Continuing from my previous post, I am exploring the lack of any psychological study behind Transmedia, Multiplatform and Interactive storytelling.
Now I don’t know a whole lot about Film theory, but I know that Hitchcock’s films are very well covered as they are all deep wells of psychological tricks and techniques. So I thought I could improve the projects I worked on by utilising some Transmedia equivalent to Film theory. But I could not find anything useful, let alone apply it.
Until one day in 2012, when I was surfing the web looking for info on how to market Bellyfeel’s business as we were not getting enough work in at the time. To be honest I had always found marketing to be the work of the devil. Some lesser effective, yet more insidious brother of advertising. (I can say now that I was wrong!)
But I knew I had to do something.
This is…
Because our main competition for interactive production work was from digital marketing agencies!
Back to my story, I was surfing through some very hokey “self-help for business” type of sites trying to find something tangible to work with, when I happened on the website of Perry Marshall. Perry is a marketing guru with a bestselling book on Google Adwords, a thriving online business and a high paying consultancy business. He is a really smart guy.
I landed on a page on his site where he talked about “Guerrilla Marketing For Hi-Tech Sales People”. Basically a light went on in my head that I didn’t even know existed.
The gist of the info was about stopping cold calling, using digital technology to elevate your business proposition to a higher level of visibility and measuring results so they can be improved. All good stuff! But the amazing thing was the way he wrote. I could instantly relate to what he was saying in a way that was very powerful. I was engaged with that webpage in a way that I never experienced before.
On further inspection I found his site to be a wealth of useful information. I signed up to the mail list and found the info I got via email to be just as compelling, I had to read each and every one. I still follow his emails and blogs, they’re very good.
I was on the end of some very shrewd marketing techniques that were basically selling me some very shrewd marketing techniques.
A lot of this info was selling his products and knowledge, yes. But it also adhered to the Freemium business model that I had been keeping a close eye on for Bellyfeel future entertainment projects. There was enough info for free to radically change our business, yet I was also inextricably compelled to buy something too and there was a range of pricing to fit any budget.
In fact the only thing I ‘bought’ was a free CD paying only for the shipping from the US to the UK.
But I was seriously impressed with the psychological approach behind what I read and was contained in the marketing info I got access to.
So I read and followed the links and made notes and read and followed the links and made notes and so on…
Transmedia as we know it is 99% funded in the form of marketing campaigns for large entertainment franchises; films, and games.
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0 Comments
Hello Krishna,
I noticed this new article and I felt it may be (even if it wasn’t intended to) a kind of response to my tweet.
https://twitter.com/raulpmaciel/status/293738453416431616
I’d like to tell that I really agree with your last irony. In fact I’m writting my Master thesis also on this evidence.
I just tought that Hitchcock sool should rest in peace. And say that that man would be anything that not a filmmaker only would make sense if the hypothesis was made for times before the cinema invention. This personal opinion.
I follow your blog on my Flipboard news feed. I’m studying the transmedia concept and trying to let it out of the academy dungeons, what may seem pretty difficult. After all, I also want to work with multiplatform communication for business in some way. I’m not a puritan.
Best regards,
Raul
Hey Raul, Thanks for your comment. I actually wrote all 3 of the posts together – my intention was to raise awareness of the interesting aspects of digital/ direct response marketing, which I had been very resistant too for many years, but when I really looked I saw that it provided answers to some of the big problems I have seen in Transmedia, Multiplatform and Interactive projects.
I saw your tweet and thought you were being ironic! Because of my fruitless search for good psychological inquiry into new forms of interactive media the Hitchock reference works for me but I also wanted to provoke a discussion!
Best, Krishna