Tracking Transmedia

"Review of the season 3 Falling Skies second screen sync app and premiere social TV campaign....

To generate conversation and buzz during the 2 hour premiere on Sunday, Falling Skies created a “Battle for the Handle” Twitter war challenge where fans chose their allegiance between the #Aliens and the #Resistance. TNT teamed up withR/GA to do something unique and unlike anything I’ve seen before from a TV network. In real time, they pulled select fans who were engaging with the#FallingSkies show along with their chosen side and created graphic novel style digital art pieces using their username and likeness. The battle was promoted on-air during the premiere and on Falling Skies social channels leading up to the main event. After the premiere, the Falling Skies Twitter page was re-skinned with the winning side along with a video depicting the battle showing the same graphic novel visuals featuring the fans who participated. This clever initiative combined the real-time production of media assets (currently all the rage in the ad world thanks to Oreo) with a fun reason to drive social chatter during the broadcast. For those lucky fans who had their name and likeness used in the digital stills and video, it certainly was a highlight they won’t soon forget..."

'Midcore games could be a way for Zynga to improve its monetization of its audience...

Descamps, the general manager of Solstice Arena, describes the game as the world’s first “speed MOBA.” (That alphabet soup stands for multiplayer online battle arena, which are games like Riot Games’ League of Legends or Valve’s Dota 2.)

“We’ve designed Solstice Arena with a distinct mission: take a genre we love and transform it to allow hardcore fans and casual players to experience the fun of MOBA gaming right from their mobile devices,” Descamps said in a blog post. “To those familiar with MOBA games, you will find a deep, competitive, and well-balanced MOBA – one that is unlike any free-to-play game on the App Store. But our goal wasn’t to just attract players similar to us. We want to make Solstice Arena accessible to new players, too – so many of whom may have never tried a MOBA before.”...'

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/13/solstice-arena-takes-zynga-into-the-moba-mid-core-game-market-preview/#fZAOeyDxCcRuKtrV.99

A Masterclass with Transmedia SG, Singapore Media Academy, May 29, 2013 Case Studies on Ruby Skye PI, The Karada & Zed.TO's Byologyc

Having thoroughly enjoyed Max Brook's Zombie thriller novel, I've been wondering where the pre-launch transmedia campaign for World War Z is and last night I finally had some spare time to track it...

"An author sells his soul to Asmodeus, King of the Nine Hells for a shot at fame and fortune...

With Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno coming out soon, the Toronto-based eReader manufacturer Kobo saw it as the perfect opportunity to launch a narrative-driven puzzle contest called The Descent. The contest is designed to reacquaint readers with the themes of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy that will feature heavily in Brown’s newest exploration in symbology. To provide the framework for The Descent, Kobo brought inauthor J.F. Penn to write three short stories exploring three sins: the Sins of Temptation, the Sins of Violence, and the Sins of Treachery. Each short story is offered free for the Kobo eReader or as an EPUB for reading on your desktop, eReader, or mobile devices..."

If you haven't begun putting an emphasis on mobile, you definitely will consider it after reading these 25 content marketing facts.

"Its creators, Remedy Entertainment, describe Quantum Break as (inhale) a transmedia action-shooter video game and television hybrid that mashes together real world actors and traditional filmmaking with computer graphics and virtual settings in the same fictional universe.

In layman's terms, Quantum Break is one of those wildly ambitious projects that would be prohibitively expensive were it not funded by a billion dollar corporation determined to get people excited about its upcoming entertainment hardware, in this case Microsoft's Xbox One.

Set in the fictional Northeastern U.S. Riverport University, the story of Quantum Break follows the people who were in the presence of a time-travel experiment gone wrong — two of whom are playable. With the power to manipulate time, gained from the proximity to the failed experiment (a la The Fantastic Four), they try to repair a universe in which time is collapsing, freezing, fast-forwarding, rewinding and slowing-down...."

Social media and storytelling together represent, for marketers, a return to the origins of storytelling....

The concept of “the survival of the fittest”  is important for marketers today. During the oral tradition, if you told a compelling story, that’s the message that was shared. If your story sucked it didn’t live on. In the broadcast era, it was the battle of the richest. If you spent enough dollars, you could get your message out to the masses regardless of the quality. Anyone who has been involved in social media recognizes that we’re back to “survival of the fittest” era. The Twittersphere or Facebookers will decide whether it’s a compelling message.

We see this at HootSuite time and time again: I’ve run the numbers and quality content that is story-based gets shared. When we get lazy and create mediocre content it doesn’t get shared. The crowd decides, it’s that simple. This has huge implications for marketers, today, you can’t just buy people’s attention, they will block you, skip you, fast forward you or ignore you. We need to spend more effort, time, budget on creating awesome content that people want and less budget on a media buy (although a paid component is still critical – more on this in upcoming post)...'

Interactive documentary about losing sleep, gains notice at Tribeca...

