and some E20 characters are on Twitter. But it’s hard, because the tweets have to be really high quality and only one of the actors was really good at it.  Unlike the Mad Men characters on Twitter who aren’t associated with the show, this came directly from the actors.

If you’re going to extend a show in any way, you have to figure out what its DNA is, what its essence is as a brand. Then you can carry that over to different platforms and decide if there is anything new to be added to the mix.

With EastEnders we wanted to attract younger viewers and nurture young talent. So we did summer schools with young people, had young people writing the show and rejuvenated the cast.

Any other lessons about what works and what doesn’t from your tenure at the BBC?

A few of the more practical things we learnt were the dos and don’ts of online video. For instance, avoid appointment to view. We experimented with that early on and it never really worked; VOD (videos on demand) is the way people watch videos online.

Another is to acknowledge the medium. The Guild, an amazing Felicia Day series about gamers, is an example of that. Each of the episodes starts with her addressing the audience and camera, then moving into the drama.

I think what it says on a semiotic level is, “we’re not embarrassed of being online. This isn’t lower-production-value content, this is a genuine form in its own sense.”

An additional really good lesson is to avoid leaving multiplatform to the end and to be involved right from the conception stage. I think it’s about orchestrating and architecting an experience for the audience. It’s what you do before, during and after the TV moment and how you bridge the gap for audiences between episodes.

An example of what worked is Being Human, a drama about a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf who choose to share a flat and try to figure out how to live as humans. I was involved with that brand from the conception stage and we came up with a really great formula.

Beforehand, we answered the ‘how the characters came to be’ question by releasing prequels, then we released the show and then we captured the chat that happened around the broadcast through social media.

We also had a blog that went into how the series was made, and then we released the prequel, which was the bridge to the next series. I think that way of pushing the audience along timelines works well.

How do you navigate the various silos (and budgets) that are involved when you’re working across platforms?

There are a lot of dotted lines and different parts of the BBC, so my role is really to cut through the silos as a translator.

I learn and speak the language of the TV commissioners and execs, and then bring mobile, tech and R&D together with the TV partners to make transmedia that works.

I do have a separate budget, but no decision is made without the dotted line being involved, and without bringing the whole business together.

Is transmedia a niche product or can it have mass appeal?

Having worked for a very large broadcaster who, each week, would broadcast to millions of people, I think transmedia has the opportunity to go mainstream and massive.

With Doctor Who, we had four million gaming downloads within weeks, which basically matches what a regular episode would get. With Being Human, half the audience came through heavily marketed TV channels and the other came through our iPlayer and catch-up services.

I think transmedia is a great opportunity because brands really want to have an intimate relationship with their consumers.I’m excited that brands are seriously getting into commissioning content and that there are amazing international collaborative projects breaking through and reaching millions.

Photo Courtesy of www.ifp.org, via Flickr

Jeff Gomez turns entertainment brands into full-blown story universes. As CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, he has created multiplatform content for such intellectual properties as James Cameron’s Avatar, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean and Microsoft’s Halo.

Starlight Runner also works with companies like Coca-Cola (the Happiness Factory), Mattel (Hot Wheels) and Hasbro (Transformers) to expand consumer brands into multiplatform experiences in the form of video games, comic books, websites and TV shows.

The key to creating successful story universes, according to Gomez, is working with the strengths of each medium. Every platform adds a complementary but consistent element to a story, and in turn, enriches the audience’s experience.

Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Jeff Gomez at the StoryWorld conference in San Francisco where he delivered a highly autobiographical keynote entitled “Worldbuilding and Mythology.” We asked him about branded entertainment, the hype surrounding “gamification,” and whether there’s room for print in transmedia storytelling.

“What a relief to get up here and not have to explain what I do,” Gomez said, and was rewarded with enthusiastic applause and a deluge of retweets.

Billed as the first-ever conference of people engaged in transmedia ­– or multiplatform – storytelling, StoryWorld was a Dungeons and Dragons-meets-TED Talks gathering of filmmakers, writers, producers and marketers devoted to telling age-old stories in exciting new ways.

The spirit of collaboration and creativity in the Parc 55 Wyndham was palpable – no doubt the conference was a success – but I’m not so sure we’ve moved past definitions just yet.

Sure, everyone at StoryWorld agrees that “the story always comes first,” as the oft-repeated mantra goes. But what is the story, who owns it, and how do we tell it in a collaborative, fair, and profitable way?

