<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Guest Article:</B></FONT> Is Transmedia Planning the future?

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been Media Neutral Planning

Sudarshan Banerjee

iContract

March 2

The Blogosphere, is abuzz with the talk of Transmedia Planning. Okay, may not be abuzz, but a few interested parties are certainly talking about it and are providing examples of campaigns that have happened in the past, which have unknowingly, or knowingly in a before-it’s-time sort of way employed this principle. Maybe the Harley Owners’ Group saga was a very early example on this. Sega’s Beta7, Audi’s Art of the Heist, BMW’s Hire series are touted as good current examples.

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been Media Neutral Planning. In essence, this is the belief that we should develop a single organising thought that iterates itself across any touchpoint. This in turn was a reaction against previous models of integration that were often simply the dilution of a television creative idea across other channels that it wasn’t necessarily suited to. The important point is that there is one idea being expressed in different ways. This is believed to be more effective as there are multiple encodings of the same idea, which reinforces the impact on the consumer.

Faris Yacob of the London based Naked Communications group has been a strong voice behind Henry Jenkins’ ‘Convergence Culture’ philosophy from where Transmedia Planning has been touted. He described the difference between Media Neutral planning and Transmedia planning in a simple illustration. (see Fig 1)

Media Neutral Planning – where a single ‘core’ brand thought/campaign idea is taken across various media (not limited to the ones shown above) Versus Transmedia Planning, which can be illustrated. (see Fig 2).

According to Faris Yacob, in this model, there will be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels can be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create a larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves.

The beauty of this is that as consumers come together to share elements of the narrative, brand communities get formed and fan sites and all the advocates/brand ambassador jargon that agencies have been plying for decades actually begin to form.

The industry seems obsessed by engagement at the moment - building/offering brand engagement. But from a person, or communities, point of view – why should they engage with brands unless there is some value in the engagement? The consumer needs to adopt it and not have it thrust upon them (think, Sunsilkgangofgirls.com, which on last count as seen on bus shelters in Mumbai, is doing quite well, thank you). The time has come where consumers can handle more than one core thought or various ideas which all complement one another to make up the brand world in the consumers’ mind.

Remember, the story of the six blind men and the elephant.

Advertising people will soon rejoice as they have often been subjected to the dilemma of clients stating ‘I get this, you get this, but would the consumer get it’, thereby reducing every idea to the lowest common denominator in terms of picking the consumers’ brains to engage with the brand. With brand communities, as long as someone somewhere gets it, and passes it on to his/her immediate community, the understanding can spread and newer perspectives brought in.

In fact layering of ideas in communication could then become the biggest challenge for people, who have been forced into dumbness by the rebukes of generations.

(The writer is associate vice-president and head of iContract, Mumbai. You can write to him at sudarshan.banerjee@contractadvertising.com.)

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