I wrote a post recently about how Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience, which included the example of Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the 25-years-later sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero, which creates a sort of closed-circuit loop by bringing both the original novel as well as the 1987 movie based on it into existence within the world of the book. By detailing his characters’ reactions to the original, darkly disturbing novel depicting their lives, and then to its sanitized film adaptation, Ellis effectively creates a narrative world that extends, and can be experienced across these multiple media formats, each one adding its own element to the complete story. There is, currently, an emergence of popular entertainment specifically designed to be transmedia experiences, to jump from platform to platform, and, in the process, intertwine the real world with the fictional, but Ellis, who became a published author when he was still in college, has long maintained that, for him, a novel is just a novel, approached and developed according to the dictates of its own medium. Nevertheless, Ellis has always had a penchant for referencing actual pop culture — movies, music, fashion, celebrities, night clubs, etc. — within his stories. It’s pretty much his trademark. His work has, all along, incorporated multiple other media into its fictional world, and, in turn, become an indelible part of the popular culture on which it comments.

In this fantastic interview on BigThink.com, Ellis muses about the possibilities for the future of fiction in the digital age and touches on what is, essentially, transmedia storytelling. It could, he says, “even possibly re-energize my faith in fiction.”

Have a listen. It’s great stuff:

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Bonus: a fun clip of Ellis talking about schooling his publisher on how to function in the “post-empire“… errr … in the social media age:

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A year ago I wrote a piece called “Your Lifestyle Is An Alternate Reality Game.” An ARG, for short, is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. Lifestyle, I suggested, with its proscribed media content, its insider signifiers, its ever-evolving subcultural narrative, is the alternate reality game all of us in the modern world are already playing. Having grown up in the rave scene and then produced nightlife events and music festivals for a decade this similarity was instantly apparent. Since writing that post, I’ve actually seen pioneering ARG creators, Jordan Weisman and Sean Stewart, each, individually liken ARGs to a quintessential alternative culture / music festival experience: Woodstock. (Called it!)

This year, however, the new buzzword gaining popularity for this type of multi-platform narrative is “transmedia.” (On the schedule for the New York DIY Days conference a couple of months ago, the word “transmedia” appeared literally a dozen times in the descriptions for no less than 5 different sessions during the course of the 1-day event). And as the terminology becomes more encompassing — no longer strictly a gaming-specific thing — last year’s thesis needs an upgrade as well: In the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we create lifestyle narratives, it’s how we experience the narrative of our lives.
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In 1985, a student at Bennington College named Bret Easton Ellis published what would become a best-selling debut novel called Less Than Zero. It’s a story told in first person by a narrator named Clay, home for Christmas break from a fictional New England liberal arts college, as he wafts through L.A.’s endlessly dissolute desert of affluence, parties, rampant drug use, meaningless sex, and progressively increasing depravity. The book was so insidious and disturbing that by 1987, just two years after its publication, it was turned into an inevitably much less insidious and disturbing movie starring Andrew McCarthy as Clay, Jami Gertz as his ex-girlfriend, Blair, and, notably, Robert Downey Jr. as Clay’s heroin-addicted best friend from high school, Julian, who’d turned to prostitution to pay off his drug debt. Now, 25 years and 5 novels (including The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho) later, Ellis’s newest book, Imperial Bedrooms, out June 15, catches up with Less Than Zero’s original cast of poster-children for morally vacant, excess-addled, existentially corrupted youth in present day, as they inhabit middle age. Once again, Clay is the narrator, once again, he’s just returned to Los Angeles after a semester-length absence, and the first thing Clay says — as classically laconic as his “People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles” line that opened Less Than Zero two and a half decades earlier — is: “They had made a movie about us.”

The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened….

[The author] wasn’t close to any of us… He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn’t seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he’d shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all….

I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasn’t clean yet and kept biting his nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation…. The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything — all the pain I felt, the betrayal — I couldn’t help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn’t recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn’t blond, I wasn’t tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use and trying to save Julian. (“I’ll sell my car,” I warn the actor playing Julian’s dealer. “Whatever it takes.”) This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair’s character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group — jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. “Be good to her,” Julian tells Clay. “She really deserves it.” The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.

As the movie glided across the giant screen, restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience — the book’s actual cast — quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn’t give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn’t help) so the source material — surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality — had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir — the cinematography was breathtaking — and I sighed as it kept streaming forward…. But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie’s new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That’s what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it’s what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. “I died,” he whispered. “They killed me off.” I waited a beat before sighing, “But you’re still here.” Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later….