Jeff Gomez (Image by James Duncan Davidson via Flickr)

Everything is a story (wait, what?)

The word “story” has gone mainstream, as John David Heinsen from Bunnygraph Entertainment pointed out in a Monday morning session. Let’s say a screenwriter, a producer and a brand marketer sit down at a table. Each may think they’re a storyteller. But they’re not talking about the same thing.

It turns out the words “story” and “storyteller” are fluid and their meanings depends on who’s using them.

Another example of how semantics are important (and confusing) occurred later in the day. Toward the end of a breakout session on “building buzz” someone used the word “brand.” Everyone groaned.

The speaker apologized profusely. But that’s essentially what people mean when they talk about a “story world” ­– a piece of intellectual property that has multiple extensions on different platforms. A brand by any other name.

Of course, the problem is that the word “brand” has become a buzzword. And if we’re not careful, the beautiful word “story” will become one too.

Story worlds are not new

Stories have been around forever (since cavemen and campfires blah blah blah) and so have story worlds. Think J.R.R. Tolkien (proudly invoked by Tricia Pasternak and Lenny Brown from Random House), George Lucas or, of course, Walt Disney.

In a Tuesday morning keynote Disney’s design director Orrin Shively noted that story worlds exist in the real world too; Disney has been creating theme park rides that expand on its branded universes (from Snow White to Finding Nemo) for decades.

What has changed is the variety of platforms available for storytelling, as well as their interactive potential.

Robot Heart Stories

Collaboration is key (but so is consistency)

A fundamental aspect of transmedia storytelling is collaboration – both with other storytellers and with the people formerly known as the audience.

We heard countless examples of transmedia stories “co-created” with fans, from Brent Friedman’s branded TV series Valemont, to Jim Babb’s playful Socks, Incorporated. Transmedia pioneer and Monday keynote Lance Weiler even collaborated with inner-city fifth-grade students on Robot Heart Stories.

Transmedia storytellers also collaborate with each other. While creative types often guard their intellectual property like Gollum guards his ring (sorry, two full days with self-professed geeks), multiplatform storytellers are like jazz musicians: happy to jam on each other’s tracks.

Novelist Sparrow Hall, for example, invites musicians, artists and videographers to riff on his short stories, which he packages into transmedia ebooks. Of course, collaboration requires trust, which means content creators are only willing to share their story worlds with collaborators who are on the same page.

A fundamental rule of story worlds is that they must be consistent across every platform and in each iteration. As Jeff Gomez put it in his presentation, storytellers need to “Show me you care about the story world. Show me it’s real.”

The same lesson applies to all (gasp) brands – whether it’s a magazine, an airline, or a TV franchise.

Collaboration is complex (who owns the story?)

Collaboration fuels transmedia storytelling but it’s also what makes it so incredibly hard to pull off.

In a Tuesday session called “Navigating the Silos,” panelists from Bravo, BBC and LucasFilm commiserated about the roadblocks involved with launching cross-platform initiatives within their own organizations (“I can accept that I.T. is a silo but there’s no excuse for Communications,” bemoaned former BBC content commissioner Rosie Allimonos).

So you can imagine how messy it gets when numerous copyright holders, licensers, and distributors are involved. A Tuesday afternoon session entitled “Co-managing in Collaboration with Stakeholders” attempted to navigate these complexities; it sort of hurt my brain (this probably shouldn’t have been scheduled as the last session of the day).

The key takeaway for prospective transmedia practitioners: “Get a lawyer.”

This question of “Who owns a story?” came up throughout the conference. Some, like “brand fiction” pioneer Helen Klein Ross (who has more than 31,000 followers as the unofficial Twitter voice of Mad Men’s Betty Draper) feel that once it’s released to the world a story belongs to the world.

Others, like Blacklight CEO Zak Kadison, insist a story’s creator is its rightful “gatekeeper.” While this question remains open, it made for one of StoryWorld’s most emotional and important debates.

Stories are good for business

In the end, there’s a practical reason for both Madison Avenue and Hollywood to embrace transmedia: There‘s money to be made.

As Innovative Artists’ David Tochterman put it, transmedia “gives buyers multiple ways to say yes.” Or put slightly differently by Universal McCann’s Jeff Bernstein, “If you’re a storyteller you have a tremendous advantage; you can design an experience that’s scalable.”

