Ask a web developer and she will invariably start waxing poetic about hardware architecture, software frameworks and programming languages. Ask a journalist and he’s likely to start talking about the places content is housed – in print, on the web or in an app.

Speak to a film or television producer, writer or marketer and they might casually drop the term “transmedia,” a close cousin of platform agnosticism which is coming into its own as an industry. Last year we attended a conference in San Francisco all about transmedia.

We like to think of Sparksheet as a platform agnostic magazine. That means we aren’t wedded to any particular medium. We love the web, but we also think there’s a time and place for print, TV and even radio (check out our new podcast).

It also means our content is available on whatever screens or device you want to consume it on, thanks to our website’s responsive design.

Confused yet? So are we.

Which is why we’re asking you to give us your take on the same question:

What does platform agnostic mean to you? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

For Rosie Allimonos, transmedia storytelling expands the brand universes of BBC shows like EastEnders and Doctor Who.

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.

-Rosie Allimonos, BBC Television

Transmedia pioneer and media scholar Henry Jenkins thinks cross-platform content is all about extending the lifespan of a story.

Pieces of the story can be scattered across media platforms and that creates incentives for us to return to that content again and again, creating multiple touchpoints for brands but also creating an expanded canvas for storytellers to work on. The story is not tied to one platform. It is in all media.

-Henry Jenkins, Author, Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins. Image by WayneKLin via Flickr.

Brazilian storyteller and startup founder Mauricio Mota thinks the platform itself can shape how a transmedia story is told.

You are not locked to a little island, you’ve got this big map and people will want to explore it on the Internet, on their cellphone, at an event, or reading a newspaper or magazine… Transmedia allows you to develop different parts of a story, for different audiences, on whatever platform suits it best.

-Mauricio Mota, The Alchemists

Platform agnosticism isn’t just about telling good stories. Medical doctor and science journalist Ivan Oransky thinks it has pedagogical power, too.

Journalists have always reported, curated, edited and managed information in various ways, no matter what we called it. What has changed over time, as technology gives us more options, is how we display that information to readers, viewers and listeners.

-Ivan Oransky, Executive Editor, Reuters Health

New York Times editor Jonathan Landman boasts about the flexibility that reporting on the web gives to print journalists. For him, multiplatform means the convergence of real-time news on the web with classic print publishing.

Are we a genuine, platform-agnostic 24-hour newsgathering operation or what? Guy climbs building at 1:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning after the paper had closed and the print editors had left the building. Web staff is on the case. We publish the news at 3:11 a.m. We add new information as it becomes available. We mobilize Sewell Chan at 4:30. By 6 a.m. there’s a 1,000-word story with pictures. Good morning, New York.

-Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor, The New York Times

Maurício Mota. Image by jmm kazi via Flickr.

For content marketer and writer David Preece, being platform agnostic means being adaptive to the constantly shifting winds of mobile and web-based technologies, be they applications or hardware.

By staying platform agnostic, and making sure you do what’s best for your clients and content, you’ll already be one step ahead of those agencies who are fixated on just developing for the latest web platform regardless of suitability.

-David Preece, Beyond

Same goes for digital and social expert David Patton, who argues that staying platform agnostic lets marketers focus on good content.

Companies looking to sell to consumers or enterprises need to be creating content that can be easily adapted to any platform. Like newsrooms, marketing needs to evolve from being focused on filling a specific platform to creating compelling content that fits in any bucket.

-David Patton, Waggener Edstrom

Tell us: What does platform agnostic mean to you?

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. 

Holistic marketing is a creative approach that takes into account the entire 360-degree life cycle of a product or service, from the perspective of both client and consumer. One aspect of holistic marketing campaigns is transmedia storytelling, which employs different media and platforms to create a unified message or story. McMann calls this a “seamless brand image.”

For example, McMann created a campaign for the British Council aimed at creative professionals looking to hone their skills through mentored work placements abroad. The goal was to publicize the program and its benefits in an effort to encourage applications.

