Penguin Australia have launched a new book for the 13+ market: Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight. Written by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, the story is described as follows:
Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight is two weeks in the life of Joel Hedges and Cat Davis. Joel would prefer to get through his final year of high school without Cat Davis or his mother’s faux Spanish boyfriend and just hang-out with his best-friend Luke. Cat Davis has an annoying best-friend, and even more annoying little brother, and a deep abiding hatred of Joel Hedges.
Due to an unfortunate incident involving a leaking pen and suspected outbreak of Bird Flu, Joel and Cat are forced to sit next to each other in Extension English. To make matters worse, and to their mutual horror, they are paired together for a tandem story writing assignment. [source]
The story is delivered rotating between the POVs of the characters Joel and Cat and is linked by their tandem storytelling assignment; the writers, Nick and Rebecca, also wrote the story in a tandem storytelling style and the readers can also participate in the tandem storyelling assignment by submitting story threads on the website or SMS. The website was produced by IshMedia, which includes Kylie Robertson — the legend behind online & mobile interactive narrative works such as Jupiter Green (that I analysed for a journal), Girl Friday and Rock Chickz .
As I’ve said before, it is these sort of intimate and parallel media experiences that will increase over the next few years and will explore the potential of polymorphic narrative.
For the past year or so these hard-working and clever individuals have been working towards their Masters at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Department. They’ve been developing their theories on TV, videogames, digital media, animation, museums, transmedia and convergence and now they’re online:
Last year I posted statistics I’d researched on alternate reality games. The list needs some minor editing since some links have moved. But before I do that, I wanted to add some more stats. Let me know if you have others to add to these ARGs or any others.
ReGenesis Extended Reality Game II These stats from a talk delivered by Evan Jones, then Creative Director of Xenophile Media, ‘Extended Entertainment Experiences‘, 24th Nov, 2006, Paddington, Australia.
First ARG linked to a full television seasonÂ
2 hours exclusive footage
9 distinct websites
Included email, telephone, SMS messaging
6 months to build
30 people on the team at Xenophile
Ocktopods (hardcore players) = 1-2,000 players
6 fan websites were created
Cost significantly less than on episode of TV
All those that registered their email and did the survey said they watched all 13 episodes of the TV show
Average age 29 years
Male and female players
1/3 of audience internationalÂ
The Lost Experience
These stats are from a talk delivered by Cricket Wardein, Marketing Director, Yahoo!7, ‘Extended Entertainment Experiences‘, 24th Nov, 2006, Paddington, Australia. They are for May 14th onwards for the Australia part of the multi-country ARG-style project.
Â
After launch video broadcast (advertisement) with a call to action to ring a number: 15,000 calls were received
900,000 unique users
7.6 million page views
1.9 million video streams
200,000 forum messages
average time spent online: 12 mins
In The Lost Experience, there were also many advertisers. The following information about the involvement of Sprite is sourced from Word of Mouth Case Studies.
“The LOST Experience is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designed to bring consumers closer to the fictional world of the ABC TV show, LOST. The ARG features 4 advertisers embedding clues into their online & offline properties for consumers to discover more information about the show’s characters. Sprite began on May 10th by placing the new Sublymonal.com URL into a faux TV commercial that ran in primetime during the ABC network show LOST. The URL drove consumers to a puzzle solely related to the show with the only brand mention being the actual URL. Afterwards, the ARG transitioned to a scavenger hunt with embedded DJ podcasts, videos, and hidden memos within Sublymonal.com. A final component includes embedded codes in print ads in Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine. The codes can then be used to unlock further content online.”
Results:
1. Sprite web traffic up 400%
2. Average visit time up 275% and +300% vs benchmark
3. 500K valid codes entered … and climbing!
Credit Information
————————————–
Client: Coca-Cola North America
Agency: AKQA
Budget: <$150,000 excluding media
Date of Campaign: May – September 2006
Meigeist The following Meigeist statistics are all sourced from:‘MeiGeist Placement and Research Report’, Diffractions, 2007 [pdf ]
Â
Gender: 56% male, 41% female, 3% unknown (note: stats from only 30 respondants)
Age: 37% aged 30-38, 28.5% aged 20-27, 27% aged 40-47, 7.5% aged15-19 (note: stats from only 30 respondants
Country: 47% USA, 44% UK, 6% Canada, and 3% Germany (note: stats from only 30 respondants)
Visitors to main ingame website by country: 40.73% Other; 21.8% United States California; 18.6% Great Britain; 14.48% United States Virginia; 4.93% United States > Arkansas.
Penguin Australia have launched a new book for the 13+ market: Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight. Written by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, the story is described as follows: