The old rules of messaging and traditional media dictate that you want to try to reach as many people as possible.  Today, with the ability to hyper target your message or story, the barrage of so much content, and peoples’ short attention spans, it’s about quality and your own definition of ROI.  We learned about [...]

The big scary paradigm shift in technology, entertainment and advertising (don’t worry everything else is converging too) is akin to the implosion of the music industry. We spent years building up obstacles between the music and the fans and trying to ignore the fact that they were always in control. When the dust finally settles [...]

As we saw in Episode 3, there are several ways to track audience data.  You can find out, on a very granular level, who they are, where they like to play, and other important metrics that are required to make great content and distribute it strategically across the web.  In Episode 4 we find out [...]

When Zach and I discuss clients and what the future has in store for those “living digital”, I am often the naysayer. While he sees the exponential embrace of a soon-to-be-unrecognizable digital lifestyle in the digital cloud, I often dig my heels in, play contrarian, and draw a line where the need for human interaction [...]

Transmedia, Branding and Marketing

In Part I and Part II of this blog series we outlined the basics of Transmedia storytelling, as it pertains to entertainment, and how technology is helping to shape the way we consume story across multiple platforms.  The Transmedia approach is also fast becoming popular with brands because the rules [...]

Transmedia Storytelling Explained

The story of traditional branding and marketing, set against the backdrop of this nerve racking, yet exciting paradigm shift, makes yet another exciting plot twist. “360 storytelling”, “Multi-platform storytelling”, or Transmedia storytelling, as it was coined many years ago by the great MIT/USC professor Henry Jenkins, is moving away [...]

The brand police are knocking at the door.  You can run but you can’t hide!
In today’s Ad Age, Jack Neff writes about Good Guide, a consumer brand rating site that has already put their scale of 1-10 on over 75,000 products.  While consumer watchdogs have been around a long, long time, this more recent entry [...]

Sometimes necessity and  a painful wallow in fourth place in a field of four is the mother of invention. Today’s MediaPost features an article by David Goetzl about Jeff Zucker’s recent investor speech.  During his presentation, Zucker more than hinted about NBC’s future and the programming changes that will play a major role.  A key [...]

Everyone knows their TV and Internet are on a crash course with each other and when these worlds collide, the way we experience entertainment will never be the same. It won’t be too much longer before we’ll all be checking our Facebook, and other time sucking web accounts, for photos and video messages from our [...]

Brand integration in web series?  Wait, I thought that was dead.  Didn’t every brand get a good clock cleaning earlier this decade by investing in this very same format?  Certainly.  However, as we have said for some time now, that too has passed. The opportunity for organic and effective branding in web series is here, we’ve learned [...]