Storytelling surely must be embedded into our DNA. I am no neuro scientist or genome specialist (no, really), but I find the idea utterly compelling. Each moment of every minute of every hour of every day is a continuation of our own, self-told story. We understand our lives and the lives of others by continually building our feelings, ideas, impressions into a system of interconnecting narrative structures. Time is at the heart of this. Without time we would have no stories. Everything would happen at once, in one massive, amorphous rush. But because we live our lives within a construct of time, we are able to use memory to create meaning, stories.

When we give someone directions, we give them in a linear order, because that is how we travel, linearly. But our memories and impressions of our own lives, although created along the linear trajectory of time, are not recalled and used in a linear way. The stories we tell ourselves are not linear. They are non-linear and in some ways are much like a life-stream of digital communication (friendfeed, Buzz, etc). Other peoples lives intersect ours, some people frequently and repeatedly, others in more random ways. Each of those others has their own life streams, intersected by others. When we meet someone for the first time, we immediately set about placing them within the context of our own lives, our own perceptions based upon our own experiences.

Through time, we build a constantly changing story of the people we meet. We tell this story back to ourselves every time we meet them, every time we think about them. And it’s not just people, but also events, places, objects. We tell ourselves stories in order to understand the things we pick up and hold as well as the places we visit and the environements that surround us and all the time, each little story, each new or repeated encounter, adds another short story to the stream. We recall these short stories; the trip to the seaside, the walk through the city, not in a linear way. These are not stories that exist linearly, we only believe they do because we see them refracted through the construct of time. they come to us in flashes, get spliced together in new ways, to create new meaning, get recalled and reused.

When we dream, we don’t dream in a linear way. Our dreams are a montage of emotion, imagery, sense, pushed through the metaphor of language. Our fears and hopes created into a stream of memory. Memory of places, faces, sometimes colours, feelings. Sometimes it’s so chaotic so as to not be fathomable at all but usually we are able to recall a story.

At the turn of the twentieth century, film – moving film, became a new looking glass from which we could see reflected the strangeness of our own dreams: the sudden disappearances, changes of view point and location and meaning. And I mean this very deliberately, because films are only linear because of time, and are completely non-linear because of dreams. Yes, we can record a passage of time and see within it, if there are no edits, no cuts, that people, cars, bikes, clocks, the movement of the sun, these things move linearly. But we do not construct meaning linearly and we do not construct stories linearly. We create film, with edits, jumping back and forward through time and place and viewpoint. Jumping from one person to another, from one feeling to another, rapidly and abjectly; because this is precisly the way in which we create stories in our heads.

This is the same way we create stories from our own dreams, the constant flux of emotion and recalled imagery forced into meaning. And, importantly, it is not linear. Our understanding of our lives and of each other is not dependent upon linearity, but it is utterly dependent upon stories.

I while ago I was asked to give a presentation on the future of navigation interfaces. I came across these examples on my travels. eyeRobot, anyone?

I love the concept of the Internet Of Things. The name invokes an epic vision of the internet brought to life through every physical thing around you: inanimate objects suddenly having lives of their own. That might sound a bit fanciful but actually it’s not that far from the truth, theoretically at least. Objects will be increasingly implanted with technology that will enable them to listen and see the world and make cursory decisions based on what they can detect. True AI is probably some way off for your standard sofa perhaps.

I recently helped develop some creative strategy for Unilever’s Heart Brand (Wall’s to us) around the concept of ‘Share Happy’. Because it’s still on-going, I can’t really tell you anything about the strategy we developed, although it was quite progressive and was about the creation of a decentralised transmedia platform, not simply another through the line, 360 degree campaign.

What I can talk about though is the first activation idea we developed for one of the markets, as this is already out there. We devised and developed an interactive vending machine, blessed with the ability to read people’s faces. the facial recognition software we added to the vending machine meant that it could now tell if you were male or female, whether you were surprised, angry, happy or sad. It could even tell approximately how old you were, but it could get that horribly wrong sometimes.

The software worked through being connected to a video camera, mounted at the front of the vending machine. This vending machine dished out freee ice cream to those that could smile truly broad and happy smiles, although the biggest smile I suspect was the one on the faces of those who managed to actually get a free ice cream.

