Tracking Transmedia

Residents in the Boston area will have the chance to see a pretty unique art installation this weekend. On Sunday evening, hundreds of LED-enabled umbrellas will light up Cambridge thanks to a  to a collaboration between MIT and a Connecticut-based dance group known as Pilobolus. The event is called UP: The Umbrella Project and was first performed up in Camden, Maine last October. Over 300 members of the MIT student body, faculty, and staff will participate; each gets an umbrella lined with red, green, and blue LED lights plus a controller to let them change the lighting as they see fit, and all of the movements will be broadcast onto a large inflatable screen so that the performers can see their movements..."

Disruption. Headhunters. Execution. Yes, the cutthroat nature of modern corporations could rival any of the hand-severing antics of HBO’s Game of Thrones.

[PLEASE REFER TO THE SPEAKER'S NOTES IN THE SLIDES or TRANSCRIPT in the SLIDESHARE VIEWER!] How & why to take a Transmedia approach to creating and nurturing en

"Part 2 of a look at the storytelling journey and digital marketing for transmedia and web series success story The Lizzie Bennet Diaries...

 

Transmedia Lessons Learned

Speaking with Jay Bushman he had three very clear lessons learned from this amazing transmedia success story:

There is no such thing as digital marketing. He explained this means every piece of content they put out was considered part of the story. The social media and other online assets were not siloed into a separate marketing department, they are as much a part of the LBD storyworld as the core vlog series.The transmedia team needs to be in the writers room. An extension of the philosophy above, for a multiplatform story to work, the transmedia content producers need to be as deeply embedded in the creative process as possible. Major plot points unfolded in the social media storylines and synergy and knowledge exchange needed to happen between all the storytellers involved.Interactivity does not mean surrendering the storytelling to the audience. If the audience had its way Lydia would never have fallen for Wickham and a big part of the drama, conflict and character growth of LBD would not have happened. Jay feels the audience still wants to be taken on a journey that transports them somewhere else. Interactivity can happen by creating spaces where the audience can play and interact with characters but the story is still protected and guided by the creative team...."read more!  

Google CEO Larry Page delivered a highly unusual appearance on Wednesday during the company's I/O conference in which he delivered an impassioned speech.

In a deal that would vault Yahoo into the premiere league of social media, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is said to be closing in on a $1 billion acquisition deal with David Karp, the...

Author: James Carter 

"Go where your audience is and fashion a story you believe will engage them."

"Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking at the first StoriesLab conference at Center for Social Media at American University in Washington D.C. StoriesLab is a project of StoriesLead and co-presented by Pride Collaborative. The focus of the day was the evolution of storytelling across multiple media platforms. And it was one of the most energetic conferences I’ve attended in a while.

 

Often, I find myself at conventions or conferences, and I rarely get an opportunity to meet other participants or engage in the work, itself. StoriesLab shattered that paradigm by offering not one, not two, but three interactive working sessions to help its attendees understand this unwieldy notion of multi-platform storytelling.

Dan Sonnett, owner of Sonnett Media Group, LLC, kicked off the day talking about the evolution of story. Starting at the very beginning with cave paintings and ending with his own work, including Half the Sky, the online extension of journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book of the same name Half the Sky: Turning

Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Dan chronicled how stories have changed over time. His work was a solid introduction on how to spread a narrative that started in a book into other forms like games and interactive websites....."

 

 

 

Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, sat down for an editorial board meeting with the Financial Post..

 

On Canada's download caps: 

 

“It’s a deterrent to Canadian society that exists nowhere else in the world. In Britain, everything is uncapped,” he told the Post. “In the U.S., on Comcast for $45 a month [you get] 300 gigabytes and then [each extra] 10 gigabytes is like a dollar.”

 On the future of apps: 

"It will be completely compatible to have a Netflix app, to have a Rogers app, to have a movie channel app, to have YouTube as an app," he said.

 

"Because in the broadest sense, we compete for relaxation time. … You go home, the kids are in bed, you want to watch something to relax, you've got many choices."....

 

"Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch wants Sherlock series 3 to air in the United States and United Kingdom on the same day....