I’d seen what had happened to him in another — and very different — movie.

Transmedia, as USC media studies professor Henry Jenkins describes in his book, Convergence Culture, is storytelling that spans across multiple forms of media, with each element expanding the viewer’s understanding of the story world and creating a new “entry point” through which to become immersed in it. Beyond Ellis’s sheer meta-mindfuckery (and the full, unabridged intro is even moreso), by incorporating the existence of the Less Than Zero movie into Imperial Bedrooms — even detailing the various characters’ reactions to its sanitized inconsistencies with the original novel — he’s effectively turned the film into something other than just the compromised adaptation it’s been for the past 23 years. It’s now a legitimate, if suitably ironic, “entry point” into the Less Than Zero world.

A couple of weeks ago, Jenkins wrote a post called “He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia,” about another fictional world spawned from the 80′s which may have had a lasting affect on my generation:

In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figure, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books.

Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories….Kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.

I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son’s imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite – a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture.

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm.”

It’s why the website for Imperial Bedrooms has a playlist of songs “from the book” featuring tracks by Randy Newton, Bat for Lashes, Duran Duran, The Fray, Bruce Springsteen, and others — music has always been a key element in Ellis’s fiction: Less Than Zero got its title from an Elvis Costello track, as does its sequel, and there are constant references to songs throughout his novels, cueing a soundtrack in your mind as you’re reading the story. (In fact, all of Ellis’s books now have playlists.) It’s why the Los Angeles Magazine website has an interactive Google map of the locations featured in Imperial Bedrooms and it’s accompanied by Clay’s guide, in his own words, to these various haunts. It’s why Clay has ended up on Facebook and his profile photo — still bearing a decided resemblance to Andrew McCarthy — is also included with his city guide. Here, for instance, is Clay’s take on Hollywood Forever Cemetery:

The most beautiful cemetery in Los Angeles. It’s behind the Paramount lot and it can be disorienting to walk off Gower Avenue into this lush, paradisiacal place. I remember going to movies there during the summer; Psycho, The Muppet Movie, Carrie. I was there last for a funeral where the only person I talked to was Blair.

Meanwhile, in a different genre section of the bookstore, there’s yet another author blurring the lines between fiction, reality, media formats, you know, the ushe: Richard Castle.

OK, so, technically he’s a TV character played by Nathan Fillion on the ABC show, Castle, which follows the best-selling mystery writer and his unlikely partner, a tough, sexy, NYPD detective named Kate Beckett, as they solve Manhattan murders. The show’s first season story-arc saw the release of Heat Wave, Castle’s new novel about (you know this) a tough, sexy, NYPD homicide detective named Nikki Heat, which also happens to be an actual Hyperion book.

Amazon’s product page for Heat Wave reads:

About the Author

Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society’s prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration.

But Castle isn’t just on TV and bookshelves. Like any 21st century writer who knows what’s up, he’s also on Twitter –

– posting updates to more than 28,000 followers on his writing progress (the second book in the Nikki Heat series is due out in the Fall — “Want to read the first chapter?“), personal life (“Found a button in one of my shoes this morning. And another in a glass of water. Wonder where the other ones flew….“), and personally relevant current events (“Dennis Hopper… iconoclast and patron of the arts… you will be missed.”) You know, like how anyone who isn’t a fictional TV character would use Twitter.

Castle has obviously been designed as a deliberate transmedia narrative, but Imperial Bedrooms wasn’t — it’s just a novel. Either way, it’s inevitable. The human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction, and it’s incredibly channel agnostic. Once upon a time, the Ancient Greeks heard thunder and believed it to be the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Today, our media formats are just more sophisticated. Our lives are inundated by digital technology, content platforms, network applications — it’s not narratives that travel trans-media: we do. And we bring the stories along for the ride. It’s 2010. All media is transmedia. Deal with it. Rock ‘n’ roll.

Like Sean Stewart says:

Your computer doesn’t care what the 19th century production mechanism for producing your entertainment was. Record, book, it doesn’t care. It’s all 1′s and 0′s to your computer. Video, music, pictures, text, and let’s not stop there, let’s include other things that you can now incorporate as part of your entertainment, like web-pages or searches or email or phone calls directly to your audience. Here’s a simple mnemonic: any way that human-kind has invented to lie to one another should be part of your storytelling toolkit.

