Transmedia campaigns
A transmedia campaign is the practice of crafting a campaign across multiple media platforms, where each medium makes a unique contribution to the campaign. The campaign can use any combination of media including video games, blog entries, webapps, online videos, blog entries, movies and advertisements. Storytelling that takes place in such a way needs to make sense to the audience as parts of a homogenous world, with shared constituents such as visual elements, storylines and characters. Such a type of campaign has been adopted by marketers to promote brands and products.
Ways to run a transmedia campaign – In a transmedia campaign, each bit of a story unfolds in a different media, transferring from one medium to another, and this development is integral to the idea of transmedia. Each component of the story works together to make a larger whole. There are various means to carry out this type of campaign. They can be –
a) Miniseries
b) Digi-novels
c) Infographics
d) Performances in the street
e) Video games
Advantages of using transmedia campaigns – a) Transmedia campaigns help to identify, engage and understand different audiences
b) Shape ideas into well-structured narratives and complex story worlds
c) Create cohesive user experiences across different platforms
d) Improve SEO
The ideal time to use this type of marketing would a launch or a rebrand
Below are some examples of effective transmedia campaigns.
1) The Met challenges – The Metropolitan museum came up with different challenges on Instagram and Twitter for engaging with the creative side of its followers and sharing its collection, which represents 5,00 years of the world’s creative expression. The museum’s challenges included #MuseumBadHairday and #Mettwinning. The bad hair day challenge included posting pictures on social media of statues wearing wigs, and encouraged followers to imitate the statues. This led to the museum gaining almost 200,000 followers across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook within the first three months of the COVID lockdown. This not only elevated audience engagement, but also led the audience to believe that public culture institutions can also be treated as third spaces, which are not restricted by geographical boundaries.
2) The Beauty Inside – Yet another example of transmedia storytelling was the project of the companies, Intel and Toshiba, ‘The beauty Inside’. It was a series of films exploring the fleeting nature of life and love. It won quite a few awards and consisted of episodic films that follow the story of Alex, a man who wakes up looking like a different person every day. Alex used a Protege equipped with Intel to tell his story through daily video diaries. The success behind this campaign was caused by how it connected with the users through different social media platforms. In this story,the audience could interact with Alex through their Facebook page and could participate by putting a face to the character with a different face every day. Each episode was then uploaded to YouTube. The campaign lasted for a month and a half, at the end of which the webisodes had gone viral, reaching 60 million views worldwide. In the miniseries, it was possible to show 100 different faces for Alex.
3) The Lost Experience – The Lost Experience was a series where followers immersed themselves in an alternative reality game. The followers created completely different stories that used the same characters in the series. Different channels such as phone calls, Ads, and posters were used. It had five stages that were carried out to reinforce the launch of the third season. The game had 50,000 unique players who shared the content from different continents and created a variety of podcasts and blogs.