For the campaign, McMann employed a multitude of online and offline tactics including:

• a breakfast panel event. Industry leaders, past award winners, press and would-be applicants attended.
• online and print advertising
• links on various social media platforms and industry forums
• viral emails for advocates and past award winners to circulate
• press releases accompanied by interviews from past award winners

Through her efforts the program received solid press coverage, including mentions in the Guardian and several high-profile blogs. The program tripled the response rate to applications received from the previous year.

Earlier this summer, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Kathryn McMann at 140conf to get a better idea of what she does and how she does it. They also discussed different approaches to transmedia storytelling in North America, the UK, and even Brazil.

But in an age where the proliferation of stories spans multiple channels, how do organizations get their stories out to an increasingly fragmented audience?

Enter transmedia.

A transmedia refresher

Transmedia storytelling employs various media to deliver a narrative. The goal, to paraphrase JWTIntelligence, is for different channels to communicate different parts of the story, with an emphasis on creating a brand community.

Image via madoocinema.com

A popular example would be the companion media to 2003 film, The Matrix Reloaded. The Animatrix, an original series of animated shorts, was released in tandem with Matrix-themed comic books and video games to deepen the narrative beyond the boundaries of the film.

Transmedia storytelling also creates a variety of entry points at which audiences can interact.

Take adaptations of the Harry Potter books, for example, where condensed, picture-centric versions have been developed to attract younger readers to the book series.

Then there is Joss Whedon’s cult phenomenon, Firefly. Despite the show’s dedicated following, the Fox flop only lasted a single season. In 2010, a group of die-hard fans came together to create Browncoats: Redemption, with the support of Big Damn Fan Films, Inc. (BDFF), a non-profit organization devoted to supporting charities through fan-made films. In Firefly, the Browncoat independence fighters are the protagonists of the show.

BDFF reached out to Firefly fans through various social networking channels to find a critical mass of followers to take part in the project. This allowed for crowd-sourced readings of the script, behind-the-scenes footage from fans and the creation of an in-the-flesh Redemption conference.

The film company was also able to leverage the fan base to raise money for several charities selected by the cast and creator of the original series.

Image via fireflyfans.net

The value of transmedia

Why should brands embrace transmedia storytelling?

• Transmedia allows brands such as BDFF to foster a devoted audience and extend their reach to different demographics and communities.

• Transmedia allows consumers to express themselves on their own terms and through established networks.

• By encouraging people to create their own stories and content, transmedia branding allows for crowd-sourced open innovation, a process that could lead to new revenue streams and a treasure trove of relevant content.

As content creation becomes a shared responsibility between brand and audience, the person formerly known as the customer becomes a full-on co-creator and brand evangelist.

Worth telling a story, don’t you think?

140conf takes place on June 15 and 16 in New York City. As the event’s official media partner, we will bring you original 140conf-related content before, during and after the conference. Sparksheet readers are entitled to a 25% discount on registration with promo code “sparksheet” - http://nyc2011.140conf.com/

With global economic parity looming, companies can no longer rely on themselves for the answers. They must co-create new value systems with their customers and other businesses not only to survive, but to grow. And stories – or the act of curating them – can provide amazing new opportunities for growth.

There are a host of companies that have built strong values and a strong “metastory” around their businesses, from more traditional brands like 3M, to the modern darlings of the technology boom, like TOMS or Zappos. Across this spectrum is a way of thinking that takes on organizational inefficiences and creates layers of transparency and authenticity that permeate all communications.

At the same time, more and more companies are taking on the complex problems of the world – from socio-economics, to trade, to education and government. The ability to directly address problems and provide solutions to complexity is the bedrock of storytelling in the 21st century.

A narrative theme is what courses throughout a brand experience, starting with a strong metastory, then extending into specific programs and media.

The business of curation

So how does storytelling actually impact business?

Understanding the value of curation is a great first action step. As my friend Ishan Shapiro says, curation can be defined as “storytelling through the use of available knowledge, information and experience.”

This means that we go from merely aggregating media assets – video, text, sound, pictures – to building currency around experiences that have cultural, social and educational impact. And where companies are relevant in these contexts, market opportunities abound.