But fictional narratives aren’t what this toolkit is strictly limited to. As tech blogger Robert Scoble writes in his recent post, “The ‘like, er, lie’ economy“:

The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.

That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.

But then I started noticing that I wasn’t behaving with integrity. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.

See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?

Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.

I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.

This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.

We are all storytellers now, all the authors of our own life stories (no big surprise, we’re taking some “creative liberties”). The array of media tools through which to “present ourselves” is already ubiquitous, and constantly expanding. Social networks, personal blogs, microblogs, digital cameras, location-based social applications — for some reason Time Magazine singled out Foursquare as one of the 50 Worst Inventions for being “just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism,” as if, inexplicably, it’s particularly worse than the cesspools of self-focus that are Facebook or Myspace. With every status update and photo upload and location check-in and “like” we click, we are producing an endless stream of new “entry points” into our personal narratives. And, in turn, like Ellis’s, aptly named, Clay, we are all shaped by the resultant media representations of our selves. In the digital age, transmedia isn’t simply the default for how we experience entertainment, it is how we experience the story of our lives.

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HBO has created a monster with the promotional campaign for True Blood, a new TV series from the creator of Six Feet Under, set to premiere September 7th.

AdAge (which has a nice little video about the campaign here, but no way to embed it elsewhere) explains:

While they’re only one part of the larger campaign launching HBO’s “True Blood,” viral promotions by New York’s Campfire agency for the vampire series are a real stand out. Among other things, a message written in ancient language symbols was mailed to prominent bloggers and science fiction geeks known to be interested in vampires. When a few with language degrees cracked the code, they found an address for a vampire website.

That would have been kinda neat on it’s own, and whatnot, but things have progressed far beyond that one vampire website now. If you start following the True Blood trail, it becomes a bottomless pool of content.

You’re more likely than not gonna see a billboard for Tru:Blood, “Synthetic Blood Nourishment Beverage” somewhere. It’s gonna look something like this:

or this:

and by the time you’ll have come to this one:

you might have started thinking that perhaps this is just the latest niche energy drink to hit the market, targeting a demographic with some sort of really spectacularly alternative lifestyle . Which is precisely the point. HBO’s particular vision of the dead-end of mass culture involves the undead too, apparently. Just another niche in our united niche culture, with their own kind of lifestyle needs. According to HBO’s official website for the True Blood show:

Thanks to a Japanese scientist’s invention of synthetic blood, vampires have progressed from legendary monsters to fellow citizens overnight. And while humans have been safely removed from the menu, many remain apprehensive about these creatures “coming out of the coffin.” Religious leaders and government officials around the world have chosen their sides, but in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps, the jury is still out.

Local waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), however, knows how it feels to be an outcast. “Cursed” with the ability to listen in on people’s thoughts, she’s also open-minded about the integration of vampires — particularly when it comes to Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), a handsome 173-year-old living up th–

Uh-huh. Whatever.

Cuz at this point, how could any storyline the show’s creators might concoct compete with the multi-dimensional online world that’s been developed around the premise of the first paragraph? (Unless they know something Lost doesn’t, maybe.)

So, there’s the True:Blood beverage site. There’s BloodCopy, a news blog which “chronicles the amazing days we live in as vampires attempt to integrate with humans.” There’s the American Vampire League, an advocacy group “Leading the fight for equal rights for vampires,” cuz guess what? “Vampires were people too.” As you’d expect, there’s obviously a religious opposition group, Fellowship of the Sun. And, of course, no party to which politics and religion are invited would be complete without sex. Which you can now find, with a vampire, at Love Bitten, “The world’s best Human/Vampire dating site,” Are there runner-up Human/Vampire dating sites? Considering that half the merch on the Tru:Blood site is already sold out, there ought to be.

Meanwhile, the series hasn’t even premiered yet!

What people are buying and participating in has pretty much nothing to do with a TV show, and to look at it as just a “viral marketing” campaign is a complete misunderstanding of what’s going on here. This is a full-on Alternate Reality Game:

An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.

Notable prior forays into the ARG world  have included promotions for A.I., HALO 2, and Nine Inch Nails’ latest album, Year Zero. But why stop at a campaign, when you can create a culture? In a sense, this kind of “narrative” that takes place in the “real world,” and involves various media to tell a story–which the actions of “participants” certainly do affect–is probably an effective way to think about the contemporary fate of any brand. Every brand. This just happens to be an opportunity to turn the brand itself, and its narrative, into a new form of 21st  Century-compliant entertainment.

