Sohail Dahdal of 6moons Interactive showed his 2 projects: Long Journey, Young Lives (which I’ve seen before and have been impressed by); and one that is just started: Swapping Lives.
Gary Hayes gave a fantastic talk, showing the various projects that have an excellent user-navigation that is ‘in-story’ most of the time. Of particular interest is what is perhaps the post-boy of the cliff-hanger style of cross-media navigation: Mitsubishi’s ‘See What Happens’ commercial that was broadcast during the SuperBowl in 2004. The first part of the cross-media ad is a TVC with two drivers dodging ever-increasing items being thrown out of a truck. Just when 2 cars start tumbling towards them the commercial stops with the website address of www.seewhathappens.com. The site received over 31 million visits during the Super Bowl. Since then, the site has had over 8 million unique visits and so Mitsubishi have launched another (web only) campaign, feelwhathappens. The campaign is housed at the seewhathappens website. They should of kept the original work at the seewhathappens site because people are going there to see it. It was good, and could continue to be good. I understand the idea of reusing the site address, because it has guaranteed traffic, but the abuse of trust and not rewarding the effort to visit the site is a big negative.
There is a case-study on the ad, written by Joseph Jaffe, the creator of the ‘word-of-mouse’ term and the author of an excellent book I’m currently reading: Life After the 30-Second Spot. But more about that in another post.
More info about cross-media production in Oz and beyond coming soon.