Charmin’s installation in Times Square, Dove’s Real Beauty meet-ups, Amex’s OPEN kiosks and HP’s innovation installations are all proving that branded content can provide an experience of real meaning and “shareability.” In each of these examples, a “metanarrative” spawns extensions whereby people are inspired to create their own media based on themes or topics related to these initiatives.

Holistic storytelling and branded experiences

Each of these brand initiatives applied an underlying theme or topic that resonates with people in their daily lives:

• Charmin explored the meaning of comfort by installing bathrooms in Times Square
• Dove broke down cultural mores around beauty with TV commercials and then extended the narrative into other channels such as social media
• HP branded collaborative innovation by inviting prolific artists to create music with their fans (Disclosure: HP is a client though I did not work on the initiative mentioned)
• Amex redefined financial independence by listening to the needs of small business owners and providing them with tools to share

In the case of AMEX, “open” was the underpinning theme; the program extensions are varied; and the medium – Open Forum – is a portal that uses multiple social, digital and offline channels, featuring business owners sharing their success stories.

In each case, storytelling is a holistic practice. Channels and inventory play second fiddle to experiences that are relevant to various audiences and consumer segments.

This is especially important when we consider that consumers today exhibit widely varied behaviours; they aren’t just car buyers or soda drinkers or banking customers. They’re people with sophisticated needs living in a world where solutions to complex problems present even more problems. So we must co-create systems that are culturally relevant and scalable.

In the case of HP, the meta theme of innovation culminated in a strong partnership strategy that produced amazing user-generated experiences co-created between people and the brand. Based on these experiences, new stories – and new ideas – have emerged that continue to evolve.

How Nike does it

Nike’s work on “The Human Race” is a great example of how to leverage people and technology in unprecedented ways. The company has long identified running as an activity that connects people, and one that can enable them to converge around a cause while feeling good about themselves.

And the best part about this platform is that it has unlimited scale. As long as we are around to run, The Human Race continues on through local events and illustrative iterations as well as a wonderful array of shareable and immersive content that provides more unique experiences on mobile devices and screens of all types.

As for sales, the marketing elements are baked into the experience: You simply buy a pair of Nike+ shoes, monitor your distance and become a part of the movement.

Nike uses the metanarrative of “running as a life activity” to rally affinity groups around causes. These experiences result in a wide variety of new stories and activities supported by the brand. These also build or extend brand equities (attributes that consumers can personally invest in).

Stories we need

So how does storytelling impact business? By enlisting people as participants in the stories they already care about so that they buy the products required to fulfill a human need. From there, business growth is organic and can take on many exciting dimensions.

Of course, telling stories and allowing them to flourish across various channels and media types is not all that easy. Major brands like Nike have their own media ecosystems with which to create these immersive experiences (hence the notion of platform).

For those brands which do not have such a luxury, the onus is on them to come up with more creative ways to engage customers. But again, this depends on allowing curation to evolve as a practice of the people, not just what we as marketers or brands dictate.

There is no question that people are willing to engage and participate. If we can make stories the catalysts for reinvention, the possibilities are limitless.

Branded storytelling expert Michael Margolis on the power of narrative:

Consultant David Knies with a few examples of great branded storytelling:

Photo by Joi via flickr

How is blip.tv different from other online video sites?

We like to say that blip.tv is what NBC would look like if it were created in 2005 rather than 1939. Think about a pyramid of content with Hulu owning the top and YouTube owning the bottom. Blip.tv owns the middle.

We work with independent producers. Blip.tv provides the player and the bandwidth and distributes the videos to places like YouTube, iTunes and to TV sets through Roku, Sony TV and other places. Then we monetize the series by aggregating, say, 50-100 shows that reach moms, and then selling space to an advertiser that wants to target that demographic. And then we share 50 percent of the revenue with show producers.

Just the other day we were excited to send a check to a producer for $123,000, which means we will make about half a million dollars this year for that series. I think that really shows that you can create a Web series that’s scalable and profitable and we’re really excited to be part of the ecosystem making that possible.

What impact are new platforms like blip.tv having on television content? Is the nature of storytelling changing or is it just the same old stories distributed in new ways?

It’s been interesting for us to watch that what succeeds on the Web is different from what succeeds on traditional television. So far, what works on the Web is authenticity, going after a niche market, and really engaging with the community that you serve.

One show that’s doing really well on blip.tv is called Nostalgia Critic. It’s really just a guy with a camera who talks about pop culture from the ‘80s. The production value is not super high.

If you love pop culture from the ‘80s, you’ll love this show. If you don’t, you’ll hate this show. He’s not trying to be all things for all people but he really engages people interested in that topic.

You’ll find that the best show producers are active on Twitter, on Tumblr, on Facebook and they really listen to the community that the show serves and incorporate their feedback into the show.

Contrast that with traditional TV, where you won’t succeed if you don’t reach a mass audience. And production values may trump authenticity.

We saw you speak at the Supernova Conference in Philadelphia  last month where you suggested that media companies should act more like startups. How so?

I’m talking specifically about the digital side of a media company. If you’re running the digital side for, say, a magazine, I think you could do your job with a few really good technologists and a few curators of content; we’ll call them the editorial team. They oversee the production of some content but also curate content along whichever vertical it is that the magazine caters to.

That means becoming the aggregator for all of the best bloggers on that topic, the best folks who are creating photos – maybe on Flickr or Shutterstock – and the folks who are creating the best Web series on that subject, whether it’s through blip.tv or Howcast or another platform.

I think this offers a lot of benefits for the media company. It keeps their overhead a lot lower. And it means that they’re not banking everything on their production crew having to create all the content on their site.

And then you’ll obviously need sales people and to make sure that all the content on the site – curated and produced – is as high quality as possible so that you maintain very high CPMs.

You recently joined forces with 7-Eleven to produce a branded reality show, The 7-Eleven Roadtrip Rally. Do you see branded entertainment playing a bigger role in the future of television?

We don’t do a lot of brand entertainment on blip.tv. We had a really special opportunity to coordinate a deal between one of our producers and 7-Eleven, which did very well in terms of viewership, but that’s a rarity for us. We’re not really in the production business.

I think branded entertainment has the opportunity to do well but it’s absolutely key that any series that’s going to succeed on the Web understands the audience that it’s targeting and serves that audience.

It’s also important that a new series comes with marketing dollars just as a traditional TV show would. There’s a bias in this nascent field of Web series that a great series will just take off and gain audience immediately.

Independent show producers are often happy to build up an audience over time and iterate on the show. A brand that’s spending a lot of money on a series might have a little less patience.

The blip.tv website seems to be aimed at content producers, not consumers. Do you have any plans to make blip.tv more of a hub for great independent Web series?

Right. Our website is not as beautiful and easy to navigate as it could be and we are well aware of that. Right now, blip.tv is not a destination site. The site is catered to making it easy for producers to upload content, choose advertising options and then distribute the show.

In the future we do see an opportunity to turn blip.tv into a destination site, but we haven’t yet.

When producers upload their shows to blip they’re given the choice of participating in your advertising program or keeping the content commercial-free. Are we at the stage where both producers and viewers are comfortable with the idea of ads in their online videos?

I think we’re way past the days of 2005 and 2006 when show producers and audiences weren’t expecting to see ads on shows.

Viewers are savvy enough to come to expect it, not just through us but the myriad of other platforms that have ads showing on video. People can handle them just as they can handle ads on television.

You still have some people who create shows as a form of artwork but whereas that was most of the community of show producers in 2005, it’s now very much a minority.

It’s now possible to create an original online series that’s both scalable and profitable. So I think a lot of folks who may have been focused on traditional media in the past are looking toward the Web as a place where they could make money without really having a boss or anyone having a say over their content.

by WayneKLin via Flickr

Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and the author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Trans·me·di·a – 1. A storytelling process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

What have you discovered about Brazil’s media culture? What opportunities do transmedia storytellers have in this part of the world?