HBO could be the first network to take the leap. Even the TV series itself could really just function as part of a larger narrative. Perhaps they’re already planning something that prescient. Who knows? If not HBO, then no doubt that line will be crossed by someone eventually. And when it is, there’s no going back.

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In popular music, independent music, often abbreviated as indie, is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording and publishing.

Similarly then, indie brands are independent from major publicly-traded companies, and reflective of a do-it-yourself approach to lifestyle symbol creation. Both indie and major brands appeal to consumers for the same reasons–as expressions of identity, and community belonging–but the indie side functions very differently. Indie brands can often take risks that the major ones wouldn’t know how to were they even interested, they are able to maneuver more deftly in a rapidly changing consumer landscape, take advantage of new opportunities more swiftly, and now more than ever before, they are blazing the trails and creating the models that many major brands are starting to emulate.

As someone who’s been intimately involved in the development of several independent brands I thought I would share some suggestions both from my own experience, as well as from insights synthesized with various examples from Buying In, of what ad agencies (and major brands) can learn from the indies about staying competitive in contemporary culture.

1. INTEGRATE DEPARTMENTS
Agencies talk of integration like it’s the latest buzzword since “viral,” (which, incidentally, before it was a buzzword, was also first tested by independent brands) but most are still set up to approach marketing in a compartmentalized, paint-by-numbers way that doesn’t fit with how any of us in the digital era actually interact with media and messaging. In a time when we update our facebook status while watching TV online, and google something we’ve just seen on a billboard we drove past, all media overlaps. As natives of this environment, indie brand creators don’t think “Print” vs. “New Media” or “Creative” vs. “Media Buying.” Of course, a variety of skill sets is necessary, but when a “media channel” can now basically exist anywhere that people are playing attention, it’s counterproductive to continue enforcing separation between all the various departments of messaging development and dissemination. Without the imposition of this bureaucratically segregated setup, indie brands approach marketing as an inherently integrated process, dealing with the way the different channels at their disposal feed into one another as part of an interconnected system.

2. HIRE DIFFERENTLY
None of the indie brand creators I’ve ever worked with majored in marketing–and that goes for me, too. Marketing majors end up at ad agencies, indie brand creators, on the other hand, end up creating culture. Music, fashion, publications, events, blogs, graffiti, whatever. If it’s a genre of DIY expression, that’s where indie brand creators can be found, and it’s where strategies that take on new marketing options are going to be developed. I’ll admit, I did take one Marketing 101 class, though, and it’s probably because marketing is taught as a segregated process that its students are primed to continue thinking within the same kind of box once they graduate. Indie brand creators think outside the marketing box because 1. They were never taught there was a box to begin with, and 2. They couldn’t afford to try out the box anyway, so developing “alternatives” is their default. This is who you want to be hiring to help develop progressive marketing strategies.

3. INVEST IN CULTURE NOT MEDIA
In a consumer landscape niched up into various lifestyles, “mass marketing” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Indie brands have never had the luxury of a mass marketing budget, so they’ve instead focused on building and sustaining meaningful relationships with the communities that nurture them. In Buying In, Walker talks about Pabst Blue Ribbon’s strategy after discovering that their brand, whose history was essentially as a staid Midwestern working class beer, was experiencing an unexpected popularity surge among the pierced, tattooed, bike messenger alterna kids in Portland Oregon. Clearly this was not a demographic that PBR had sought deliberately (the brand just happened to become quite eagerly adopted by a young culture in need of a cheap beer), but once they noticed what was going on instead of buying up a ton of media targeting this demo, PBR began sponsoring community events such as “bike polo” matches. In fact, a particularly ardent PBR fan that Walker talks to specifically noted he appreciates that he’s never seen a PBR ad of any sort. It shows that “they’re not insulting you,” he says. If advertising AT a community can be perceived as an insult, supporting it can make a brand an integral part of the community’s culture.

