CHAPTER 12

Using Digital Storytelling for Promotion, Advertising, and Other Business Purposes

OLD ENDEAVORS/NEW TECHNIQUES

On the face of it, it may be difficult to see any similarities between a music video featuring a group of preppy rappers, an alternative reality game about mysterious crop circles, a gritty video game about military combat, and a reality show where all the contestants are housecats. Yet all four of these projects do have key characteristics in common: they use interactive media and storytelling for advertising and promotional purposes.

The need to advertise and promote probably goes all the way back to the time when humans were still living in caves. Perhaps the first manifestation of this type of activity began when an enterprising caveman set up shop under a tree and tried to trade his surplus chunks of wooly mammoth meat for some sharp pieces of flint. But when he attracted more flies than customers, he realized he would never do any business unless he could make his fellow cavemen aware that he had mammoth meat to trade, and excellent meat at that. Thus the first attempt to promote and advertise might have been born.

While no one can say for sure if such a scenario ever took place, we can be quite confident that the need to promote and advertise has existed as long as people have had products, services, or ideas that they wanted other people to purchase or willingly accept.

The methods have changed with the technology, of course. Our enterprising caveman would only have had his own voice and his gestures to make people aware of his excellent wooly mammoth meat. In time, however, merchants would be able to tout their wares on strips of papyrus, and then in printed newspapers and magazines, and ultimately, in radio and television commercials. Today we have still another technology at our disposal, and an incredibly powerful one: interactive digital media.

Unlike earlier forms of promotion and advertising, which used passive forms of media, interactive digital media encourages an active involvement with the message. Because this form of promotion and advertising can be so entertaining, people willingly become involved with it. Furthermore, they enjoy it so much that they even tell their friends about it—a phenomenon known as viral marketing, which is the voluntary spread of information by means of digital media. And, unlike earlier forms of advertising and promotion, the exposure to the message is not a fleeting experience. In some cases, the involvement can last for days or weeks, and it can even lead to a life-long connection to the product or idea. Think how different this is from fast-forwarding through a commercial or barely skimming the ads in a magazine or newspaper!

With interactive digital media, we have an enormous variety of techniques we can use to promote and advertise. The ones we will focus on in this chapter are not “hard sell” forms of advertising like the online pop-up and banner ads that most people find intrusive and annoying. Instead, they use various aspects of digital storytelling such as plot, characters, suspense, conflict, competition, humor, and the striving to obtain a highly desirable goal.

As we will see, many of these projects are remarkably ingenious. The techniques we will be examining can be used to promote products (automobiles, shoes, candy, cat food); entertainment properties (movies, TV shows, video games, theme parks); ideas and causes (health issues, international crises, social issues); and organizations or groups (political parties, religious faiths, professions).

DIGITAL MEDIA VENUES FOR PROMOTION AND ADVERTISING

As we saw in Chapter 11, many different forms of digital media can be used to teach and train. The same is true of promotion and advertising, which can also employ many different types of digital media to accomplish their goals. Before discussing the specific techniques of narrative-based promotion and advertising, let’s first take a look at the major digital venues and see how they are being used. They include the following:

APPLYING DIGITAL STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES TO PROMOTION AND ADVERTISING

In the short time that digital media has been used to promote and advertise, content creators have developed an extremely varied palette of techniques to engage their target audiences and get their messages out to the public. Let’s take a look at some of the most widely used of these techniques.

Advergaming

Advergaming, introduced briefly earlier, is, as the name suggests, a combination of gaming and advertising. Advergaming, also known as promotional gaming, began on the Web, but now these games are also appearing on wireless devices, where they work equally well.

Advergames are meant to be short pieces of entertainment, lasting just a few minutes. However, they are also designed to be highly addictive and fun. Usually they start off as very easy to play but quickly become more difficult. Thus, people become hooked on them and play again and again, trying to do better with each go-round. Furthermore, they are not demanding in terms of the technology or skill level needed to play them, so they are as enjoyable for inexperienced players as they are for people who play games regularly.

Advergames are popular with advertisers because they

Often these games contain a little backstory to set up the gameplay and put it in context, though the backstory needs to be established quickly because users want to get into a game as soon as possible. Advergames often contain an indirect message reinforcing positive aspects of the product.