Imagine this: an appointment at 3:14am. A phone call at 3:12am from Quebec announces the appointment minutes before it happens. Logging onto the A Journal of Insomnia website, white digital artifacts arrange themselves on screen, gradually shaping themselves into an approximation of a mouth.

An accented, ethereal digital voice intones, “At night I can't sleep. In developed countries, 30 percent of people are insomniacs like me. Since the fall of 2012, privately under the cover of darkness, I have been meeting them and collecting their stories. Welcome to A Journal of Insomnia. Only by making an appointment and coming back tonight will you receive the full experience. It's your turn now to invest part of your night.”

The disembodied voice is followed by a ticking clock and ambient sound collage, which is at once dreamy, disconcerting and beautiful. The whole effect is made all the more surreal in those early interactive moments as the user is drawn toward the computer screen like Max Renn in David Cronenberg's Videodrome....

Fresh off his directorial debut, the William Faulkner adaptation "As I Lay Dying," which just had its premiere at Cannes (go HERE for our review), James Franco has just launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo for $500,000 to make a trilogy of feature films based on short stories in his first book (Yes! He wrote a book; there's lots of reminders on the page!)....

'...One of the members of my discussion panel was Carri Bugbee, a social media marketing exec from Portland, Oregon. Her trackrecord includes being one of the very first to explore the power of Twitter by creating the — unofficial — @peggyolson persona to intersync with the narratives of the hit series Mad Men. She’s experienced the good sides – an overwhelming positive response from show fans and other co-creators – and the bad side – getting shut down by Twitter within a couple of days (yet later reinstated). I asked her how important will co-creating fans be for television in the future. Her reply merits a massive quote!

I feel like collaboration with fans is the ultimate form of social TV. Web 2.0 brought about social media, which allows web users to interact with other people and content. Merging social media with TV (and film) means fans will (or should) be able to interact with and sometimes even influence outcomes for TV and movie content. That could be as basic as sharing favorite movie lines with friends on their social networks or as complicated as influencing the direction of a character or story arc online....'

A Masterclass with Transmedia SG, Singapore Media Academy, May 29, 2013

Following the now infamous Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones, fans took to the web to lament the loss of favorite characters and swear they were done with the show. Were they? Probably not.

Adafruit has created a handy how-to to help you build a wireless access point that anonymizes your internet browsing using Tor and a Raspberry Pi.

Few people get things done in as consistent and impressive a fashion as Joss Whedon. His Avengers was the rare superhero movie to break box office records as it garnered critical acclaim.

kiehl's sent a custom captain america comic book to certain wall street journal subscribers thursday as part of a content-marketing effort...

In the 12-page story, created specifically for Kiehl’s by writer William Harms and artists Angel Unzueta and Ty Templeton, Captain America must protect some "rare extracts and botanicals" -- hidden in the Kiehl’s basement -- that could be used to create another super-soldier like himself.

The story doesn't mention any Kiehl's product by name, but the action is bookended by ad pages from Kiehl’s including six pages touting its Facial Fuel for men and Ultimate Man body scrub soap.

The comic book is available at Kiehl’s stores with the purchase of any product and a digital version is on the company’s website, but Kiehl’s worked with The Wall Street Journal because the company wanted more people, predominantly men, to see the comic. “We feel it is so true to our DNA,” Mr. Salgardo said. “Instead of advertising, this allows potential new customers to understand Kiehl’s -- our quirkiness, but also our expertise in serious skincare.”...

"@SummerBreak, a new reality show that will exist — not on TV -— but exclusively on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Vine. Here's how it works....

@SummerBreak will ditch the standard 30- and 60-minute TV format, and will instead play out in a 24/7 stream of tweets, photos and videos. Additionally, 60-second daily YouTube webisodes will get posted, and three- to five-minute weekly wrap-ups will round out the show’s eight-week run...."

'Marketers can reach a greater audience than ever by combining the power of social media and storytelling...

We have a connected consumer revolution. The consumer is now in control of what they view, what they share, and how they view (on what screen). So there has been a major shift in terms of the relationship between consumers and marketers.

And there are bigger things at work as well. We saw it with the Arab Spring, and the critical role social media had in the way information was shared. We saw it with the Occupy Movement as well. Social media can have an impact on traditional power structures.

From a marketer’s perspective, that means that we’re moving towards pull versus push approach, sometimes referred to as inbound marketing. We can no longer push our messages across, we need to pull customers in with engaging, useful content.

All of these trends are turning the traditional media model on its head, and brands are evolving into media properties. One of the best examples of this is Red Bull. Red Bull is putting out such compelling content that traditional media properties like NBC are buying the rights to this content. They’ve completely flipped the model around as a brand, where the broadcasters are after them for their content. They’re a great example of a brand doing it well in social....' 

Have you been waiting anxiously for more details on Neill Blomkamp's new movie Elysium? Well hang on — this video is going to make your eyeballs explode.