4. A BLANK SLATE IS THE BIG IDEA
Ad folks think it’s their job to create advertising. Indie brand folks think it’s their job to make sure their product sells. The disconnect between these two perspectives is perhaps nowhere more blatant than in the ad agency reticence towards “user generated content.” This is not to say that ad agencies shouldn’t create branded content, by any means, but rather to point out, as Walker does, that some of the most potent brands are ones that have allowed people to project their own meanings onto them. His two biggest examples of this are Hello Kitty and the Live Strong bracelet. One benefited from an inscrutable expression, the other from a statement that allowed innumerable personal interpretations. Neither sought to define what specifically it was supposed to mean or stand for, and thereby each allowed people to cast their own relevance onto the brand. Unequivocally cementing a brand into a “big idea” couldn’t accommodate that. Creating a brand that functions as a “platform” for consumers to create their own meaning (whether it’s as literal as UGC or as ephemeral as a personal projection) is now just as crucial as messaging.

5. COMMUNITY FIRST, BRAND SECOND
It is tempting to think that a brand creates a community. In fact, many brands, realizing the power of community as a resource, strive to create their own, and brands such as Apple definitely have a cult-like following. But the reality is that brands do not create communities from scratch, they become symbols of communities. Brands can reflect a community’s values and lifestyle, but I don’t think it’s possible to brand a lifestyle before it actually already exists. Was Apple as hot before the rise of the creative class? (The trend itself, I mean, not just the book about it.) Of course, the Apple technology certainly helped facilitate the expansion of the creative class, but the bottom line is that the societal predisposition that can come to constitute a community has to be there, and a brand does not invent it, it reflects it. Indie brands are spawned out of the very communities that they represent, so it’s not like they need to conduct massive amounts of consumer insight research, and their understanding of this community first, brand second dynamic is deeply intimate. For many major brands, however, the focus shouldn’t be on fabricating their own “community” but on developing a more significant understanding of the needs of the communities that buy and endorse them. (Then, see #3).

6. THINK BEYOND THE QUARTER
The relationship between a culture and a brand, like any kind of relationship, takes time. That it can’t always be statistically documented after three months does not necessarily make the relationship unsuccessful. My favorite example of a brand thinking “beyond the quarter” is Scion integrating it’s cars into Whyville, an online community for tweens. Pretty much the coolest thing you can buy in Whyville is a Scion, and its added bonus is that then you can drive all your other friends around in it in the game. They start at 15,000 “clams” (Whyville dollars), but for 20,000 you can get it all customized. The most fascinating thing about this whole strategy, however, is that the Tween demographic is between 8-12 years old. It’s gonna be a while before they even have a driver’s license at all, let alone be in a position to be buying a car in the real world, but when they are, owning that virtual Scion will no doubt be an experience they draw on when making the purchase decision. This is thinking five, ten, fifteen years beyond the quarter, and it’s how indie brands think. Ok, maybe they don’t necessarily have the forethought to think that far ahead, but they do have the luxury to not have to think of success as based on proving something to shareholders every season. After all, just ask Starbucks about how rampant growth can even undermine success in the long-run.

The trend of more and more kinds of facilities cropping up to support DIY creative endeavors means that more and more kinds of indie brands are getting created. The evolution of marketing that doesn’t look anything like what it has before is only going to continue. Might as well take a cue or two from the side that’s plowing head-first into the changing the landscape.

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They’re all over the place:

Been wondering what the hell that’s all about, maybe?

Well, answer #1 goes like this:

Hope people have been seeing the billboards that I have put up around town. I think its important everyone knows how much Sarah Marshall SUCKS! How she does look fat in those jeans! How my mom never liked her! How over her I am!

So, I used the money that I spent on her engagement ring to buy every available billboard around town. (That’s right Sarah I was going to propose to you. I was just waiting for the right time. I guess that time is never O’clock in the month of Nev-ruary).

Sarah, I really hope you are un-happy for the rest of your life – that you understand how totally over you I am.

That said, you should call me if you want to talk, I can have these things taken down.

Posted by Peter Bretter

Answer #2 goes like this:

While driving home I saw a billboard that read “You Suck Sarah Marshall”. At the bottom of the message I saw the URL www.ihatesarahmarshall.com so when I got home I jumped on my computer and checked out the website. [It's] a blog that is currently being written by a loved obsessed 26 year old guy who is YouTubing videos about how infatuated he is with his hot TV star girlfriend.

Well, as it turns out this website is the launch of a new marketing campaign for a movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall“. I have no idea if this movie is any good although it is brought to us by the guys who gave us the 40 Year Old Virgin. On a quick side note I can not recall seeing the R rated warning on the billboard but if I had I would have known right away it was a movie.

The point of this post is to point out the way this movie is being marketed. They are utilizing a combination of vague yet somewhat shocking billboard ads to drive people to a Google Blog thats incorporating YouTube videos as a way to create buzz. It should be interesting to see how it works out.

And answer #3 goes like this:

At OMMA a few weeks ago the theme was “Welcome to the Machine.” All the panels and presentations were framed around the question: How to prepare for the kind of dubious advertising that would be in store in the “Machine”-mediated future? (At least that’s what I think the theme was supposed to mean.)

The model for creating advertising has, in general, been pretty conglomerative. The media department buys the adspace, the creative department puts stuff in the adspace, the “new media” department does….who knows what, and the whole process is as compartmentalized as an assembly line. You know, it’s funny. There’s now hypersonic sound technology, which can be used to literally beam audio ads DIRECTLY at individuals in its path, yet we still insist on referring to the internet as “new media.” And that kind of segregated perspective may be part of the problem.

In strict media buy terms all that’s going on in the IHSM campaign is a grip of outdoor and a domain name, you could even say that ihatesarahmarshall.com is a kind of “microsite” I suppose, or maybe an “adverblog,” but are any of those elements individually responsible for the effectiveness of the campaign? While there’s certainly no shortage of ads out there that make a play on our curiosity, the IHSM billboards are the first that immediately struck me as possesing a deliberate, blatant, “What the hell is that about? Oh, I’ll just check it out on my iPhone,” quality.

There’s now more and more people carrying the internet around in their pocket. What does that mean in terms of how we approach Mobile, Online, Experiential, Outdoor, or Out-of-home media–all together! Then multiply all of that by the coefficient of search.

From Boinboing:

Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently went to Japan and noticed an interesting trend in advertising there: search boxes have replaced URLs.

Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!

An ARG–which stands for Alternate Reality Game–is defined as: “An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.” Which could also serve as both a philosophical definition for marketing in general, and a more advanced version of what the I Hate Sarah Marshall campaign has started to touch on in a very basic, accessible way. The opportunity is now there to create advertising that works not by managing to take our attention hostage for an instant, but because it’s able to move between media the same way that our attention does.

“Integration” may be getting primed to become the next “viral” when it comes to overabused industry buzzwords, but it’s more than just a trendy new widget. The next phase is not about defeating some monolithic “Machine.” It’s about figuring out: How do we create messages that cater to the way technology lets us interact with all different media? Meanwhile, the paint-by-numbers, assembly-line approach is still trying to figure out which department’s responsibility it is to come up with the answer.

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Q. what’s the fastest way for a new company to get exposure?
A. look for existing communities that are comprised of your target demographic and approach them. if there’s already a connected group of folks that you feel will be interested in what you’ve got it’s a lot faster to generate authentic exposure through that network than trying to aggregate a community from scratch. from a completely different perspective, cliff allen of suretomeet.com who was on the panel with me, said the fastest way for a new company to get exposure is spam. so there you go. choose your own adventure.

Q. is social media, like facebook, going to be the future of advertising?
A. its impact on the process is hugely important. i think it’s certainly something that now needs to be factored into any kind of advertising plan. but i also think it’s completely foolish to altogether write off exposure media (which is what advertising has been primarily dependent on up until like yesterday). it’s not a battle between whether engagement or exposure media is better adapted to the natural selection of marketing, it’s about pursuing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and developing integrated strategies that are overall more effective. that’s the future…. or at least it ought to be.

Q. what’s one piece of marketing advice that is most important for a new company?
A. know your audience. really really understand who you’re talking to. or who you should be talking to. the danger in making a message that isn’t relevant or that isn’t approaching your audience on their own terms is not just that we, as consumers, “tune it out,” it’s that unconsciously we translate messages we don’t relate to as being “not for us.” that’s the #1 thing to avoid.

(and my #1 favorite…)
Q. if you had $10,000 to spend on advertising and you couldn’t use any of it on the internet, what would you do?
A. throw an event. and if you’re targeting people over 50, buy some print.

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We believe:

• Nothing is more important to Artists than the relationship with their Fans….We call the total value of these relationships an artist’s Band Equity™, and it is our mission to help artists maximize this.

