Transmedia planning & brand communities

The most interesting piece of thinking I've seen recently is something Faris over at Naked posted a few weeks ago, and his colleague Ivan presented at the excellent APG Battle of Big Thinking in London (which I thoroughly enjoyed and keep meaning to write about but something always comes up, and now I suspect I've missed my moment - but if you're interested read good summaries here, here and on the event blog here).  What interested me is a model they're calling "transmedia planning," informed by some stuff in Henry Jenkins' new book Convergence Culture.

I'd recommend you read Faris' post here first.  Go ahead, I'll wait.

OK.  I like that they deconstruct the model of "media neutral planning."  This is the practice of starting with a brand idea, rather than a particular execution, and expressing it over various media.  To steal Faris' diagram:

This seems to be fairly de rigeur right now, and I think most agencies and marketers are using this model now in some form or another.  That, if anything, is a good reason to look for a different model, but there are also a couple of problems with it. 

One is that, as Russell has talked about, ideas don't really exist without execution, and in fact with good ideas, execution is often crucial and inseparable from strategy (think about the Bravia stuff - the strategy is the somewhat pedantic "our TV has amazing colour" but the bigness of the idea is in how that's brought to life with coloured balls and paint).  Seeing the same thing executed across a bunch of channels isn't really the most interesting use of each medium, and the best ideas are often built to really leverage the strengths of a particular channel (like Bravia's gorgeous use of film, or using the social elements of blogs and Flickr and YouTube to tease the new ad).  So talking about ideas as separate from the media they will exist in is a bit silly and can miss out on the most creative opportunities.  Media-neutral leads to media-neutered.

But more importantly it's also missing a key factor: social relationships. I've been thinking about social relationships a lot recently, and how we tend to underestimate or miss them altogether.  Marketing tends to think of people as individuals.  We target individuals, trying to change individual minds and behaviours.  Most of our models focus on individuals.  And in research, when someone says "I don't like it but my sister would" we discount that.  We say "thanks but today I'd just like to hear what you think."  We make people write their answers down so they're not biased by what others think.  But this is a problem because people don't exist as individuals, we are highly social beings.  People form opinions and make decisions informed by what their friends/spouse/family/colleagues think about things.  People talk about brands and media and yes, even sometimes ads with other people.  Mark Earls has been talking about this for a few years now, that humans have a strong herd instinct, and brand behaviour being one way that is manifested.  And in the big engagement research project that we've just done here at Leo Burnett, the social element of brands and communication also came out really strongly.

So fortunately Faris and Ivan suggest a new model, which they call transmedia planning.  The gist of it is that rather than using different media channels to communicate the same idea, you can use each channel to communicate different things.  Everything is still tied together by the same brand strategy or narrative, but each channel does what it does best, rather than bending to fit an idea that's not really built with any particular channel in mind.  Each channel is strong and self-contained enough to live on its own, but can then be pulled together into a greater brand narrative.  The most interesting part is that this pulling together doesn't necessarily have to be done by one person - social relationships can help forge those connections, forming a brand community that shares and builds on each others' experiences with the brand.  I've seen the advertising, you've been to an event, she's tried the product, he's had a good experience with an employee, and we all compare notes. So the model looks like this (again stolen from Faris):

Faris mentions Jenkins' example of the media franchise spawned by The Matrix - the three films, the Animatrix series of short films, the video games, the comics.  Each has different (but overlapping) parts of the story, different pieces of the puzzle, and each stands on its own, but you can put them all together to understand the whole Matrix universe better.  Another media franchise that's done this well is the TV show Lost, and the various websites, wikis, conspiracy theories, and books that it has generated.  In the world of brands, Faris mentions the example of Audi's Art of the Heist campaign, but I think the big brands like Axe/Lynx, Nike, Dove, Apple, etc all work this way.  They put lots of things out there, not necessarily expecting every person to see every piece, but creating enough interestingness that people will talk and eventually hear about pieces they haven't seen from someone else.  And of course, social media means that these discussions are easier, are amplified, and do not necessarily have to occur face-to-face or even in the same part of the world.

I really like the transmedia planning model, because I think it addresses those two weaknesses of media-neutral planning: ignoring that different media are better at different things, and that people are social beings.  And by putting a brand community in the middle, it also forces us to think about whether we are in fact making brands and communications which are interesting enough for a community to form, and for people to want to talk about our communications. 