 

Sherlock series 1 and 2 aired in the United States on PBS several months after their premieres in the United Kingdom. Most U.S. Sherlock fans who are internet savvy decided that instead of waiting, thus find themselves getting spoiled on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, they would just download the show illegally...."

"Big data has enabled many firsts. It was used to develop the atomic bomb that ended WWII. It was used to put a man on the moon. And now it is used every day in every way through the devices we carry around in our pockets--our mobile phones....

 

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY.

The dataset you want is a global one, but the most valuable individual queries are typically the hyperlocal ones. Design and build your platform solution for the broadest possible footprint, and then slice and dice it as necessary to create value. For example, the Weather Company uses its global weather data to create localized, sales-driven analytics on segments such as retail. Data says a high-temperature forecast of 60-degree weather prompts sales of shorts in Chicago, but the same encourages sales of jackets in Phoenix. This helps shape more effective messaging on our properties for both the consumer and the advertiser...."

 

A Reddit user mapped the connections between the network's niche communities. The result looks like a galaxy.

"A look at the storytelling journey and digital marketing for transmedia and web series success story The Lizzie Bennet Diaries....

 

The Story is the Thing

Lizzie Bennet co-creators Hank Green and Bernie Su recognized from the beginning Pride and Prejudice was their “greatest weapon,” a fantastic tried and true story (as Hank’s wife had pointed out). The book was first published on January 28, 1813, but has been retold and reimagined  in plays, movies, television shows and multiple other creative works. This romantic comedy of errors has also often found significant commercial success.  I could not help doing a little keyword research and noted that “pride and prejudice” is still searched over 200,000 times a month on Google. This enduring story clearly has much resonance, which the LBD team handled beautifully, transitioning it to a modern setting and narrative with great writing and pitch perfect casting (especially for Lizzie, Jane and Lydia)...."

 

Yahoo announced on Thursday it will be integrating content from Twitter directly into the news stream on Yahoo.com.

"Will you stay up and marathon them till morning, or parcel them out slowly over time?

 

You stay up until midnight (or even later in other time zones!) and mainline all of the new episodes until the next morning.

How to Prepare: Be sure to rest up the day before, since you wouldn't want to nod off that night and miss Kristen Wiig's cameo, would you? (At least you won't have to call in sick on Monday, since May 27 is Memorial Day.) And just remember: If you absolutely, positively need to take bathroom breaks or a quick catnap in order to continue … you are a lousy quitter and you should just burn yourself alive.

Drawbacks: You've waited years and years for these new episodes of Arrested Development, and now you're going to watch them bleary-eyed at 4:47 in the morning? This is perhaps not the best way to consume what could be the most important television you watch in your entire life...."

The Emmy Award and Tony Award-winning actor will play Braff's father in the independent film

The franchise's licensing and merchandising rights are split between CBS and Paramount which created headaches for the multihyphenate's production company Bad Robot....

 

A struggle over the U.S.S. Enterprise's past and future helped sour J.J. Abrams on the "Star Trek" franchise and may have contributed to his decision to take on the "Star Wars" universe.

Competing ambitions between Paramount, CBS and Abrams' production company Bad Robot over merchandising surrounding the first film in the rebooted "Star Trek" franchise led the director to curtail plans to turn the series into a multi-platform experience that spanned television, digital entertainment and comic books, according to an individual with knowledge of the dispute.

"J.J. just threw up his hands," the individual told TheWrap. "The message was, 'Why set up all this when we'll just be competing against ourselves?' The studio wanted to please Bad Robot, but it was allowing CBS to say yay or nay when it came to what was happening with the 'Star Trek' products."..."

Twitter and Foursquare have inked intriguing deals with National CineMedia, which announced the partnerships in front of a packed movie theater on New York's Upper Westside this afternoon at the cinema ads firm's Upfront presentation.

 

NCM will produce a weekly series that highlights the latest trending movie topics based on Twitter data. The videos will be distributed via NCM's network of thousands of movie screens nationwide, while also appearing on the social media site. In the coming weeks, the two companies will pitch sponsorships around the videos to agencies and brands. 

 

"It will give movie audiences the chance to continue the conversation and even influence the upcoming episodes," said Cliff Marks, NCM president...."

Iron Man 3 was officially a smash hit at the box office, and now fans can watch the film's end credits sequence which has been released in HD.