So, our vending machine has some smarts. Not much, but I would say it could be added to the Internet Of things. It is able to detect and react to it’s environment and it’s connected to the internet.

It’s an interesting thought, to think that things like vending machines can tell things about you, maybe tell things that you aren’t aware of (was I smiling?). That might be a bit creepy, but it has benefits, as well as the more obvious Orwellian resonance of big brother control. but if you think about it, it’s a nice way to engage. Not having to type something in, just to feel something. Now that could be interesting.

What else could you use this for? Healthcare springs to mind, as does experiential gaming (Xbox Kinect, formerly known as Project Natal, will have biometric reading capabilities installed). Biometric reading technology will most likely be used in your car before you know it (falling asleep? Your car will wake you up. Over the limit? Your car will tell you). I wouldn’t want to be told to cheer up all the time though: “No, no my face just looks like this. Yes, I’m fine, I was actually happy before you butted into my life, you contestable computational creature!” (I am envisioning myself being Dr Smith in Lost In Space at this point).

Audiences are now, literally, all over the place. For brands, the ‘all over the place’ scenario is confusing at best and at worse, totally unfathomable. How do you reach people if they can be anywhere?

If brands are to connect with disparate audiences, they need to start thinking in ways that enable them to connect in different ways, in different places. Basically, in a more transmedia way.

Transmedia storyteller Jeff Gomez suggests that

“Most of us flow naturally from one medium to the next. Unfortunately most of our content doesn’t. Instead the stories are re-purposed and repeated. They do not extend the franchise nor do they build brand equity. With transmedia, each part of a story is unique and plays to the strengths of the medium. The result is a new kind of narrative where story flows across each platform forming a rich narrative tapestry that manifests in an array of products and multiple revenue streams. The audience is both validated and celebrated for participating in the story world through the medium of their choice.”

We now consume content across a phalanx of different platforms and channels. We consume more niche content than before, as well as more, what could be regarded as, non-professional content. We also still consume things like mainstream films, TV programmes and news content, but we consume these things in many different places now and shunt our consumption from one platform to the next.

Media consumption is now transmedia consumption: It is multiplicitous. It covers many different touchpoints and consumers now have a much greater expectation of control. Brands need to adapt. The days of command and control are quickly dying. The question is: How can brands still reach audiences and engage with them, across an increasing number of channels and platforms?

Faris Yakob (who wrote a blog post on transmedia planning) maintains that brands need to think about the “myths” that are created around them, in order to communicate in a transmedia landscape.

“Think about the myth that is the brand you are charged with building. Find the brand’s point of view, create the brand’s world. Don’t treat consumers like idiots. Get online and see how people are living – but that doesn’t mean charge and claim a stake in Second Life! It’s the brand’s myth that is interesting. What’s interesting about trainers? What’s interesting about Japanese cars?”

It’s definitely true that most products in themselves are generally not all that interesting; they have to be placed into context, sort of hyper-reality brand stories, to explain their relevancy. Brands need to be ‘made’ interesting or, rather, made relevant. Their values need to be demonstrated, but at the same time, they also need to create a fantasy or ideal, with which to vault their products into a depiction that incites desire. In transmedia terms this means building brand ‘worlds’ or mythologies that tie every communication and experience back to a brand’s underpinning values, offering up a different part of the world or story in the different places it populates. In the advanced capitalist, consumer reality we inhabit, USP is not all that relevant: value, or values, are what counts.

Transmedia brands need to provide a world that audiences can participate in; a world in which consumers can shape brands, twist and stretch them, to fit their needs. Consumers now expect to curate and control more of their consumption experiences.

The major difference between a consumer brand such as Coca Cola, and an entertainment brand such as Warner Bros, is that the consumer brand’s products are not stories. So where does this leave consumer brands, in terms of storytelling? Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, represent the sharp end of transmedia storytelling but transmedia campaigns needn’t always end up as an ARG. Brands can employ transmedia tactics in less immersive ways, indeed, this is where consumer brands will need to look more closely to build out effective multi-modal, transmedia identities for themselves. Identities that are able to connect widely and deeply, across disparate environments and audiences. Some brands are already operating in less immersive transmedia ways that still enable consumers to engage with a brand world.