But I think there's another potential level to this model, if you'll allow me to build on it - we can also apply this model to single pieces of communication.  We sometimes talk about how a good piece of communication needs to have multiple levels so that it rewards more time spent, or repeated viewing.  This might be small details, things going on in the background, music, metaphors, or references.  And we, Russell, and others have talked about the power of complexity in communication - that people generally find complex, nuanced, layered things more interesting than simple straightforward things. But when we talk about this stuff, we still usually talk about people processing it individually - so each one person is rewarded for spending more time or if they see it again.  But what if we looked at it through the lens of a brand community?  Each different layer or detail could appeal to a different group of people, who could compare stories, and thus continually be getting new perspectives on the same thing.

If this sounds horribly complicated let me give a few examples to show it doesn't have to be.  This Burger King ad by Crispin Porter is one of my favourites:

On the surface, it's a jingle about the new Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch chicken sandwich.  But you might also notice that the guy singing the song is Darius Rucker from 90's band (and pop culture trivia item) Hootie & the Blowfish.  Or that the jingle itself is based on the old hobo ballad and Burl Ives classic "Big Rock Candy Mountain."  Or that it was directed by iconic photographer David LaChapelle with all kinds of sexual imagery, both hetero and homo.  Or that model and TV host Brooke Burke makes a cameo at the end (she's often used in BK ads).  But you probably wouldn't notice all of those things, and in fact I'd be surprised if the same people who know who David LaChapelle is are also into turn-of-the century hobo ballads (I'm guessing those circles don't tend to overlap much).  But more to the point, not getting some or all of the references doesn't detract from the main brand message (there's a new chicken sandwich), because each bit also stands on its own.  By having lots of detail, though, it gives fans of the brand something to notice and talk about and deconstruct.  So you might have missed some of the details but someone else can point them out, and this gives you a deeper appreciation of it, and completes your picture of the whole a bit more.

For one piece of communication, then, the model could look like this (apologies to Faris for bastardising his diagram):

This definitely happened with Honda's "Cog" ad - while you could just see it and say "there's a new Accord" or maybe "wow, that's cool," people also talked about how many hundreds of takes it took to shoot, how many days it took to set up, whether it was actually all one take, the reference to Rube Goldberg, or that the voice-over is done by author and radio personality Garrison Keillor.

Looking at a TV show like Lost, a single episode can also get analysed like this.  I might just follow the main story, but someone else might notice a parallel structure to a previous episode, a flash of a Dharma Initiative logo on something, a character's name that is an anagram, or a reference to philosophy.  And some people do watch the show frame by frame, poring over it for clues, and comparing notes the next day.  No one person figures out every clue and reference, it's a collective effort, and that's part of the fun.

Or consider the M&Ms Dark website puzzle that I recently wrote about: it's very hard to find all of the 50 film references needed to solve it, so communities have sprung up to share answers and observations (a google search for "m&m dark answers" returns 188,000 hits).  And the fact that the painting contains other references unrelated to the puzzle, like being based on the Renaissance style of Hieronymus Bosch, is yet another layer of meaning which some people won't get but which might add to your overall appreciation of the brand.  But you could not get any of this, and still understand that there's a new dark chocolate M&M.

The idea of brand communities solves one issue that we sometimes run into when attempting to create complex and layered communications - the pushback that we shouldn't put details that everyone (or at least most people) won't or can't get.  This is often combined with research findings that indeed, "most people didn't get this reference you were trying to make."  This kind of thinking dumbs down communication into the lowest common denominator. But with the brand community model, that ceases to apply - as long as someone, somewhere will get it, then lots of details and references can work.  Whoever notices it will likely tell others about it, because the fact that they figured something out reinforces their ego, status and self-image, and because the tools to widely spread that knowledge are now readily available. So instead of talking down to everybody, we can talk up to everybody, by giving many different groups something that makes them feel intelligent for getting a subtle reference.  And we give them a reason to have multiple conversations about the brand.

Still, the challenge for brands is to not just put in detail for detail's sake, but to use it to truly make the brand more interesting, to give brand users something they will enjoy noticing and talking about.  So maybe that is a new starting point we should set out on our briefs: does a brand community already exist, or will this communication do something interesting enough to create and support one?

