Story Becomes Software - John du Pre Gauntt - MediaBizBloggers

You're a media person. You're good at telling stories. That's why you got into the media business in the first place. Storytelling is the only consistent advantage you'll ever have.

But how you tell stories, how you propagate stories, how you co-evolve stories with your audience, how you monetize stories — all of that is now up for grabs. It's up for grabs because of a flip in the media equation.

You previously put the medium -- not the media-- at the center of your business. The media was lashed to the unique assets and constraints of television, film, print, music, radio and yes, even the World Wide Web. Thirty minute situation comedies and late night variety shows work mainly when they're experienced through television. Above the fold placements of news and ads reflect the physicality and logic of newsprint. Good luck trying to draw people to the local cinema to see a 20 minute film, no matter how good it is. Web pages, banners, overlays, ad bugs, and other digital coinage have evolved in tandem with people clicking with a computer mouse.

But that's all changing fast. We're sorry to inform you Marshall McLuhan, but very soon the medium will no longer be the message. The message will be the storythat finds and engages audiences who experience it across a palette of mediums and co-evolve it with the story creator. Mediums will be that which are organized around the assets and constraints of stories, not the other way around.

Consider a transmedia franchise like Heroes. A non-exhaustive list of the entry points to the story beyond television include Web clip summaries, behind the scenes documentaries, mock news reports, dual screen episodes, polls and quizzes, console games, online games, interactive graphic novels, comics, mobile games, text updates, trivia contests, fake Web sites, blogs, Facebook pages…the list goes on.

In its ideal form, this type of storytelling allows each medium to reach an audience on its own terms. Each entry point enables an audience to experience a particular doorway into the world of Heroes. Marketers use the various doors to engage with different demographic and behavioral slices of the Heroes fanbase. The popularity and/or emphasis of these mediums may ebb and flow. But the franchise hangs together because each Heroes media experience originates from and feeds back to the mothership of the story canon and mythology developed by Tim Kring and the Heroes writers.

Kring and his collaborators didn't create all those entry points simply to show off how many different media formats are out there. In a visceral sense, the decision to tell the Heroes story across all these platforms is an acknowledgment that for an on-demand media world, the game is shifting away from pushing out content for people to consume in favor of creating story-based worlds in which they can dwell and interact.

The next evolution of storytelling will do more than extend a narrative across multiple platforms. Next generation storytelling will directly bundle functionality and data with narrative. The story will "behave" differently, not just "display" differently, depending on the given medium and context an audience chooses. Effectively, many of the mechanics we associate with gaming will be integrated into mainstream media content. Episodes and other story elements will act more like computer objects, enabling an audience to experience the media and do somethingat the same time.

People who master this different orientation to storytelling will resemble brand managers as much as they resemble traditional content creators. It is extremely likely that their story-based worlds will live on a computing cloud rather than a cable head-end, a film reel or a print run. The cloud itself will be the basic "platform" for exchanging and evolving media with multiple audiences who are using multiple devices in multiple contexts under multiple business models.

But even with that awesome capability, nothing happens unless you have a story to tell.

Don't forget that.

Click on the link to download your free PDF version of Media Dojo's new whitepaper Cloud Computing for Media People. Since this is a large file it may take a little while to open, please be patient.

John du Pre Gauntt is the founder of Media Dojo and is an expert on the business impact of interactive technologies on the media and marketing industries. John can be reached at john.gauntt@media-dojo.com.

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