Transmedia Entertainment & Marketing:
Marketing & Branding
Week 5
Rhythma Kapoor
Contents
• Main features of TM universes
• Case study: The Art of the Heist
• Business goals
• Project development
• Business models
• TM platforms
• Platform release strategies
• TM financing
• Crowdsourcing
• Case studies
• Group work 4
Main Features of Transmedia Universes
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Points of Entry
Trigger Points
Teasers
Rabbit Hole
Pivot Point
Distributed Narrative
CTAs
The stop and go effect
The Domino Effect
The Spin-off Effect
Points of Entry
How a user can enter your story/property/project.
These may be platform, medium, content based.
Multiple POE’s for Transmedia projects.
The audience must reach a project’s points of
entry by consciously moving towards them.
Teasers & Trigger Points
Teasers
Teasers have traditionally given information
about an upcoming event but with no CTA.
Trigger Point
o A Trigger Point motivates the audience to
follow up on the teaser information.
o A Trigger Point usually refers the audience to
the Rabbit Hole.
Rabbit Hole
• Sets the foundation of the world and the
Experience
• Use linear media
• Tells the story
• Hook
• Stickiness
• Creeps into our lives
• Has CTA
Call To Action (CTA’s)
presenter based, visual, unintended!
Ability to move between components
Audience has three stages:
 motivation to act (primer),
 sense of the action (referral) and
 personal reward for the action done by the
audience (reward).
Pivot Point
o Certain aspects of Interactive narratives
o Provides strong narrative backbone
o Penetration to mass audiences
The stop and go effect
During the course of the story,
one of the middle segments of a project is suspended,
while other parts continue on,
and then the stalled segment resumes its course as if nothing
happened.
For example, in a transmedia promotion of a movie,
online trailers all around the world simultaneously disappear from
the web
as soon as tv and radio commercials are aired ,
and then return online a few days after the movie comes out.
The Domino effect
A particularly emotional narrative in one of the multiple
media platforms or a particular asset of a transmedia
project becomes temporarily more important than the
others.
This dominant asset changes the flow and direction of
all other assets and acts as the dominant ‘driver’ until the
conclusion of the project.
The spin-off effect
One of the platforms in a transmedia project can
temporarily attach itself to another medium in order to
strengthen or revive its role or its content and continue
towards a secondary goal in respect to
the project as a whole.
The Art of the H3eist
The Art of the Heist” embraced the target audience’s
need of control over their environment and invited
them into an immersive 24-hour-a-day alternate
reality.
“
This story blurred fact and fiction by concocting a
mysterious storyline that involved consumers in the
recovery of an A3 stolen from Audis Park Avenue
headquarters in New York City.
At the heart of the narrative were six new A3s
containing coded plans for the largest art heist in
history; however, one car contained the key to
decrypting the information hidden in all the others,
and the mystery surrounding the “heist” unfolded in
real time over three months across the country. The
Heists final chapter was played out in front of a live
audience at the Viceroy Hotel in Los Angeles, where
we finally discovered who the real villain was.
Art of the H3ist
McKinney-Silver Report
Art of the H3ist Dissection: Launch
Storyworld
Gameplay
Meta
ARGN
announce
Forums,
Trail, Guide,
Wikis, Blogs,
RSS Feeds
Blogs: Kuro5hin, MetaFilter,
GearLive, Museum of Hoaxes
PortaGame hughhewitt.com,
dailykos, lockergnome, The
New Yorker Times...
Stolen A3 Blog
Auto Show
Ingame
Ads
Story
sites
Break-in
video
Print Ads in: Wired, Esquire,
Robb Report, USA Today,
The New Yorker…
Day One D2 D3 D4
16 March
D5
D6 D7
D8 D9
Day Ten D11 D12 D13 Day 14 D15 D16
25
March
March
Day 17 D18 D19 Day 20
April 4
29April 1st
Official
Launch
Day 22
April 6
Art of the H3ist Dissection > POEs
AudiUSA.com
microsite
Hardcore ARG
players
51%
Atom Films,
iFilm
Blogs: Kuro5hin,
MetaFilter, GearLive,
Museum of Hoaxes
PortaGame
hughhewitt.com,
lockergnome,
The
dailykos,
New Yorker Times...
