Category: Creative Practice & Strategy

The Boston Interactive Media Association (BIMA) is holding it’s 3rd Annual Cross Media Forum on September 18th 2007 in Boston. It is described on the site as follows:

In the ever-changing and increasingly fragmented media environment, marketers must develop multi-platform advertising strategies to effectively reach their target markets.  The BIMA Cross Media Forum was created to bring together leading agencies, marketers and publishers to have an open dialogue on the challenges, successes and realities of executing across multi-media platforms. Now in its third year, this half day forum includes case studies and panel discussions offering actionable, solutions-oriented recommendations for both planning and implementing successful cross media programs.

Keynote Speaker: Peter Hirshberg, Chairman, Technorati

Session 1: Overcoming the Obstacles to Cross Channel Integration     
Moderator: Kate Kaye, Editor, News and Special Projects, ClickZ
Panelists: Erin Matts, Group Director of Strategy, Digital, OMD; John Moore, SVP, Director of Ideas and Innovation, Mullen; Kristen O’Hara, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Time Warner Global Marketing; Traci Topham, Vice President, Interactive Ad Sales Marketing, Scripps Networks; Lisa Valentino, Senior Director Digital Sales, ESPN

A cross channel campaign that uses multiple touch points to convey brand position and key marketing messages is the ideal way for advertisers to overcome fragmentation and clutter. The reality is that buyers and sellers alike face numerous obstacles as they strive to develop truly integrated media programs. As a marketer, how do you contend with the fact that most companies are not structured to reward integration? How do publishers manage and balance the needs of multiple participants from the agency side? What does it take to get representatives from different channels to work together to come up with an integrated solution that supports the “big idea?”
 
Join a distinguished group of panelists from leading agencies and publishers as they share their insights on how to overcome these and other challenges and successfully shape cross channel campaigns.
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Session 2: Breakout Sessions – B2B & B2C Case Studies

Planning an integrated campaign is difficult but there are many agencies & marketers who have pulled it off successfully.  Hear their secrets of success.
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Session 3: What to Do, What to Look For, and What to Avoid When Executing Cross Media
Moderator: Ken Dec, Chief Measurement Officer, Director of Strategic Planning, PARTNERS+simons
Panelists to Date: Kerry Benson, SVP/Account Director for Liberty Mutual, Hill Holliday; Erica Crossen, Senior Manager Operations, Brightcove; Mike Lacorazza, VP/Director of Marketing, Digitas; Erin McSheffrey, Director of Program Management, Carat

Once you have successfully planned, sold and gained approval to implement a cross channel campaign, the work doesn’t end there. Even an expertly integrated plan can falter in execution if you do not take a number of additional factors into consideration. Have you secured the T&R rights to run the creative across all recommended platforms?  Does your creative messaging translate across all channels?  How do you compare and measure the success of each medium and its overall impact on the campaign?  Join our panel of implementers – creative, traffic, messaging, production and measurement team members – to receive essential tips for executing successful cross media
programs.

Through Adam Crowe’s delicious I found this great ppt from Brand Zeal about their ‘solar system’ approach to ‘brand mapping’:

I loved seeing this because the solar system or astronomical approach is exactly how I visual storyworlds and brands. I’ve been working on a model for this for a few years now, have been developing (in my head) the software for it, and have called my upcoming podcast Universe Creation 101. I wouldn’t categorise the systems like Brand Zeal does, but I have different intentions. Yay World Creation!

In 2004, well-known academic Jill Walker Rettberg (who among other things did a great piece a few years ago about the online drama Online Caroline by XPT) published a great paper called Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks:

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in.

Although I argue that a distributed narrative can be a total artwork, Walker nevertheless provides some canny observations about the phenomenon. For instance, these forms are explained according to three values:

1) Distribution in Time (can’t experience in a single session)
2) Distribution in Space (cannot experience in a single location or single medium)
3) Distribution of Authorship (collective, emergent authorship)

Among the works Walker discussed to illuminate the theory was Nick Montfort’s and Scott Rettberg’s Implementation, a sticker novel that I’ve referred to in my talks many times. It is novel that has each paragraph distributed across stickers all over the world. It is described on their site as follows:

Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. The text was written collaboratively by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg with some contributions from others. Its initial incarnation was as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that were distributed in monthly installments.

Ludologist (game theorist) Dakota Reese Brown mentions a recent project that adds to Walker’s genre: a stencil story called She Loves the Moon. I cannot find any info about the creators, just the info and pics they provide at flickr:

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

Its a love story with 2 characters who start in different locations. His story starts at 16th and Valencia, in front of the Crown Hotel / Limon Restaurant with the text “He Leaves his Lonely Apartment.” Her story starts at 21st and Guerrero in front of a stunning mansion with the text, “She Leaves her Lonely Apartment.” Eventually their paths merge, at the point where they meet, and their paths travel together until drama pulls them apart.

Their are two possible endings, happy and tragic, and two other points where the story can end unexpectedly if the viewer chooses the wrong ending. All in all, there are 4 possible endings.

Looks like fun!

• More info on Walker’s ‘distributed narratives’
• Implementation site
• Jon Bauer’s Google Maps rendering of She Loves the Moon
• Mission Stencil Story at flickr