But perhaps most crucially – this was stated by multiple speakers – mutliplatform is good for business because it’s what audiences and customers expect. End of story.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco. 

Transmedia means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. How do you explain what you do to someone who knows nothing about transmedia storytelling?

Everyone looks at transmedia through their own lens. Independent film makers may have the “bringing film into the digital age” angle whereas for others it’s franchising or adding interaction.

To me, transmedia is one or more stories that live on different screens. It’s about audience participation and the story changing with audience interaction, until that same story comes back and interacts with them in a different way.

The work you’re doing now is focused on the world of ARG [alternate reality games], but you’ve also advised brands like Ford, GE and Pepsi in your work with Undercurrent. How do these two sides of your work inform each other?

Sometimes my brand strategy work is directly informed by my gaming design. With Ford, for example, we designed the Focus Rally, which was an interactive race across the U.S. that we produced with Hulu and the producers of The Amazing Race.

They shot six competing teams in Ford Focus’ and we came up with this transmedia gaming strategy to let people at home live-stream the show, interact with the contestants driving, and influence the race. The team that had the most engaged followers won the competition.

Other times, it involves partnering our clients with indie game designers who are already doing awesome stuff. We help them make a big splash in a small community with what is probably, to a brand, a really small amount of money.

Do you think transmedia has the potential to cross-over to mainstream markets, or are you mostly catering to hardcore tech geeks?

We’re trying to figure that out. Socks, Incorporated was kind of R&D in that sense. We thought, what if we take some of the core principles of ARG and transmedia games and make them family-friendly, playable, light-hearted? Humour is a big part of our work, because we feel like it’s really lacking in the world of transmedia. So we tried that out and got a ton of research from the players.

There’s a ton of mixtures of technology that people haven’t tapped into yet, that alter physical and digital boundaries in a way that could make play happen anytime, anywhere.

Where do games fit into the free vs. paid content ecosystem? Are more people willing to pay for games than, say, newspapers and magazines?

We keep pushing our business models even further down the line. First you had to buy your Xbox game, then that was disrupted by games online that you could play for free with advertising or you would have to download the app and pay for that. Now, you can download the app for free but you have to pay to unlock additional content within the app.

I think the same thing is happening with transmedia, where the revenue models will be embedded within the story. We’re been toying with this model for the next phase of Socks, Inc., where  you can play most of the game for free but then you’re going to hit a paywall where if you want to keep playing a specific character’s mission you have to buy their badge or buy their sock puppet kit.

It’s like a FarmVille model, where you pay for an additional crop or animal that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. You don’t need it, but because you’re so engaged in the story you want to have everything.

I want to ask you about Jim Babb as a personal brand. You seem to exist in a gazillion online universes and you even created a microsite for your marriage proposal! How consciously do you manage that brand?

I think it’s important to have elements of yourself in your brand and to do things publicly. If you don’t, if you’re not doing it somewhat consciously, then what’s coming out unconsciously is probably not what you want.

Personally, as the years have gone on and my different online identities have melded into one image of myself, I find that my work benefits from being personal and transparent and vice-versa.

At StoryWorld you’ll be presenting on “The Evolution of Gaming Behaviours” along with Gabe Zicherman, Steve Peters, Dan Hon and Evan Jones. What are you guys planning to talk about?

For the longest time, we’ve been going on about the 1-9-90 rule, the notion that 1 percent of people on the internet are going to creating content for your game, 9 percent are going to be curating that content, and 90 percent are going to be passively browsing the website and then bouncing.

But things are becoming so much more interactive. Are people evolving or are games evolving? Were we not making the right kinds of games for people before?

I think the name “Evolution of Gaming Behaviours” sets us up on a really interesting topic: Are gamers changing?

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place this year from October 31 to November 2 in San Francisco. 

You define yourself as a transmedia author, producer and brand developer. How do you go about explaining what you do to someone who knows nothing about transmedia?

I tell people that I create experiences around a story. I’ll share that story with other artists and see if they would like to create an extension of it through their own medium.

I’ve also done the same thing with major brands. Whereas in the past a company might have had a major TV campaign, today they use transmedia: jumping from one media to the next to tell their story – in that case, the story of a brand.

