Media Dojo

Archive for March, 2010

Flying out tomorrow for Osaka and Kyoto. Kids are old enough now to where they need to see cousins and get in touch with their other culture.

In the meantime, I’ve started the next piece of research, which will look at how we build APIs into branded content franchises and where the cloud might fit in. I spent the morning with Brent Friedman, founder of Electric Farm Entertainment. His latest transmedia series Valemont has been running live on MTV for some months now. It’s pulled in serious backing through Verizon and others. I can’t go into a lot of the data stats just yet but the upshot is that the Internet and, by extension, the cloud have become the ultimate IP incubators for storytelling.

We did a 2hr brain dump for notes for my flight. Should get a shorter piece out during the May/June timeframe. Contact me if you’ve got any pointers related to transmedia and the cloud.

Next month will see me in San Francisco to address a hard-core geek audience at the Emerging Communications Conference about what it might mean to build an API into a branded content or marketing franchise. Some of the first baby steps are being taken by information publishers like Guardian and NPR. Developers can bake an app that executes an API call to permitted content feeds as part of its feature set. I think it’s going to get a hell of a lot more interesting in an iPad world. Here’s the basic gist:

STORY AS SOFTWARE: Transmedia storytelling is hot in both Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The success of franchises such as Heroes, Afterworld, and Valemont has proven the value of extending narrative across many platforms to create multiple doorways for end-users to enter and engage with a story. The next stage of transmedia storytelling will pair narrative extensions with functionality extensions to open up completely new user experiences and business models for producers, distributors and marketers. Recent deals between content providers like Bravo with location-based players like Foursquare, in which Bravo branded content is made part of the Foursquare experience is indicative of a larger trend of integrating function with media experiences. This talk will explore some of the examples of new marriages of form and function in media, with special emphasis on the operational and technology challenges needed to pull it off. Drill downs will focus on mobile augmented reality, handling the data challenge, as well as integrating audience input into the evolution of a branded content franchise. For developers, there is no better time to think about what it means to build an API into a content franchise.

Comcast is probably starting to think that I’ve gone over to the dark side and become a spammer. I’ve been pushing through lots of copies (at 9mb a crack) of the full e-book to about 300+ media and marketing leaders on the hit list. These are people with whom I’ve had direct contact from my days at Economist Intelligence Unit, eMarketer, and the Monaco Media Forum. So far so good…crisp feedback and interest in pursuing projects. I’ve also opened things up more. There’s a separate tab above that takes you to a download link for domestic users. If you’re of European persuasion, my friend Monty Metzger in Germany has a download link to the paper on his blog where you can pull the whole thing.

One of the potential projects to come out of this paper will be a scenario planning event during this summer on Whidbey Island. No keynotes, no panels, no presos, just 50-70 people from across technology, media and marketing who collectively influence > $1 billion in decisions. We’re going to take over a town for 2 days to roll up the sleeves and start populating the first cross industry database of future expectations about cloud computing and media/marketing 2020. I’m still debating the level of Mad Max vibe that needs to be baked into the event….any volunteers to be the Toecutter?