The sky is the limit in Brazil. I’m still learning a lot about the media culture here, but what I’m seeing is a culture that preserves its traditions in a way that’s very much alive and vibrant.

What we’ve discovered is that digital culture represents the applying of a folk culture tradition to new media content. In Brazil, the folk culture has always been participatory. It’s always had a strong sense of remixing. It’s always included the audience as part of the performance, whether we’re thinking of the samba schools or carnival.

So if we apply that carnival spirit to thinking about media content, then I think something remarkable is going to come out of this. What I see in Brazil is a country on the threshold of global attention. Between the World Cup (in 2014) and the Olympics (in 2016), people are going to be paying attention.

That creates a unique opportunity for Brazilian companies to become international content producers, to model alternative ways of connecting the producers to the consumers and to experiment with transmedia storytelling, which I think represents the wave of the future where media content is concerned.

2. Transmedia storytelling reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call “synergy.” A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible.

What role will social media play in supporting transmedia storytelling?

Well, I think social media is the key to what I call “spreadable media.” Spreadable media is media that gets passed along as gifts from one member of the community to another. And social networks play a really huge role in that.

Research in the United States is showing two things. First, social media is making people return to watching television in real time. Because otherwise it gets spoiled through their Twitter accounts. There are certain shows they want to watch and tweet about as they are watching [them] and that’s creating a return to a kind of event-based television.

The second thing we’re seeing is that Twitter may be the best indicator of how well a movie opens. Not just because it allows us to see the buzz, or the conversations that people are having about a movie, but it also amplifies those conversations and allows people to discover new movies and discuss them among themselves. It makes word of mouth much more powerful than it’s been before.

In that world, the fan or the consumer plays a crucial role in shaping the circulation of media content. And so companies need to know the fan, respond to the fan, build a relationship with the fan in a very different way than they’ve done before.

3. Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers.

Does transmedia spell the end of television as we know it?

Television is exploding across every media platform. It’s broadcast but it’s also on the Web, it’s on the mobile phone, and that’s part of the opportunity in transmedia entertainment.

Pieces of the story can be scattered across media platforms and that creates incentives for us to return to that content again and again, creating multiple touchpoints for brands but also creating an expanded canvas for storytellers to work on. The story is not tied to one platform. It is in all media.

The more open your system is, the more opportunities there are both for storytellers to expand their reach and for the audience to play a more active role in shaping the content.

4. Transmedia storytelling practices may expand the potential market for a property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments. For example, Marvel produces comic books which tell the Spider-man story in ways that they think will be particularly attractive to female readers (a romance comic, Mary Jane Loves Spiderman).

In Brazil, we have soap operas that run for as little as six or eight months. Is there an opportunity here for transmedia producers to extend the series beyond its television lifespan?

I’ve always felt that countries that have fixed durations for television shows have certain advantages for storytellers. We saw in the States that when the Lost producers discovered they could end the series after five seasons, that gave them a structure and rhythm that they could build on.

The result is a richer and more interesting program than one that has to be infinitely treading water because it doesn’t know how long the story is going to be. Once you’ve got that then you can build the story out in a variety of ways.

Star Wars has a fixed duration, six films, yet through games, comics and novels, there are more and more elements to the story. We’ve gone back in time to the old republic and discovered and explored different areas of that world.

And so you can build on that established base and extend it in transmedia ways that allow artists to continue to capitalize on a story that’s caught the imagination of the public.

5. Ideally, each individual episode must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. Transmedia producers have found it difficult to achieve the delicate balance between creating stories which make sense to first time viewers and building in elements which enhance the experience of people reading across multiple media.

Any final words of wisdom for aspiring storytellers in Brazil and beyond?

I think creative people should be rejoicing in the fact that we’re living in a period
of enormous innovation, a highly generative period in which the definition of a story is changing.

It’s going to change inevitably for economic reasons, as stories travel across every media channel. But it is up to the artist to seize the creative potential of that, to create from that something that is new, that is fresh, that is meaningful and that enriches the culture.

And I think that is the challenge that artists face in the 21st century.

Transmedia definition adapted from Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling 101.

Henry Jenkins at TED