Coca Cola has gone some way towards deploying a transmedia approach with it’s Happiness Factory campaign. They’ve created a rich story-world (or brand-world) around the idea that their vending machines have a whole world existing within them, known as the Happiness Factory. The campaign has seen the production of all the usual campaign activity: a website, some TV ads, etc, but also things like a co-created music track.

Although, for all of the rhetoric from Coca Cola heralding a bold new transmedia dawn, the Happiness Factory sits tentatively between a media neutral approach and a transmedia approach, as if it’s trying to grab hold of one without letting go of the other.  But, even if the Happiness Factory doesn’t turn out to be the mother of transmedia campaigns, it does represent a conscious step towards a greater understanding of transmedia in consumer engagement.

The dominant line of thinking within the mar/comm.’s industry still promotes a ‘media neutral’ planning approach to brand strategy. This basically posits the belief that we should develop a single, unifying idea that iterates itself across any touch point. That practice worked when advertising was predominantly a broadcast medium, but not so much anymore, given that we’ve evolved into a media-dense world, where audience attention is fragmented across many different platforms and media types.

Transmedia storytelling (a phrase Henry Jenkins first coined back in 2006) is sometimes referred to as being multi-modal, meaning it uses multiple representations to convey a complex story through numerous media channels and platforms. Brands themselves now need to become multi-modal, that is to say, more multifarious and flexible in their identities – in how they portray themselves, in order to remain relevant and accessible to an increasingly differentiated audience. They have to simultaneously manifest themselves across multiple differentiated touch-points. To summarise: a multi-modal brand is a brand that is able to maintain it’s core values, but be flexible enough to be represented in a multitude of different ways, so as to fit more closely to the medium it is being placed within and to the community it finds itself talking to.

In order to do this an over arching brand mythology is required, that can support multiple different stories and brand representations. What would a multi-modal brand look like exactly? I’ve sketched a little diagram (very roughly) to demonstrate simply how a multi-modal brand might work:

In my sketch, brand ‘nodes’ are created as autonomous consumer engagement experiences. Each Brand node is targeted to complement a specific audience and a specific medium, channel or platform. A brand node could be anything really; an ad, a PR initiative, a video, an interactive experience, anything.

Every brand node has, at it’s heart, the brands core values, yet each may look and feel different. In this way, brands can become modified to suit the audience and the experience, yet still retain core brand values.

I wanted to see how a multi-modal brand can be placed within a transmedia framework. Brands can use transmedia storytelling to connect audiences, experiences and media into a single brand universe or story-world, with active participation from audiences enabling feedback and the evolution of the brand world they participate in. Less active audiences can still engaged, with more active audiences being provided a more immersive experience, across disparate brand nodes. Collective intelligence is leveraged through the creation of an over-arching brand narrative, that threads together very different brand experiences, by placing them within a greater brand narrative. So what does a multi-modal, transmedia brand look like? Cue another poorly drawn and most likely innacurate sketch:

Now, each brand node is still hyper-targeted, to suit a specific audience and experience but in the context of transmedia storytelling, a brand can thread or connect seemingly disparate experiences into a unifying brand world, encompassing multiple campaigns, or numerous disparate experiences.

When viewed as a platform, this model could enable brands to simultaneously grow and connect disparate audiences, through an ever evolving, highly targeted, brand universe. It is a model that also requires the participation of the audience, in different ways, depending on the audience and the experience, to evolve the brand narrative through interaction, in more or less immersive ways.

The audience is integral in the creation of the story and the storytelling. One other point I wanted to make about this model, is the importance of a mix of factual and fictional storytelling. Consumer brands need to be able to inspire as well as demonstrate utility and value. Creating transmedia brand worlds that are able to do both and, importantly, cross over from one to another, will be able to build cohesive transmedia storytelling while managing to service their different communication requirements.

