"Around the Transmedia World" is a series of interviews Laurent Guerin is conducting for Petitweb.fr.
This is the complete interview of GUNTHER SONNENFELD.
A French shorter version is available on PetitWeb.
Your background
My background is in different areas of media. I started in broadcast television, then I transitioned into broadcast design, then interactive design and then brand marketing. During those stages I worked in a variety of media disciplines: from film to television to online media and to various forms of off-line media as well, basically as a creative. I was a creative when I started, and then as I got into design and production, I started to do projects that utlilized multiple platforms in unique ways, some that told stories, others that were more about immersive experiences – for example, I wrote and produced the opening sequence for the Sony PS2 console, and we extended parts of that onto other platforms like iDVDs, large interactive displays and such. In the last few years, I've been working more on the strategic side of things. So I kind of evolved from someone who created and produced stuff to thinking about how various media types and respective assets were going to potentially make money for businesses. I suppose I’m a business consultant who can develop plans around the use of multiple media properties.
How would you define «being a strategist» ?
In short, I would say strategy is the process by which a business can think creatively about its growth. A strategist plays a catalytic role – someone who brings different camps and lines of businesses together to achieve a growth objective.
I think strategy in general has evolved quite a lot in recent years, particularly on the agency side – really an effort for decision-makers to gain a better understanding of how products and/or respective media could be monetized. Which is not to say that anyone has really figured it out, but more to say that we’ve been forced to bring a lot more holistic thinking, rigor, data and analysis to the disciplines that were already resident within creative spaces or production spaces or media buying spaces. And the new push in recent years is to either merge disciplines or connect them in ways that make more sense especially since there's more media and more options for distributing media than we've ever had before.
So I would say that first and foremost I'm a strategist, but to be a strategist I also have to be a practitioner so I actively am producing and creating transmedia projects on my own, I also advise various media companies - agencies, networks, brands, tech companies, independent production outfits, etc. - on different content initiatives, whether it's pure digital media or multi-platform. I would say the most important thing I try to do for them is to turn those efforts into real product opportunities, or take the products that they have in their possession -and this could be anything from consumer products to technologies- and turn them into bankable platforms from which they can generate revenue.
You say you work for disruptive company. What is a disruptive company ?
I think anyone who's disruptive is probably doing one of three primary things:
First, they are trying to bridge the gaps between inefficiencies in media or product design or technology.
The second thing that they do is they make connections between people that improve their lives or make them more efficient on a daily level.
And the third thing they do are things that help improve the economic environment in general and social environment in general, and I think there are some companies that do all three, I think the most progressive companies do at least two of those three things. They can be large companies, they can be Fortune 100 companies but there are also startups and companies that are mid-size or middle stage, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with all types.
I would say that disruption is also not something that interrupts. I think disruption was viewed in the technology space for many years as a means to catch attention or grab eyeballs away from one of medium or platform to another. I don't think that's the true design of it though, I think the real design of the disruptive companies is a company that solves complex or wicked problems, and wicked problems can be those problems where there's a solution yet there's another problem or set of problems around the corner, and that's kind of the world we live in now -- it's very complex.
Examples of disruptive companies ?
Zappos -the online shoe distributor- is a very disruptive company. Their model is very very progressive and very innovative. The way they work from the inside out is pretty much the opposite of what most companies have traditionally done over the last 35 years, and their whole propositions is about utility and service and making people a part of the supply-chain.
Tom Shoes is another one, where they are using the production and supply chain to create a story with people about how to affect change. Specifically what they do is that for every pair of shoes that you buy they'll offer a free one for charity and donation, and then a percentage of the company's revenue goes to these causes that they reprensent.
3M is a great example of a more traditional Fortune 500 company that has worked hard to create both disruptive products and a disruptive corporate culture. The company has adapted very well to socio-economic change, and applies innovative thinking to every line of business.
I would say on the media side, Red Bull is disruptive, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which their entire approach to branding and marketing and customer relationships are based on cultural movements: they create new sports, they create experiences, they use their athletes as role models and persona figures whom people can relate to, they use media intelligently and they coordinate it and they also leave a lot for experimentation. One of the reasons why they're so successful is that they don't necessarily control their messaging in the same way that Apple does (and Apple's also another disruptive company of course), but Red Bull really leaves a lot to chance mostly because they create their own media environments, earned, owned and paid. They've had a television network which didn't do very well for a variety of other reasons but they're experimental, and I think this is a huge part of why they're disruptive.
