I recently had the opportunity to speak on a panel about Transmedia at the MIT Futures of Entertainment conference. I was granted the opportunity due to some of the work we have done with MIT through gamerDNA. The panel focused on research and measurement of transmedia efforts.
Wikipedia defines transmedia as:
"...storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a viewer/user/player's understanding of the story world. By using different media formats, it attempts to create "entrypoints" through which consumers can become immersed in a story world."
For the sake of simplicity, that was more or less where we started... the questions from there were things like:
- What does transmedia mean to you?
- What role does research play developing or valuing transmedia properties?
- What research methods can we use to measure transmedia?
- What are the drawbacks and challenges presented by our methods?
- What do we need to make them work better?
I was the only "gaming guy" on the panel... the rest came from strong TV and advertising backgrounds. Much of the conversation centered around TV, but I made sure to offer the gaming/entertainment perspective when I could.
The best observation I had while sitting there and listening to the crowd was that in TV, the measurements of "How many, how long, how often" are not available. In the gaming world, due to gaming increasingly being online, these metrics are becoming available. We know what people play... how long... how often... and since gaming is starting to unify identity under common identity systems like your Playstation Network ID or your Xbox Gamertag, or Facebook connect, we can track people across these media experiences. So now... we have to explore WHY do we do this? What is the benefit of transmedia to gaming?
I believe that early transmedia efforts tended to focus on engagement... or re-engagement... and those have met with very little (or marginal) long term value. The engagement tends to be from an audience that was already franchise loyal or already heavily engaged. The big opportunity is to expand your audience with transmedia. This means building incoming points that allow new people from different contexts to interact with your property.
So I think in gaming, we are ahead of the curve because we learned the "why" is not engagement, it is about establishing new audience. Transmedia channels then become exclusive to each audience, each channel optimized for the experience and type of audience you are going after. A gaming example of this would be CCP taking their MMORPG property Eve Online... and expanding the audience by making a first person shooter (called DUST) that synchronously interacts with the same MMORPG world... but in this way they keep their RPG audience and plug in a new FPS audience.
So if you are going to run out and create an iPhone app for your online web product, the focus shouldn't be on extending your product to your existing audience with iPhones, but building an exclusively tailored experience that brings in a whole new audience of iPhone users to something that also continues to support the engaged online web audience.
For a full recap of the entire session, jump over to Rachel Clarke's blog. She took great notes:
Moderator: Eleanor Baird – Director, Partnerships & Analytics, Tube Mogul; Panelists include: JuYoung Lee – Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, ACE Metrix; David Spitz – Director of Business Development, WPP; Trapper Markelz – VP Products, GamerDNA; Joel Rubinson – Chief Research Officer, The ARF; Jack Wakshlag – Chief Research Officer, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Oh and for being on the panel, I got a nice little gift... a book by Grant McCracken called Chief Culture Officer, how to create a living breathing corporation. I will have to work that into my reading schedule.
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