Nisha Roberts
movie
Rabbit
Hole
Trigger Point
Print Ads in: Wired,
Esquire, Robb Report,
USA Today, The New
Yorker…
Stolen A3
Blog
Pivot Point
NYC International
AutoShow
Results:The Art of the H3eist
•More than 200,000 people became involved with the
search for the stolen A3 in a single day.
•Online buzz for the A3 grwe by more than four times as a
growing number of consumers participated in the thriller.
•Within the first few days of the campaign launch, seven
fan sites were created, one of which includes a "Top 10
Reasons to Play Art of the Heist."
Lessons from The Art of the H3eist
 Continually create components that refer new
audiences to your Rabbit Hole;
 Your Rabbit Hole needs to persist in this role;
 Have a pivot point & guide to the unfolding experience;
 Use hardcore players as characters;
 Target & address hardcore & casual players;
 Mix up using everyday devices, immersive play and
linear narrative;
 Use a real-world performance ending.
TM MARKETING & BRANDING
Business Goals
Awareness
– Maintain or boost brand awareness
– Reach beyond the usual or core consumer
– Assist in profiling and recruiting influential consumers
– Generate press (old & new media)
Advocacy
– Increase consumer advocacy
– Reward or empower advocates
– Add buzz to brands and products
– Generate fans and followers
Revitalization
– Add glitz to boring or undifferentiated products
– Generate word‐of‐mouth around low involvement products
– Build brand image
– Build product awareness
– Re‐position against competitors
Sales
– Generate indirect sales through all the above
– Increase in direct sales by getting the consumer closer to the point of
purchase, combined with sales promotion
TM Marketing & Project Development
The Marketing development loop has six key components:
Story
Experience
Audience
Business
Model
Platforms
Execution
Transmedia Project Workflow
TM Project Planning
The Transmedia Franchise
Transmedia Business Model
• Platform
• Define
• Develop
• Design
• Deliver
• Release platform/s
• Finance & Funding
• Branding
The Business Model
Raise
Finance
Make low
cost
Media
Exhibit
Raise
awareness/
Build audience
Involve/Collabo
rate with
Audience
Sponsorshi
p/Brand
Integration
Pre-sell to
Audience
Audience
big
enough?
Make more
media
No? Repeat
Yes
Transmedia Platforms
Transmedia Platforms
A
U
D
I
E
N
C
E
Platform Release Strategies
Strategy 1
Step
Objective Platforms
1 Have paid content available
to capitalize on interest from day 1
DVD, Kindle, Pay‐to‐view/
download
2 Release free content to build audience
Web series, comic book
3 Attract the hardcore audience
ARG with “secret” comic books
and webisodes as level
rewards
4 Work with hardcore fans to spread word
to casual audience
Collaborative/co‐created
sequel
Platform Release Strategies
Strategy 2
Step
1 Attract large casual
audience
Objective Platforms
(sponsored & televised) flash
mobs
2 Work to convert casuals to hardcore Social network with
unfolding/evolving Twitter story
3 Work with hardcore to spread
word to develop experience
UGC& poster competitions
4 Sell paid content
DVD, merch, performance
workshops/training
Multi-Layered TM Release Strategy
Marketing Strategy:
No-Mimes Mini -ARG
Positive aspects of the Time-Line
•shows the media and links or calls‐to‐action
between the media
•there’s an implied sequence of experience (from
top to bottom).
•indicates which part of the story is told by which
media
•indicates the timing of each element
•indicates how the audience traverses the media
Transmedia Financing
3 ways to finance TM Projects
Sponsored (e.g. free to Audience) ‐ project is paid for by
the author (self‐funded) or by a 3rd party such as a
brand (advertising, product placement, branded
entertainment) or by benefactors (crowdfunded, arts
endowment)
Audience‐paid ‐ purchase of content through paid
downloads, physical product, subscriptions or
Membership
Freemium ‐ mix of Sponsored and Audience‐paid
content that may change over time.
Good
Audience-Paid
Competitions
(Poster etc.)
Webisodes
Comic
Book
Website/
Apps
Poor
DVD,
Kindle,
etc.
Poor
ARG
Good
Sponsored Financing
Crowdfunding:
a form of Sponsored financing because you're asking people to give
you money to fund your project… which you may then choose to
give away for free.
E.g. UGC, Poster design competition etc.
Example: THE ADVERTISING‐FUNDED FEATURE FILM
TM Branding
1. Product placement- having the product or brand logo
frequently appear in shot or appear in a contrived way
2. Sponsorship: having brands sponsor financially etc.
3. Branded entertainment- having your content: the characters,
the storyline and the production values – embody the brand
values. E.g. Branded Web-series
4. Advertising funded films etc.
5. Crowdfunding.
e.g.s: Heroes (Sprint), Rock Band 2 (Cisco), It’s a Mall
World (American Eagle Outfitters), Gossip Girl: Real NYC
Stories Revealed (Dove), The Temp Life (Staples), Easy to
Assemble (IKEA).
PROMOTING AND DISTRIBUTING A
BRANDED WEB SERIES
Examples:
Easy to Assemble- top ten IKEA fan
blogs.
Thread Banger is a web show aimed at
people who like sewing,
knitting and making their own clothes. The
show, with around 500,000 views per
month is perfect for the Japanese sewing
machine manufacture Janome. So
successful was show sponsorship that
Janome now has a sewing machine with
Thread Banger branding!
Examples
• Reebok creates “Secret Life” with F1 Racer Lewis Hamilton
• Nike transforms London into a game board
• Bing partners with Jay-Z to produce Decoded
• Mattel: Ken and Barbie
TM campaign grounded in music:
•Song produced by Mark Ronson
that integrates the sound of
athletes mid-sport around the
globe titled “Anywhere in the
World.”
•Currently being used on
television.
•A documentary following Ronson
on his journey of writing the song.
•Coke has built a Beatbox Pavillion
in the Olympic Village where park
visitors can come and “play” the
building like a musical instrument.
•Facebook & mobile apps
•100 pieces of content across
multiple platforms
•
•
•
•
•
•
Facebook game similar to “Six Degrees
of Separation from Kevin Bacon.”
This interactive game helps fans
answer the question “How Olympic
Are You?” by determining how
connected they are to U.S. Olympic
team athletes.
Also U.K version.
Olympic Torch Relay Route. At each
event, there is a 20-minute
performance on stage followed by
pyrotechnics during which the crowd
is encouraged to give a “Big Cheer.”
Samsung is capturing photos of the
crowd during the cheer and providing
the photo online so fans can go on and
tag themselves.
Samsung’s campaign is predominately
composed of social media and mobile
elements.
CASE: SONY BRAVIA ‘BALLS’
CASE: SONY BRAVIA ‘BALLS’
Key success factors
• Every medium tells a part of the story,
so the campaign’s impact is amplified
by word-of-mouth
• A show, a piece of entertainment… adapted into different forms,
even with ‘behind the scenes’ footage
CASE: SONY BRAVIA ‘BALLS’
Key results:
• Business:
– High impact on sales
– Share has risen of more than +40%
• Word-of-mouth:
– Several million views online
– + 650,000 mentions on blogs etc.
• Cannes: Gold Lion
Rather than SAY something,
DO something for the consumer
Make your brand a content provider…
ENTERTAIN the consumer
Be part of the conversation, give the consumer a
reason to SPEAK ABOUT or USE your brand
CASE: NIKE PLUS
CASE: NIKE PLUS
Key success factors
• Perfect example of branded utility
• Excellent channel approach,
cfr. ‘Run London’
« Nike+ has reinvented running as a fun,
social, digital-enhanced sport »
CASE: NIKE PLUS
Key results:
• + 450,000 kits sold during the
1st three months
• + 15 millions KM during the 1st year
• Cannes: Titanium Lion and Cyber Grand Prix
CASE: DOVE EVOLUTION
CASE: DOVE EVOLUTION
CASE: DOVE EVOLUTION
Key results:
• + 10 million views on YouTube,
also with a famous parody
• Cannes: Grand Prix Film and
Cyber Grand Prix (!)
Group work 4: TM Business Model
Part 1
•Find an interesting startup and breakdown what you think
they're biz model is. Try to find startups working in the TM or
interactive storytelling space.
Part 2
•Critically evaluate the BM from part 1.
Part 3
•Use your analysis to prepare your TM project’s BM.
•Prepare:
– List of platforms you are going to use
– Platform release strategy/ies
– Prepare a time line for platform release
– List of finance & funding strategies
Group work 4: TM Business Model
DEADLINES
Part 1
• due next Friday, blog post+ comments
• Part 2
• due next Friday, blog post+ comments
• Part 3
• Ongoing, post as you finish each part
• Make sure to comment on 2 groups BM