(source: locamoda.com)
Content has changed. It’s no longer the passive programming of years past. Thanks to new-and rapidly fragmenting–media channels, today’s audiences demand interactive, personal and customized experiences.
I’m not just talking about websites, social networks, user-generated content-so 2007. I’m talking about screens-cell phones, digital billboards, web-enabled TVs, projectors. It can be argued that 2008 marked the year that these truly became viable, widespread, and mass-adopted technologies. Finally, it seems, people are realizing that these aren’t siloed platforms. They are all interconnected and can be used to leverage and play off of one another. The new media triad has emerged.
Perhaps the numbers convinced us: NBC reported that web and mobile content didn’t cannibalize TV viewership, but rather increased it. Of course this makes complete sense to anyone who uses the technology: Viewers are now watching TV while they message friends about it and get background from Wikipedia. They are creating richer, non-linear experiences for themselves. In the coming year, anyone that wants an audience will need to do the same.
And they are starting to. This year I wrote about one example called AT&T’s Text Jumbli, a campaign from the wireless provider that works through three kinds of screens: Computer, billboard and TV. Jumbli is like a massive multiplayer boggle that people SMS to play with one-another in real time through Facebook, a screen in Times Square, or TVs in thousands of bars and restaurants.
The networks are catching screen fever as well. MTV’s backchannel, developed by area/code, let viewers “competitive chat” from their computers while the show aired online. Their messages would show up on screen and could be voted on by other viewers. Similarly, CurrentTV streamed relevant tweets from Twitter on screen during their coverage of the presidential debates.
This is just a taste of what we’ll see in 2009 and beyond. The question no longer is: what’s your Facebook strategy? Mobile strategy? Twitter strategy? Going forward, content creators from Hollywood to Madison Avenue need to understand their multiscreen strategies, and how they can all fit together to tell a much larger story. They will essentially need to fracture the narrative, which actually isn’t as new as it may seem. As I quoted Benjamin Palmer saying, ”[Even before the Internet] we needed to be able to tell a story that could exist in fragments, and no matter which fragments people saw and in what order they assembled them together in their head, it still added up to the same message. Now that’s happening with content, too…”
Next year, I look forward to seeing how stories are told through new touchpoints, and how viewers become part of the plotline.
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