• Active Fans are the best promoters of music on the web. Fan attention has become fragmented across the web in a way that mass marketing no longer makes financial sense (see the demise of radio, music TV). Today is the age of social networks. Artists cannot be everywhere they need to be at once, so they need to focus on activating their most rabid fans to promote them in every corner of the web.

• A Music Community is more valuable if includes all of the members of the community. We believe that fans, labels, venues, and other folks all deserve a voice in the community if it is going to be representative of the entire music ecosystem. At ReverbNation, we invite all members of the community to take part.

at first glance you notice a slick design, and an interface that makes, as the client said, myspace look like fisher price. but 10 seconds later the extent of the sophistication going on here begins to dawn, and as you continue to discover what reverbnation is actually set up to do, you understand that this is way beyond just another community site, this is an incredibly powerful broadcast tool. one developed with an impressive understanding that the new channel is now a fragmented channel. this, by the way, does not mean it’s a broken channel, but rather it is a new kind of channel. one that broadcasts like a prism rather than a laser beam, and exists, as the reverbnation mission statement points out, “everywhere at once,” rather than being confined to any one particular medium.

if you are a musician, or if you are responsible for developing the strategy for how brands spend their advertising money, you really ought to check what reverbation is doing, as it is a model for how to approach the business of message dissemination in the future–and by that, i mean now:

ReverbNation provides innovative marketing solutions that musicians need to compete, cooperate, and differentiate in an increasingly noisy online environment. Unlike typical “closed” communities, artists use ReverbNation as their home base for approaching marketing and promotion across the Internet as a whole — be it via social networks, blogs, or the artist’s homepage. Tools like TunePaks, FanReach, and Widgets give the artist the power to spread their music and information virtually anywhere. Real-time stats then provide a 360-degree view of how the music is spreading, who is listening, and which fans are actually passing it on to their friends and posting it on their pages.

the most impressive offering for artists through reverbnation, isn’t even the array of features, but the way all the tools are enhanced through a seamless integration into the rest of the social media world. a strategy that can be summed up in one word: widgets.

here’s an example of a widget in action on a facebook profile:

in one slick little box you get:

• the band’s upcoming show schedule–which is incredibly easy to create since reverbnation also has venue profiles, allowing you to add ten shows in about 2 minutes.
• direct links to buy tickets to upcoming shows
• an email list signup form– reverbnation’s free FanReach email service allows artists to create targeted messages to fans based on age, gender, and location which is more sophisticated than the offerings of many email list service providers, and their service also lets you include music and a show schedule automatically in every email.
• the widget even has a freakin “Also join Street Team” option for people signing up!

to get all these features before you would have had to go running around to a bunch of different service providers, and then work to continually integrate all the features individually into every online location where your band had a presence–and that’s all resting on the assumption that all those features were compatible with each other, and most importantly, that a bunch of musicians had the necessary marketing acumen to even understand all the features they needed in the first place.

of course, it doesn’t stop there, this widget slices and dices and plays music too. here’s another example from one of the glitch mob’s member’s profile:

it doesn’t just let you embed a playlist, it lets you create portable online music player! this means that folks don’t HAVE to stay on your profile page to listen to your music. they can be doing anything else on the internet and still listening to your serenade.

the fragmented channel, remember? it’s everywhere all at once.

there are sooo many more features that reverbnation offers that to even get a grasp on all of them would take me the rest of the day, and then i’d have to spend more time tomorrow writing about them, but i should think you get the idea at this point.

i can imagine part of the hindrance in reverbnation’s adoption is the sheer complexity, and wide array of their offerings. it’s been confused for a myspace competitor, but in reality that is a complete misconstruction of what it looks like reverbnation is setting out to do. during the many company-wide conference calls that took place in the process of House of Blues’ acquisition by LiveNation, michael rapino, livenation’s CEO, continually stressed the importance of the consumer relationship to the future of the concert promotion industry–about which, as the largest concert promoter in the world, livenation has a right to claim to know a thing or two. (if “reverbnation” picked its name in complete ignorance of “livenation” i would be tremendously surprised).

the big difference, of course is that livenation owns the venues. but in reverbnation’s case, they are setting up to own a channel. one that is deftly suited to broadcast to a fragmented audience. and if you were paying attention then you’ve also realized that it is a model for the future of message-distribution itself, also known as advertising. connecting the needs of artist, fan, and venue into a symbiotic “ecosystem” is the same as connecting the consumer, the brand, and the “venue” for a brand experience into one constant feedback loop.

now go listen to some beats:

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