I've been working with one company that is becoming its own network and it started out as a product, a consumer product, which grew into a sports phenomenon, and now they are literally building their own media empire from the ground up and they've done it in less than two years (I can’t say who the brand is just yet). The reason why they are taking off is quite simply because they are connecting with people at the ground level and even if they don't have a very strong social media presence right now - they will soon - what they've done during their first year really is gone out and built organic audience engagement and participation. People are of an active part of their brand, their lifestyle and their product, and it’s exploding. They're probably gonna grow to numbers that are going to reach those of a mid-size company probably in the next year or two year, so you're looking at within three or four year cycle, a company going from nothing to becoming a player in the consumer goods market along side of a lot of big brands.
It’s really exciting to be a part of it. It also shows you how Darwinistic the business landscape is right now.
What role for transmedia in disruptive companies ?
I think if you look at transmedia as an extended dialogue between people and you add the element of experimentation, I think you have what are the seeds of transmedia or transmedial approaches to product development, along with experience design and media distribution. More specifically, when you take that approach the media that you create is more intelligent and more coordinated - it's really a liberation of media.
The company I mentioned earlier, they own all of their own content outright, and they even have a TV show that's the highest-rated show on one of the US networks. They've come up with an approach to creating and developing and distributing content where they own the content from the getgo and so every deal that they do when they distribute it or every idea they come up with creatively, for the most part, they're not inhibited. Whereas in other cases in film or TV or even the web, If you try to build a franchise through a core property and you're in partnership with a studio, you're gonna have challenges right off the bat. IP, licensing, franchising, distribution, the whole shabang. And if you’re asking people to participate in storyworld elements you can potentially fall into challenges there, copyright infringement, all that stuff.
So I think the new wave of companies are going to do what the guys I mentioned are doing, which is to approach it from a very strong economic perspective, meaning that they’re going to find ways to be self-funded, or they're going to find ways to produce content on their own, independently of the studio or a network or a media company, and then they're gonna come to the table and strike interesting distribution and syndication deals. I think that's kind of where things are headed so to me that's the allure of transmedia and that's what lies beyond transmedia.
Transmedia storytelling, transmedia marketing, or anything that requires a more intelligent and potentially more profitbale approach in the longer term is hard to do, and most of that is attributable to the fact that you're dealing with media companies buying or placing inventory for profit as opposed to buildnig or sustaining a media franchise. But again, the damn is breaking and new opportunities abound.
About brands becoming media
Procter & Gamble's a great example, they're probably the most popular example of a brand as a publisher. They just released a site in beta called «life goes strong», which is basically a lifestyle site and what they're doing is there's very little brand presence on site -brand logo, marks, messaging- and they're just basically just allowing people to curate content that they know is meaningful to their audience. The plan is to leverage that content for other uses both in marketing and original branded content creation, and also to understand the composition of their audiences better, and to use that data to also look at their new market opportunities – product development and the like. It’s nothing really all that new, but it's really smart.
Currently, I work with Toyota, and we're developing a really cool content and analytics initiative for them for a few of their online properties and part of it of course was spawned by the recalls and some of the challenges facing the brand and its reputation, but on a larger level, they've finally decided that they need to be transparent in a way that gives people an inside look into how they operate and they need to tell stories around it. They're making an incremental transition as a publisher, as they come to terms with the fact that they no longer dominate the automotive category. I would say they’re a little bit slower than most of the really progressive brands but at least they're doing it and they're making headway.
Ford in the automobile space has really gotten this down pat. Ford stories is a phenomenal example of how they’re becoming a publisher in the space, and beyond that really how they’re tying consumer interaction and participation into the development of their own vehicles and products and design, and this whole idea that user generated designs are now becoming part of the engineering process and the supply chain process, which also gives rise to other stories about the company itself.
Even the pharmaceutical companies here in the States are starting to get a jump into the publishing space, from Pfizer to GSK and others, where they're realizing that the sale of pharmaceutical products is really contingent on how people use them in their daily lives, and what they're realizing is that if we can get people to share and tell stories and experiences, they don’t have to push clinical products in a clinical way and with all the disclaimers and governance issues they’re faced with.
About User generated Design
To me, the future of product development will bank on merging the design process with stories that create rich metadata for companies to use – to better understand a product’s utility through acute observations of behavior, and allowing people to share the associated data with each other. It’s sort of like designing around collective intelligence, and actively keeping people – in some cases, advocates of as brand – within that loop.
A number of brands have done creative experiments around this in the form of digital media and some very cool ad campaigns, but I think this will become far more ingrained in experiences that are ongoing.