You’ve just released a paperback book that includes music, video and artwork in addition to two short stories. Do you think readers can get a complete experience out of just reading the thing or do they need to engage with each medium to follow the story?

I don’t like experiences where you’re forced to do anything in a specific sequence. I want to be able to move around freely. When I created my type of transmedia storytelling, I wanted each of the elements to really exist on their own.

When I was in college, the movie Trainspotting came out and I heard the soundtrack being played at a club one night. I went out and bought the soundtrack to it, even before I had read the book or seen the movie, so in that way, the soundtrack was a way of letting me into that story world.

The actual book and movie came after for me, but even in that way, they lived separately from one another – they could be absorbed separately. I love books, but they just don’t have anything interesting going on! There’s nothing that takes a book further.

You had mentioned Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris as an example of a film that could be told through transmedia. What did you mean?

Midnight in Paris was a surprise hit; the story was great, and it was incredibly funny. But it also let us go back in time and hang out with these famous artists and writers. It lets you hang out in that universe.

There was an opportunity there, I think, for a transmedia experience. There was an opportunity with the music for a soundtrack that would let us revisit that story. There could have been episodic content online that offers more doors for you to walk through.

I think telling stories through transmedia is the type of thing that studios and advertisers are interested in, since you have stories that are continuing online, and that’s where you can get viewership. There’s a whole marketing system that can be built around that, and ways to generate revenue.

How have you brought transmedia storytelling into your work with brands like Bono’s (RED) campaign, CitiBank and Motorola?

The work that I did with those brands has informed the more creative work that I’m doing for myself. I think when we create our own art we say, “I want to try this out, this is an experiment.” But in advertising it doesn’t work that way, you don’t create something just to experiment. You create something to meet a goal.

You’re probably familiar with the (RED) campaign – Gap, American Express, Armani – all of these big brands had (RED) products. Motorola came on as the campaign’s technology partner and since Motorola deals with technology, we created an online calculator.

You could plug in the amount of money you had spent on a Motorola product and it would tell you how many people have been fed or clothed with the money you spent. It let you see how your donation translates.

We were also collaborating with different artists at that time. They were doing live events that were also awareness generators for the campaign. It was supporting those events, documenting the events with video, creating exclusive content for the Motorola site (download remixes, singles, etc.).

It was taking the (RED) story and telling it in many different ways so that people could connect with it. One of the reasons why the Red campaign was so successful was the transmedia element.

I’m curious about your own personal brand. You’ve been very open about things in your life that have affected your work, like your involvement with Alzheimer’s Awareness. Do you think this sort of transparency is part of what it means to be a “brand” in the digital age?

I think that there is value in transparency, whether you’re an artist brand or a larger corporate brand. Transparency is different for each, though.

For instance, there was a campaign that was created for Ford right after the bailouts that was all about how they were going to have to go back and fix what happened. Showing people what went wrong, talking about it, and being transparent about it, ended up being a year’s worth of content.

Over the course of the campaign, Ford came to be seen as this organic thing instead of a faceless, robotic, awful entity. That’s when a brand starts to transcend the marketplace. What we’re watching there is not a company. We’re watching something that represents ourselves, and that’s the most powerful level a brand can reach.

Sparrow Hall flanked by his collaborators - Photo by Lindsey Bourke

At StoryWorld you’ll be talking about “Managing Rights in a Participative Canon” with Sarah Hinchcliff Pearson from the Creative Commons and other experts. How does this topic relate to your work and how do you plan on approaching it in San Francisco next month?

Transmedia is often a collaboration, so you have to manage those relationships. You have to manage people’s trust in you. The amount of money I spent on legal fees on Two Blue Wolves, my first transmedia story, was more than I spent on any of the production!

That’s the reason why I wanted to speak about contracts at StoryWorld. To talk about my experience in getting those contracts where they needed to be, what that was like, and then helping by talking to the audience about what they should look out for and offering tips, resources, and things to think about as they’re creating their contracts.

What are you looking forward to most at StoryWorld?

I’m looking forward to seeing dialogues form between the brands and storytellers that are coming in from all sides of the industry.

This is the first time we’ve ever had a transmedia conference and it’s the first time for all these different forces to come together. I have a feeling people are going to be making amazing contacts.

It’s going to be eye opening for people that are working in toy companies, game companies, and entertainment companies to connect with people that are thinking on these multilevels of storytelling. I think people are really going to inspire one another.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco.