"Around the Transmedia World" is a series of interviews Laurent Guerin is conducting for Petitweb.fr. 
This is the complete interview of MIKE MONELLO. 
A French shorter version is available on PetitWeb. 

About you

I am the founding partner and CEO of Campfire, which is a marketing agency in New York City.  We specialize on launching brands and changing perceptions, but we do it through storytelling and we like to tell stories across multiple platforms and we like to tell them through experience rather than pure content. So we do make content but our general philosophy is don't necessarily be the storyteller don't think of yourself as a storyteller but think of yourself as building a world and experiences that get people your story to tell.  

Your background

I started actually studying films at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and went to work for the Florida film Festival and studied independent films. I eventually got together with four other filmschool buddies and made the «Blair Witch Project», as one of the producers. 

Coming out that I was completely in love with telling stories online because it felt so immediate and collaborative with the audience in a way that film wasn't. It just felt like something entirely new and exhilarating. So after «Blair Witch» we began to be approached by brands and marketers who wanted to do something similar on behalf of their brand, and at the same time we were trying to get the TV networks and the studios here in the US to fund and finance movies that were connected to online experiences, and to think about media in a more integrated way, organized by story.

But they just weren't interested. To them, a website was a thing you do to get people to buy a ticket for a movie, or a place where you put some pictures, a press kit for your film and directions for the theater.

The movie studios and the TV networks know how to make money from movies and TV shows and at the time, they didn't yet understand how to make money from the Internet and thruthly they still don't... 

They didn't recognize the power of fans, which I think now they do -if you look at the success of things like Comic Con in San Diego- they realize that if you've got a fan culture around something, you make for the stronger franchise.

It's always been hard for a studio to spend money into something that doesn't have a direct revenue stream.

Now with marketers who weren’t looking to make money from telling stories online -all they want is to get people’s attention-, it was kind of an interesting possibility :  we could tell stories and experiment with the form of what we’re doing. The value to advertisers is that we bring people to their story and they will get the message in an interesting way that is not about pushing commercials that are interrupting other content, but actually creating content and telling stories on their own.

So we started some early transmedia project for marketing, like «Beta 7», a marketing campaign we did for a football video game.  

About television 

People love stories. And television has been for a while the dominant medium for storytelling for people. The Internet, mobile devices, Ipads, laptops and some of the platforms and technologies like Youtube have enabled individuals to tell stories now, and that has changed the way we want to interact with the stories that are produced for TV. 

So I think that what we're going to see is more and more of this convergence that's happening. We still want television shows and movies that are created out of brilliant stories but we also want to interact with those worlds, and we're starting to see more and more studios, filmmakers and TV producers recognizing that and conceiving their shows with that ability for people to participate in them more, not just for TVs but for any media we're seeing JK Rowling doing it now with the Potterverse for example. 

The market is absolutely growing and people are trying to figure things out so we're in a bit of the wild west here which is actually the great place to be because there are no rules right now, which means we get to wildly experiment.

About «True Blood»

"True Blood" was interesting because at the times HBO did not really have anything on the air that was geared toward horror fans. They weren't really on the radar of people who really like horror shows. So we created a 3 month prequel that played out over marketing channels as well as online, that told the story of vampires coming out and being a part of civilization, and acknowledging their existence. That story led right up to the first episode and was played out in real time. We engaged horror fans and started to help develop the fan culture around the show even before the first episode went to air. We created a mailing that was written in dead languages, like Babylonian. People realized that these things were made for them but it was a puzzle to decipher, and that puzzle actually was part of a deeper story about vampire culture living in the underground at the time. 

About the metrics

Metrics are different for every program and it's really important when we're hired by a client that they define what metrics they want they want to address before we actually create a program. 

With «True Blood» there was a lot of interest in creating PR, creating buzz in conversations and making a cultural impact. But there were other metrics : part of the «True Blood» campaign had these video pieces that were on HBO on demand and we were able to drive from about 2 million views of the on-demand episodes before the premiere which are huge numbers for HBO on demand at the time, and we're talking about a show that haven't even aired yet. 

About the word transmedia

I don't think it's a marketing word, I think it's a storytelling word. I like to think of it as stories that are not bound by any single media format. It’s what happens between a TV show and an online experiment, or between a book and a game. 

That what makes it different than franchising where you take a character like Batman and put him in a video game and then put him in a movie and then we have a cartoon on the air and then we have comic books...

The difference is that when you think about transmedia storytelling, you're thinking about the meaning that's created between those forms of media and how each of those story builds a larger story.

I think the word transmedia is really an adjective, so you can have transmedia storytelling and you can have Transmedia marketing but I don't think you can point to something and say "that's transmedia". 

About the future

The biggest challenge is to getting good at it ! 

We have a lot of people who are using the word and promoting the word and talking about it philosophically and academically, but you know from my own experience I have to say that nothing compares to actually doing it and figuring out what works and what doesn't.

Very few of the theories can be duplicated... Which make them wrong. The only way to realize that is to be continuously doing it and refining the process and refining our understanding of it.

We need to worry less about the meaning of it and about how to define  it and we need to worry more about how to actually do it.

Transmedia requires you to think about a story maybe the way an architecting thinks about a building... A transmedia story is kind of empty and meaningless until it's occupied by people, and so you have to kind of design around behaviors, you have to design around more basic kind of desires.

People don't sit down like they do in a theater and go "oh I'm really looking for new Transmedia experience", what happens is they fall into that because they've been designed so well that they attract people and just next thing you know they’re thinking "Wow I'm living in this fantasy world...

About brands 

Some brands are ready and some brands are not, but wether they're ready or not is almost irrelevant because the as things keep moving they're just gonna have to be. They start realising that they don't control the message in the same way that they used to. 

About key players 

There’s a lot of people who are doing interesting things, but I keep finding new elements and pieces and experiences from out of nowhere that are really surprising and interesting.

I feel like it's wrong at this stage to try to identify the leaders or the key people, on the one hand I think there's people who’ll have more experience than others but I feel like we're so new to it that to me the next big thing could, and maybe should, come from someone who nobody's talking about right now.

Some people who have written brilliantly about it, some people have helped break it down and helped understand, people who have been great teachers about it and then there's people who have done incredible work with but I feel like all of us are still experimenting and changing and adjusting  and I would hate to think that we would start to hold somebody up as a leader because as soon as you do that things get still.

I believe that right now transmedia is something that is gonna be best actually be done by independents. The success of «Blair Witch Project» had less to do with having a deal for a movie which we didn't have, it was more about how we'd managed to get lucky with a story that resonated with people and told that story in a format that made sense for the way the Internet was at the time. We captured people's imagination and that drove the success of the movie.

I think that companies who make movies or TV shows now have too much at stake to risk, so their experiments are happening slowly, and I feel like that an independent creator who understands the value of fans and is willing to think about «how do I build fans for my story», and «how do I make them live in the storyworld» and «what stories do I tell in the storyworld», well I think there's a chance for somebody to create that and have hopefully a bigger success than Blair Witch.

I think right now advantage is to the independents, I don't know much longer that's gonna be so I think a lot of independent creators need to get their asses kicked to get in gear and just do it.

Mike Monello on Twitter : @mikemonello

Campfire website

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