The popular OpenIdeo and the more niche site, Quirky are two examples of where social design, user generated design and crowdsourcing are used to align companies with people out in the world who have really inventive ideas, and they can build product around it. More specifically, if you look at user experience design, that is becoming more closely aligned with storytelling.
For example if you go to those sites you'll see ideas and merging stories from which the brands or the corporations can take and shape with people out in the in the real world, and curate them, and then what they do is they arrive at a place where there's a really strong product idea and really strong story ideas associated with those products. Then the brands are basically strategizing via the crowd and making decisions around what to do next - putting this product idea in production and with all these cool stories along with it – and from there, they end up talking to their internal marketing teams and their engineering teams, sometimes simultaneously, about where to go and how that kind of lands.
I think in all of this the major catalysts are two things: human need and human behavior. Human need being what do people in the market place need on a daily basis that's gonna help them improve their lives. And human behaviors that are associated with that, are all the things that they talk about in physical spaces which validate or support that need. And those two things are what companies that are progressive and innovative are looking more at, in order to design experiences.
I think at the root of it given where we are in the world today economically we've got a lot of problems, and it's global and the markets are global. So where storytelling plays a major role and where transmedia storytelling can play a major role is kind of exposing those relationships in how we solve social problems and economic problems. When you look at how transmedia disciplines are being applied to areas like education or being applied to activism, or how they’re being applied to different forms of brand marketing and then of course film and television, you start to see those things all heading in the same direction.
Will Transmedia drive to a better world ?
The challenge is to build a better world, which is not to suggest that within every transmedia story or platform there is a participatory role. Sometimes film should just be film, you don't necessarily need people to co-write the narrative, but I think in general if you use film and other elements as an experience to bring people in on a transmedia level, I think you could attack core issues that are really deep and penetrating and hard on society in general. Film is a really interesting example to me because I think some of the best transmedia elements come into play once audiences have taken in a really amazing cinematic experience, and have time to ruminate on what struck a chord with them. Batman did that with « Why so serious ? » and I think on the Indy side, projects like Pandemic were amplified by all of the social themes resident within that narrative, not so much what was used to bring people into that storyworld, if that makes sense. It kinda puts the idea of the « medium is the message » on its head.
Let me give you another lateral example of what I mean by that: one of the things that I thought was really powerful was a form of transmedia activism that evolved as a result of James Cameron's Avatar. If you look at Avatar as a story itself, a lot of people kind of wrote it off, Hollywood writers said "the stories has been told 1000 times", but I think Cameron did that on purpose. I think what he was saying is "look this story is not new" but I'm gonna contextualize it in a way that is new, because I think we need to be given new context as to why we are fighting with each other, why we are taking up our natural resources, why we are putting other cultures down, why we are supressing people».
I thought his message was incredibly powerful and I think he used visual media, specifically 3 dimensions, to have people go "Wow, maybe we are ignoring what's been so obvious to us all this time», so if you take Avatar - and Avatar is a great sort of commercial example of how transmedia storytelling is employed - there were incredible «extensions» of it. There was protest in the city of Bilin, Palestine, over land rights usage. And the people started live-action role playing, they put on the Avatar costumes and they played different character roles and archetypes within the story to show what was going on -- they were saying «look, the story that you've read about and heard about and seen in the movies is happening to us in real life, and we're gonna use that as a way to show people how serious we are about our land rights problem here». And of course when they protested, the story was picked up on major news outlets like CNN and AOL and others, and so I think that's the power of transmedia right there. It’s to take a media property so big and so grand and so commercial and to be able to distill it and extend it out into other parts of the environment in the world, so that people can use it as renewed context for the problems that they're dealing with in their particular region or environment .
To be clear – and this is something I’ve been forced to rethink in conversations with folks like Mike Monello, Alison Norrington and Brian Clark - Transmedia storytelling doesn’t use new stories. Stories have been told for centuries. If you look at "Arthur" in the cinematic medium they've sort of done regurgitations of different story themes over time, but all done with their own signatures and their own sort of unique color and flair and imagination, and that's kind of the idea. But we're dealing with similar themes that we have since civilization began - since heiroglyphics, since word of mouth started, since the Bible was created- but the point is that you use technology and culture and epistemology and metaphysics to approach storytelling differently now, and I think that's what makes it new, not that stories are new, I just think that the filters and the methods and the delivery systems are new and that's what's interesting.
You’ve worked in agencies, how are agencies doing now ?
This is sort of an obvious statement, but most agencies suffer from the fact they’re service businesses. Ironically, creative media can just as easily be developed as a product, but for myriad reasons agencies just don’t seem to approach it from that angle. Agencies that are parts of holding companies have the problem compounded because they’re bound to industrial models that can’t really support hybrid revenue streams, let alone innovation. You have to make your margins, and it's based on billable hours and it's very hard if not impossible to innovate under these circumstances because there is no real active investment in innovation just for the sake of it and if's not tied to client initiative or scope -- it’s pretty hard to get funding for things that are new or experimental. To boot, often times agencies people in decision-making positions who lots of client experience, but have little or no experience building businesses or being entrepreneurial, and that’s a problem when the landscape in general is erring towards self-sufficiency and scale.
With that said, I think agencies are very important. The agencies that can adapt and become agile enough to keep talent around and incentivize their contributions will do great things. There are a lot of creative forces at play in the industry, and a lot of unmined talent. There are people roaming the hallways of big agencies who could transform those businesses if management would just get it together ;)
Some agencies have innovation arms and they are trying to make innovation a part of the the daily service model that they have, and some are doing it with some success, and I think they're trying to break ground. Then there are agencies that are independents and smaller agencies that really doing some interesting stuff.
Rockfish for example is an interactive agency and what they did very early on was they decided that their business model was to be a hybrid model meaning that they were gonna build proprietary products while they were servicing these big brand clients, and they experienced phenomenal growth. Then this year they started Rockfish Ventures and the venture arm is literally an investment arm for angels and early capital investment of technologies that they feel are going to help their business and help the market in general.
About Old Spice
There are two things that really struck me about the campaign that I'm surprised Wieden did not take advantage of. I'm not sure that this was their fault - it might just have been the client not wanting to act on it - because Widen+Kennedy is a very progressive agency and they do terrific work. But I remember reading an article in Ad Age 2 weeks after the first Mustafa online campaign broke, where one of the people on the P&G side said : "Yeah but we're still trying to work out the numbers across the different channels", and I thought to myself... your channel's there and your sales funnel is there on YouTube, you've got these unique subscribers and they're participating, what more do you need?! What other evidence do you need?! And so the second part to that was: why didn't they sustain that as a platform, why didn’t they keep this whole Mustafa meme going as a platform with its own storyworld ?
So, they did release a number of other commercials afterward and all the commercials are very cool and cute and crafty, but why didn't they sort of concurrently alongside of that have a platform based on a dialog around the YouTube participants? And keep those viewers and those people activated ? Because to me, that's your new market, that's your new audience. They could have done all sort of things, they could have started a new channel, a new network. So I'm a little surprised by that, and I think that was where the value of the case study is, not so much in its virality. Because – as a few people have pointed out - virality is not a thing, it's something that just happens. There's really no such thing as viral marketing. Virality is just a thing that happens with marketing or other things because people are curious and they want to be conductors of or participants in a social experiment.
Best practices and challenges in transmedia ?
I don't think there are best practices. It's a constant mode of experimentation and discovery and I think that the biggest challenges for us who are practitioners and explorers of the space are really to come up with defensible business models for the transmedia platforms that we create and I think it's a reasonable ask for companies that have the media dollars.
I think creative people need to own the discipline of data analysis, analytics and business modeling for « experimental »revenue models. We need to own that because no one else is gonna figure it out for us, and if you think about it from a very simple level: if we're the ones exploring, we're the ones who're gonna have to advise on where the economic opportunities are. A studio is not gonna figure that out for us, a media company is not gonna figure that out for us… we’ve got to crack that nut, so those are the big challenges for us, and I think we're getting closer.
Producers and creators need to understand everything and anything that's happening in the marketplace that relates or affects their media properties.
They need to understand what is going on, with and around their media property so that they can create a viable revenue or business model.
They need to develop disciplines around analytics - not just measuring asstes or properties after-the-fact – but develop real market intelligence and audience segmentation going into the development of an idea and then and of course measuring it once the media goes to market and then they have to build a real business plan around what they're seeing there. So when they go back to a studio or a brand or a partner they can say "look at what we're seeing, here are the numbers, and here are the assumptions that were gonna make based on these numbers that equates dollars or sales or revenue, and that revenue stream can come in a number of different ways». And that's what they need to be able to own.
When some of my friends complain to me saying «the media companies and the studios and the networks just don't get it», I say it's not their fault, there's nothing for them to get, you've got to show them what you're talking about. Why is your story, why is your creative idea a product? Why can it be franchised? How? How can it be licensed? You have to be responsible for that discussion.
Gunther Sonnenfeld’s blog : http://goonth.posterous.com/
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