I shot this short video of my children, Nye and Tove, playing together, because I wanted to illustrate how children work together to create narrative structures during imaginative play, making the connection between how we first learn to engage with one another and how we use social networks in much the same way. The only problem was, in the video, Nye tends to lead much of the play. He is the older of the two. I could have recorded their play another time, when both of them were actively engaged on a more equal footing, but after watching the video I realised that the way Nye and Tove were playing was still relevant to a comparison to how we use digital, social systems, perhaps more so.

Like Nye and Tove’s game, a social network is a shared venture. In order for it to work, participants must actively work to create stories by taking on the roles of both author and audience. The roles have to be fluid and instantaneously interchangeable. Each protagonist must be both actor and audience.

During social, participatory play, children actively take on roles within the story, in order to create it. The children involved often play in groups of two or more, although just as often by themselves, without any adult involvement. So, the children are the audience as well as the authors and the one does not exist without the other. Even in singular play, we consume our stories as we create them. In online social networks, more participants are generally needed to watch, listen and support than they are to create and publish for the systems to flourish. The two roles of author and audience feed off each other. Engaging authorship gets rewarded with a supportive audience. And, like Nye and Toves collaborative play, the audience can be the author and the author can be the audience, simultaneously.

Nye and Tove’s engagement with each other to create a story, played out, heightens the quality of experience. Their joint involvement also adds an element of the unknown for each, an element of serendipity. In this way, Nye and Tove’s shared story becomes more than the sum of it’s parts. Social networks exist upon a similar framework to that of Nye and Tove’s social play. They are set up to enable the communication and sharing of ideas and stories. Nye and Tove’s framework is the room and the objects within it.

Social networks similarly provide us with props, platforms, and shared objects for us to connect over. Mostly, we inhabit social networks in much the same way as Nye and Tove inhabit their story space. We actively author our own stories, and are active in the process of telling other peoples stories, by forwarding links, content and comments.

Watching how Nye and Tove play together, using imaginative, participatory storytelling, also made me think about how we use collaborative play in order to realise new ideas and experiment with a shared sense of reality. It struck me that we never really lose the desire to do this. Social gaming has been developing for some time now. From the popular MMORPG environments of Second Lifeand World of Warcraft, to ARG gaming and participation dramas, such as The Truth about Marika. Social gaming is a rapidly expanding area, with more and more start-ups appearing. For me, the development of this area, specifically around ARG related development, represents an opportunity to start seeing how virtual, digital systems can change our physical, social engagement. At the moment ARGs are popular because they disrupt reality, but there are increasing attempts to use this format in more prosaic ways, that seek to magnify reality. Serious ARG games have started appearing, so called because they attempt to bring real world issues into play, so to speak, in order to try and deal with real issues.

Nye and Tove’s play is, of course, fun, but this is also how they learn. It’s going to be interesting to see how things develop in the intersection of physical and virtual collaborative engagement, especially beyond the realm of gaming.

I came across Ben Reynhart’s blog, as you do, meandering through the net, looking for whatever. Ben’s in his final year of the Digital Art and Technology degree, at the University of Plymouth. What interested me was what he has been doing in his final year project, based around utilising mobile technology and swarm behaviour.

In short, Ben’s practical aspects of his final year project work is concerned with how swarm theory might translate into social, domestic applications, through the use of mobile networks (for a fuller understanding of Ben’s final year work, see his project microsite here). Ben initially carried out a ‘swarm’ behaviour experiment, using a bunch of people, each with a mobile handset, following a few simple rules of engagement. To quote Ben’s own description:

‘Connections made within the swarm are represented by the camera flash on each persons’ phone. We can see that from just 8 people walking randomly over a period of a few minutes, many person to person connections are established. With current mobile technology and software, these potential connections taking place are in no way exploited in any degree. Mobile phones currently require user interaction to initiate communication via centralised control systems, but what if we could exploit local area user connections on mobile phones, without requiring constant and intimate attention to your device…?’

A lot of chins have been flapping over the possibilities of crowd sourcing in recent years, with new mobile applications being set up to try and harness people en-masse (the navigation app Waze, being one). Also, there is increasing use of AI in mobile applications (My6Sense, for iPhone being one), albeit on a fairly simplistic level, but nonetheless, forays into this area are increasing, seeking to establish some kind of learning principle (intelligent, ‘learning’ search engines, such as Wolfram Alpha, and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft’s Bing).

