One of the words that cropped up on the fringes of the Cannes advertising festival (or rather The Festival of Creativity – they’ve added too many categories to claim it’s purely devoted to advertising) was transmedia. My friend Sally O’Dowd of the PR agency MS&L spoke passionately about her conversion to this relatively new form of storytelling. I’ve also heard it called intercreativity.
Very simply, it’s about using varied media to tell – and enrich – the same tale. Imagine you’ve written a novel. Instead of leaving your characters trapped inside your book, you create Facebook pages for them. You bring them to life by having them tweet incidents that add depth to your story. You allow readers to check in at places your characters have visited. And you create viral videos. TV shows, films, comics, video games and of course advertising – all of them can be given the transmedia treatment, allowing your audience to further explore a universe they enjoy.
Of course, your core idea has to be interesting enough to capture their imagination: transmedia doesn’t mean you can let go of character or plot. It also requires more work. Which is why, according to Sally, transmedia is likely to be a collaborative exercise. The writer is no longer a solitary figure typing in his attic. He’s the leader of a construction crew building an exciting new world.