Comments

[Lee McEwan]

Jason - Re: Your comment on the APG Battle of Big Thinking at the start of your post: "I suspect I've missed my moment".

No you haven't! Please write up your thoughts on the day for those of us who couldn't be there ;-)

Lee

[Angus Whines]

Fabulous post Jason, really really interesting and I agree wholeheartedly with your build and your point re ensuring we don't 'dumb down' communication through not understanding the way people work as a community. Well done.

[Mike]

Faris just sent me the link to this post, genius stuff.

I remembering hearing Alex Bogusky speak at a conference and he said that "people are social. They find reasons to talk and communicate with each other. We supply the reasons" or something along those lines. Basically on the idea that CP+B is about communications between people and not at people.

I agree, we can't look at consumers as people that just sit back and "consume" all the shit we feed them.

[helenltaylor]

Excellent, excelllent post Jason!

As a Lost fan, I've been thinking about the different layers of experience it offers. It doesn't matter if the average viewer doesn't get all the references, as long as they don't feel that they're stupid or missing out and still get something out of just watching the episodes. But had't got my thoughts together so coherently.

Am going to have a ponder about how we researchers can address some of these issues. Any thoughts gratefully accepted...

[Andrew Hovells]

Wow. Erm, I'm sort of at a loss for words. Brilliant, brilliant stuff for us to ponder.Thanks.
I was reading that people don't join religious cults for the religion, but rather they want to belong. What you've written echoes some of that I think.

[michaeltakasaki]

First of all, I know who David LaChappelle is and also knew that Harry McClintock, rather than Burl Ives, is most closely associated with "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." I'm actually quite a fan of turn-of-the-century hobo ballads. Check out Norman Blake's "Chattanooga Sugar Babe" CD. It's excellent and rife with hobo ballads, both old and new. My favourite is "The Weathered Old Caboose Behind the Train".

As for the points you make, I also couldn't agree more. I think we do our work a disservice when we don't leave those kinds of gaps between media and executions that people can fill in.

I'm reminded a lot of my time spent teaching and getting to understand the different ways different people learn (I.e., that some are visual, some are auditory and some are kinesthetic or physical learners) and the implications that has on how you teach them and design lessons and exercises for specific classes and students. What you discover is that you can't translate a particular exercise directly to suit a different learning style. There are going to be differences in what's taught and what the student takes away. And I think that has some bearing on how trying to have an idea very faithfully translated across different media can be robbing it of some of its power.

What’s also interesting is the motivating effect that incomplete information has. In a language classroom, teachers will often give different students different (and complementary) sets of information because it gives them a genuine reason to communicate. It’s often really hard to get your students to interact, but when they have to bridge those gaps in their knowledge or experience, it becomes a lot easier. There seems to be a very human need to do this that I think your post supports, Jason.

[Faris]

Hey buddy,

Nice. I'm liking this a lot.

I think that adding depth to communication is essential to maintaining interest - it provides a reward that in itself invites people to engage more.

Have you read that Everything Bad is Good for You book? He talks about how syndication led to more complex programming - because it was those programmes that reward repeat viewings that work best when endlessly repeated.

This is what gives The Simpsons and Lost their power. And this is what triggers fan / brand communities - no one will be able to work every allusion out on their own so conversations naturally happen - especially online, the new home of the fan community.

It seems to be an essentially postmodern way of communicating - loading texts with allusions to other cultural artefacts - not just transmedia but intertextual!

Great Post Jason - I think one of the biggest things we need to overcome as an industry is the tendency to treat 'consumers' as idiots - what Bill Hicks called the Will it play in the midwest problem of media.

[olivier blanchard]

Wow. I'm going to have to come back here when I have more time and read the entire post.

[Edward Cotton]

Jason,

Amazing job. Some really great thinking here and a toolset we can steal and build upon.

It poses lots of interesting questions like:

- does every brand have the potential to build community?

- how to agencies get paid for all this new stuff?

- how do you get these ideas out there in the first place?

- what's the role of planning in all this?

Look forward to more debate and discussion on this

[Tim Keil]

great stuff. really. it just made some of my thoughts fit together. which is very good, because now I have more space for new thoughts. thanks for sharing.