Increasingly, there is a focus on filtering data, rather than searching for it. Searching we can do, finding is another thing altogether. So, back to the what if. What if mobile networks could learn from our behaviour and apply this to how we enagage with our environments, one another, products? Well, firstly, a mobile application with AI, that learned from our behaviour (what we did with it, what we did while it is with us) would be reacting to our actions, then feeding back to us, and so on. If it could also learn from others behaviour (our friends, people within our networks, anyone), would be an awfully powerful application. This kind of background, reactionary, behaviour-augmented communication could have several profound effects on the way we engage with one another. Firstly, to the way we behave in groups, whether locally or remotely connected, secondly as individuals reacting to our environments, and thirdly, to the way we behave as consumers, in relation to products and brands.

A few applications that spring to mind are: Crowd-control, traffic congestion and routing, real-time opinion gathering, crisis response, (flooding, for instance) product sales (triggered by crowd behaviour to weather or other conditions), real-time trend analysis, I could go on, and probably will. How about an automatically created playlist – for a party, dependent upon the listening habits of all of your house guests, triggered by their proximity to the venue, so constantly tailored to your guests tastes (could be awful for a few perhaps?) or the automatic creation of shopping lists, recipe suggestions, event planning, resource marshalling, yada, yada, ya. I could imagine whole new ways to interact with one another en-masse, at social gatherings like concerts, festivals, rallies and clubs. This kind of aplication  could totally change how we interact with each other at events, as well as exponentially increasing the opportunities for co-creation and collaboration Marshalling people in order to get a group task done might also be a whole lot easier.

Looking at this in terms of how brands and consumers might better engage with one another, I can similarly see benefits of applying a swarm approach. Realtime feedback on consumer behaviour with products themselves (products talking to mobiles, about how they are being used, or even whether they are being used) could throw up some very intereresting CRM prospects for brands. For instance, the ability to target consumers who aren’t getting the full benefit from a product, or could do with a service upgrade. And what aboiut the greater good? Getting people to lower their carbon emmissions or energy consumption in a particular area, being able to evoke help or support locally, local government services reacting to the local populous better, better emergency response, live calls to action within communities, based on audience behaviour? Urban planning anyone? Policing? Surely there are many more areas where a mobile, swarm behavioural technology could be made good use of? New forms of social, experiential entertainment could also be brought about by the use of this kind of approach. Shared, group-based entertainment, narratives being shaped in real-time by participants behaviour.

Whoa! I’m going to stop now. But I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts or ideas on this.

Leaving off from part one of these two posts, I was talking about ROI (yawn, I know). But to continue with that fascinating subject, when brands talk about ROI, they are invariably still referring to commodity sales. But the increase in peoples connections, through digital media, has had a profound and, perhaps, slightly anti-commercial effect within capitalist cultural systems.

What has emerged hasn’t just been a straight transfer of the high street shopping experience, whereby people walk into stores and pay money for products. A subversion of the the linearity of the offline experience has inflected the business of selling things. Certainly, the initial question for brands and advertisers moving onto the web has been: How do we transfer what we are doing over here to over there? And for most, enough success has been proven by replicating offline methodologies. But there’s no getting around the fact that brands, however hard they might try to retain the linearity of the high street, are now faced with a much less controllable environment. With a greater stake in our own method of consumption, or at least with a much more closely listened to voice, we now have the ability to become more active in how we engage with brands. This opens up questions about value and currency that brands have previously only toyed with the edges of.

There are new currencies to be explored for brands when it comes to engaging with people. Participation, time, advocacy, reaction, feedback, personality, collaboration, exchange, advocacy, criticism, experience, knowledge, creativity, ideas, escape, identity, support, labour, effort, education, the new and the old. As consumers we exist within financial constraints, but as people we exist beyond those constraints. We yearn for social contact, for positive or challenging experiences. Brands can help provide these experiences, but they need to connect at a human level and not at a commodity sales level, if they truly want to connect with people.

