TRANSMEDIA MARKETING
Your business is your world and you are the creator of its story. Where it takes place, what it looks like, the colors, and the people who populate it and support it. What happens in your world? Is it magical? Based in realism? Is it retro or futuristic? What’s the soundtrack of this world? How did it come to life?
As creators, these are the questions we ask ourselves and our clients in order to get a clear vision of the world we are building and the necessary steps we need to take to get there. Our creative direction service is untraditional in that we have implemented the transmedia design and marketing strategy to take an innovative approach to provide our clientele with an insider perspective on the future of making money with the emergence of technology in our ever-changing industries. We take an innovative approach to expressing your brand’s story to its full capacity by incorporating new mediums and marketing tactics to expand your audience/clientele to demographics outside of your current market.
WHAT EXACTLY IS TRANSMEDIA MARKETING?
Transmedia is a marketing and brand/project development strategy that utilizes multiple artforms/platforms to tell your brand’s story while simultaneously broadening your reach past your current target market, thus creating a lucrative ecosystem between each piece of your art, merchandise, or content.
What I am describing may sound a lot like multimedia art but the key difference between the two is that with multimedia art and production, a creator will reformat and repurpose a single story/product/project via multiple platforms and artforms while with transmedia, it begins with a single story, product or project that extends the original story by adding new perspective and information & incentive via a different medium than the original form. This continues until you have a complete puzzle or mosaic of every piece of content, product, or merchandise you have created that illustrates your story world’s bigger picture.
Some of the mediums the transmedia creative direction model work well with are books, clothing lines, merchandise/product lines, film, tv, video games, comic books, graphic novels, zines, concept albums, podcasts, web series, apps, social media platforms, blogs and many more!
Technology has advanced so much in the past decade that many industries can’t keep up and as a result and most creatives are in limbo figuring out how to best get paid their worth in this era of short attention spans and the need for everything to be done INSTANTLY. Most consumers have forgotten that artists and creatives are human too, and more often than not, our teams are just us doing the work of what thousands would do at a large company like Amazon.
WHAT IS YOUR BRAND’S STORY (WORLD)?
The story world is simply where your brand’s “story” takes place in space and time. Along with the characteristics associated with that. This can be a concept or your “real” world. The main point is, what goes on there? What do you eat? What do you wear? This all changes depending on your respective industry because this model is malleable. Either way, you have stories to tell and an audience that wants to hear them.
By implementing the transmedia creative direction model into your work, you’re simply inviting more people to come to the party at your house. The party is your brand and the house is the world. The idea is that there are different entry points to enter a home and not everyone can/wants to get in through the front door.
Let’s say you’re a model, you take amazing photos and you’re the insert iconic editorial model here of your generation. That would be the front door for people to engage in your world/brand. Creating a coffee table book of all your best-unreleased photos and telling the story of how you got to where you are now, would be the garage door, next, a documentary, fashion film centered around or exploring a specific iconic moment in fashion for yourself or your influences would be getting people in via the back door, a fictional book about a model navigating the highs and lows of success would be the window and a creating video game similar to My Scene or Kim Kardashian Hollywood where people can create an avatar of themselves and live the life of a successful model. All of these avenues make way for you to provide your audience, clients, or customers with valuable art/content that keeps them “fed” because your work is soul food.
This also allows people who aren’t familiar with your brand to become familiar based on their specific interests because the person who absolutely loves documentaries and film might have never discovered your work had you not made it and the person who reads novels about chasing your dreams might have never discovered your work either and now you have got a new audience engaging with you and your brand and your original audience is satisfied because you keep blessing them with avant-garde and experimental products and art!
To expand upon this example, the target audience for each of these mediums (listed above) is completely different, so when they experience the new avenues you have taken, they gain more knowledge and understanding of your overall brand/story/world and this ultimately leads to wholehearted engagement and support. This is why musicians are now creating and selling short films or creating cinematic music videos to accompany their albums. It gives them the opportunity to tell their story via this new medium while also attracting the average “cinephile” and enticing their current audience with innovative content that is completely unexpected and well received. It also makes it possible for them to pitch/self their film to streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO MAX, or on the NFT block-chain.
So when you create an amazing story (world) you’re opening doors for you to stretch your ideas and concepts to their limits while simultaneously opening new financial avenues for you and your brand. There’s no better time than now for us as creative entrepreneurs to think and dream bigger about each of our projects because now more than ever, anything is possible.