[Dan]

Wow. It's not very often that one stumbles upon a new idea and genuinely new thinking in advertising planning. But how you've extended the idea of transmedia planning to individual pieces of communication totally blew me away. Extremely interesting. Thank you!

[Vando]

Jason, I've finally got around to reading this and Faris's posts thoroughly and it's an excellent thought process.....some real food for thought come the next brief. Thanks for sharing and thinking so thoroughly through this.

The key questions you ask at the end of your posts should be mandatory as part of all briefs. Can we engage a community or create one?

My background is mostly client side FMCG so I'm trying to think how this applies to low involvement &/or high volume brands, small ad budgets, trade offs etc.

This raises a whole heap of thoughts about how this approach relates to certain situations - think I might jot down a few at some point over at the Recliner.

[giles]

Transmedia planning surley a case of the emperors new clothes? The 360 model aint broke just they way people have been deploying it.

[giles]

http://interactivemarketingtrends.blogspot.com/2006/11/transmedia-planning-my-arse.html

[Jason]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, and all the supportive comments. Happy this idea connected with so many of you. Please keep contributing to the discussion.

Ed & Vando -
Great questions. That's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now too. Not sure I have any answers yet. But here are some thoughts on low-interest brands/FMCG. At Leo Burnett many of our clients are FMCG (P&G, Kelloggs, Coca-Cola), and among them some clients that are super-low-involvement, like Wrigley's chewing gum. So I've been thinking about this a lot. It is easier, for sure, to create communities and debate and discussion around high-value/high-interest products like iPods and cars, but look at the meaning that Dove has built up around a soap brand, or Axe with deodorant, which are both pretty low-involvement purchases. Or check out this viral bit for Charmin bathroom tissue , probably the lowest involvement category there is, from Publicis UK. So it can be done. I guess these three examples have started by looking at what are some interesting, provocative, topical cultural issues that are linked with using those products, and played with them. So they've started by asking "what's interesting about this brand/category" rather than "what's our USP/message?" That seems to be a good way in.

Giles -
You have a point, often the issues with the 360 model (as with many other things in marketing) come from it not being implemented very well. But there are a few things that I think it doesn't address - or at least not inherently in the model. Of course, smart practicioners always figure out ways to address them.
But I think a strong model needs to be a bit directive and force anyone using it to think differently, rather than relying on someone to notice and add what's missing. As I mention above, what interests me about this transmedia model is that it addresses two weaknesses I see in the 360 model:
1) it isn't about everything expressing the same idea, which the 360 model is. It is more clear that individual pieces can be used in different ways, to do whatever they do best (but still tied together by a strategic direction), and sometimes do completely different things. As Faris says it doesn't have to be "one idea iterated different ways."
2) it factors in the idea of community and social relationships, which the 360 model doesn't speak to. This is the more important part, and the big innovation for me. Of course social stuff can be factored into 360 thinking, but it's not inherent to the model, and I think it's an important addition to force us to ask the questions like "How can I provoke or faciliate conversations? How can I feed communities?"

[Paul McEnany]

Jason- Great post. I'm a little annoyed I missed it the first time around, but, luckily, Russell Davies has brought us back together. :)

[mike]

check out interview with faris on rm116

http://www.rm116.com/2006/11/transmedia_plan.html

[Charles Edward Frith]

Big rock candy is also a track in 'Oh brother where art thou', which to my mind reflects a yearning in U.S. culture for the simpler life of naieve expedition and serendipity, a hankering for days gone by.

[sean Moffitt]

Jason,

I can see your passion palpably zip through your piece on Convergence Culture and there are some great takeaways around the importance of community, the need for communication to get people to talk and the role of your different media constituents to operate differently.

Unfortunately, I take this model the other way...the specific role of the marketing/agency professional is to stir the conversation and provide the reasons for conversation not provide the world thousands of tiny conversations (let your audience do that--you provide the tools).

Given an attention and time-starved world, focusing on producing widely-differing individual paid executions is nevermin d a costly exercise but seems to create a cacophony of stuff that may cause more dissonance than conversation.

Mozilla Firefox is a great example of organizing an entire business around getting their community involved - they couldn't exist by producing it all themselves - I think only 18 people are one the payroll. Even though they have farmed out nearly every key role to their community, they still have a strong sense of self.