One of the things that really interests me is how changes in the way we communicate effect changes in the way we do things, especially with regard to the way we behave in a capitalist, consumer-driven culture.

In the first of two posts examining how our relationship with brands is changing, I want to look at how the way we consume is intrinsically tied to the way we communicate and how current changes in the way we communicate is revolutionising how brands behave. In the second of these posts, I will look at emergent trends in digital engagement and suggest new ways in which brands can return value from engaging with people, that will be mutually beneficial to them and us.

At the moment, a one-to-many approach to communication (advertising), to sell products or services, is still the dominant form of brand communication. Also, most brand engagement is brand-led and brand-controlled. The emergence of multi-participant (many-to-many) forms of communication, has led to what is now becoming apparent as something of an evolution for brand engagement and quite possibly the extinction of traditional forms of one-to-many forms of brand-to consumer communication. As consumers, we have flocked to digital media, moving away from papers, magazines, television and radio, towards mobiles, social networks, the web. Brands have had little option but to follow us. With no us there is no them. And as brands open the doors to their bright, shiny new shops in their new socially networked neighbourhoods, they are quickly realising they can no longer close the door. In-fact, the door is disappearing altogether.

If consumers now have a greater stake in the process of how they consume, brands need to start seeing consumers as within their business rather than outside of it because, like it or not, that is going to be an increasing expectation. Brands need to start to see engagement with them as more than just a potential sale. There is a fundamental shift taking place in the way brands and consumers behave together. As brands strive to become more connected to us, they are knowingly or not creating a relationship that has the very real potential for revolutionising what brands are.

As brands open up more and more connections between them and us, the border between them and us becomes increasingly blurred. Brands are making themselves more transparent.  The really interesting thing is that, as brands become more open to us, we increasingly become more influential to their development, to what they do. This change is sociological in nature but technologically driven. The fact that brands are increasingly entering into direct connections with consumers means that consumers increasingly have a say in what brands do, how they develop. Conversations are also open. Brands cannot control what you are going to say, but they will certainly be listening and if they wish to be successful, they will be responding, with change.

Consumers have never before been so close and so potentially influential to brands than they are now. Our greater connection to brands is also changing the means of production. Consumers and brands are beginning to collaborate increasingly, in the means of production. Social networks have demonstrated how we can be both producer and audience to. In digital media terms, we are now creating our own products, as well as others. Brands are not involved in a lot of this production, but they want our attention, so they are trying to be. This is creating another profound change in the way brands behave. Consumers are increasingly becoming involved in producing what brands say and so are increasingly having a say in what brands are.

But if this is ultimately a revolutionary phase for brands, it is a very quiet one. It’s as if brands are unaware of what they are entering into. By opening themselves up in an effort to get consumers to spend time with them, they are quite possibly getting more than they bargained for, but there’s no real grand public debate going on. Not really any visible hand wringing, or skirmishes to be spoken of. It’s all very orderly. I wonder whether brands really do understand the extent of what may happen to their businesses, which could well mean a lot more than just rethinking marketing strategies.

Even if brands are enlightened to the impact their increasing connection with consumers will have on them, as we move out of an age of one-way brand-to-consumer communication into an age of always-on dialogue, how do brands continue to market their products? The interruption method of advertising is fast becoming a very blunt tool, in the face of a very much more diverse, yet ever more connected, consumer landscape.

When brands talk about ROI, they mean sales: How does this translate into sales for me? I would argue that the term ROI needs to be broadened, quite substantially. Now brands can generate value that is beneficial to their business but that doesn’t necessarily equate to a sale. Usually, word of mouth is thrown in at this point as the only other possible form of value a brand should consider. There are new currencies to be explored for brands when it comes to engaging with people. Brands need to look beyond simply advertising toward more meaningful ways to engage with people.

We now have the opportunity to find new, more mutually beneficial ways to engage with brands. To use the closer proximity of us to them, the fact that we can talk to each other, even create with each other, to evolve a more valuable means of exchange. In the next post, I’ll explore emergent trends in digital engagement and look at new ways in which brands as, well as us, can return value from engaging more fully.