In my world of word of mouth, your first chance is you biggest one to make an impression - rather than spend on a whackload of anything sticks, I would project out an inspiring lifestyle statement, big edgy idea or purple cow product and get out of the way and let people talk (although not completely out of the way - becoming a part of the conversation is quite helpful too).

If I look at the world of communication right now, it's not a lack of integrated media approaches or brilliant individual executions, it's the absence of brave, inspiring big ideas that start the conversation and a system to support that effort that have afflicted performance -

I'd hold out Dove, lululemon and Axe as three Canadian-relevant brands that have a strong sense of self, a big idea that allow their biggest stakeholders and a forum for their customers to own a piece of that.

Strangely, we're probably more in agreement than not, with maybe two key differences:

- who should be producing all these multiple appendages of community and conversation?

- what is the role of the people who offciially lead/steer the brand in creating this sense of community?

Personal opinion - I think your adaptation of the original model is a good one but leans to a different point - how does each execution build engagement by creating layers of talk value? I think its great guidance...it may be a different point to how to orchestrate media across the board.

Anyway, love to have a coffee about this one day and debate it...great exploration of a topic ad agencies should be having more of...sometimes posing the question is more important than having the right answer. Cheers

[sean Moffitt]

Jason,

I can see your passion palpably zip through your piece on Convergence Culture and there are some great takeaways around the importance of community, the need for communication to get people to talk and the role of your different media constituents to operate differently.

Unfortunately, I take this model the other way...the specific role of the marketing/agency professional is to stir the conversation and provide the reasons for conversation not provide the world thousands of tiny conversations (let your audience do that--you provide the tools).

Given an attention and time-starved world, focusing on producing widely-differing individual paid executions is nevermin d a costly exercise but seems to create a cacophony of stuff that may cause more dissonance than conversation.

Mozilla Firefox is a great example of organizing an entire business around getting their community involved - they couldn't exist by producing it all themselves - I think only 18 people are one the payroll. Even though they have farmed out nearly every key role to their community, they still have a strong sense of self.

In my world of word of mouth, your first chance is you biggest one to make an impression - rather than spend on a whackload of anything sticks, I would project out an inspiring lifestyle statement, big edgy idea or purple cow product and get out of the way and let people talk (although not completely out of the way - becoming a part of the conversation is quite helpful too).

If I look at the world of communication right now, it's not a lack of integrated media approaches or brilliant individual executions, it's the absence of brave, inspiring big ideas that start the conversation and a system to support that effort that have afflicted performance -

I'd hold out Dove, lululemon and Axe as three Canadian-relevant brands that have a strong sense of self, a big idea that allow their biggest stakeholders and a forum for their customers to own a piece of that.

Strangely, we're probably more in agreement than not, with maybe two key differences:

- who should be producing all these multiple appendages of community and conversation?

- what is the role of the people who offciially lead/steer the brand in creating this sense of community?

Personal opinion - I think your adaptation of the original model is a good one but leans to a different point - how does each execution build engagement by creating layers of talk value? I think its great guidance...it may be a different point to how to orchestrate media across the board.

Anyway, love to have a coffee about this one day and debate it...great exploration of a topic ad agencies should be having more of...sometimes posing the question is more important than having the right answer. Cheers

[sohbet]

Okay, I placed a link to you in my Blog. Let's see what happens. Also, who is
Meme? Is she cute? :)
siir odasi
sohbet
ozel sohbet

[serkan]

Anyway, love to have a coffee about this one day and debate it...great
exploration of a topic ad agencies should be having more of...sometimes posing
the question is more important than having the right answer. Cheers
sohbet
sohbet mynet

[Kurye]

Thanks for this informations. yararli bilgiler icin cok tesekkurler. (escuse me my english is bad.)

[Bayo Adekanmbi]

The interconnectedness of the consumer world as an evolving TRANSUMER who is largely driven by experiences, discovery and fighting boredom (TrendWatch) supports the possibility of “smashing” the brand story into an unending soap opera perfectly integrated as a continuum deployed through different media aperture

The sustainability of this multi-channel integration is the holding power created by the wildfire effect of the big idea narrative within social communities

[cicicocuk]

oyun
bedava oyunlar
kız oyunları
thanks you all