For example, The Race to School Game was developed around a particular type of athletic shoe, Reebok’s Traxtar. It features a character named Sammy Smartshoe. In the backstory, we learn that Sammy has missed his school bus and has to get to school in time for an important math test. So Sammy decides to beat the bus to school. As the player, you help Sammy race against the bus, making him leap over a variety of obstacles and avoid hazards like slippery mud puddles. Sammy’s jumps in the game have a springy, bouncy quality that sends him effortlessly over obstacles—a subtext indicating what the user can look forward to if he purchases this particular brand of shoe.

Advergames are most likely to catch on when they are a good fit with the tastes and sensibilities of the target audience, which is one of the reasons cited for a game called King Kong Jump becoming an international hit. This zany game promotes two different products: the movie King Kong and Pringles potato chips. Though tying potato chips and an adventure movie together in the same advergame might seem like a quite a stretch, the company that made it, Inbox Digital, based in the United Kingdom, recognized that both products were perceived as fun and both appealed to the same demographic.

The game is set in the jungle of Skull Island, where much of the movie takes place. You, as the player, are the would-be hero of the game, and you must save a helpless young woman from King Kong’s jungle. For some reason, this is accomplished by dodging and jumping over cans of Pringles potato chips, which are rapidly rolling down a hill directly at you. If you fail to get out of the way in time, you get squished flat. But if you achieve enough points, the gorilla beats his chest and roars approvingly, and you move on to the next level.

Product Placement

As we noted in Chapter 2, product placement is the integration of products into a game or other form of screen-based entertainment. Product placement is becoming a highly popular form of promotion in video games, where you might find NPCs wearing ball caps embellished with clothing logos or skimming the waves on surfboards decorated with soft drink logos. Product placement in video games is becoming a major form of advertising, and it is expected to continue to grow because ad agencies realize it is one of the best ways to reach the favored demographic, males between the ages of 18–34. One might think that players would find product placement intrusive, but a focus group conducted by a New York ad agency showed that to the contrary, 70% of those in the group felt that seeing familiar products in a game “added realism.”

Product placement is also finding its way into virtual worlds and MMOGs. For example, players of the Sims Online can set up McDonald’s restaurants or equip their offices with PCs from Intel. Furthermore, media companies like CBS, NBC, and Sony are establishing outposts in Second Life. AOL has created an entire island there, AOL Pointe, with many attractions geared to lure Second Lifers to pay a visit.

For the most part, product placement is a static form of advertising and is not directly related to digital storytelling. However, product placement is increasingly becoming a more active device and at times does contain elements of narrative, in the form of characters and little storylines.

For example, the famed science fiction novelist William Gibson, via his avatar, visited Second Life in 2007 to promote his new novel, Spook Country, and did a reading of his book there. During the holiday season of 2006, NBC held a tree lighting ceremony in Second Life. The ceremony took place at a virtual version of Rockefeller Center, which even had a virtual skating rink. Avatars of characters from the cast of an MTV show visited MTV’s virtual world, Virtual Hills, and interacted with the avatars of fans, and avatars of famous movie stars and musicians are becoming increasingly common.

If this phenomenon of active product placement continues, we can expect content creators to become involved by creating little scenarios or even larger dramas to integrate the products into some kind of engaging narrative.

Branded Content

Branded content is programming that is funded by an advertiser and integrates promotional elements with the entertainment content. Unlike traditional advertising sponsorship, where the advertising is done through commercials, the entire program can be thought of as a “soft” commercial. To be effective, the promotional elements need to be woven into the narrative content, and the narrative content must be highly attractive to the audience.

Many examples of branded content can be found on the Internet and, to some degree, on mobile devices, as well. Advergaming is a form of branded content, and so are a number of amusing videos found on sites like YouTube. Sometimes entire websites are forms of branded content. For example, The Official Harry Potter Website, described in Chapter 8, invites users to explore and play in Harry Potter’s world. It is highly entertaining and interactive, but its true goal is to promote the Harry Potter films.

The Way Beyond Trail, an online interactive adventure story promoting the 2007 Jeep Patriot, is another example of branded content, and it is a good illustration of how digital storytelling techniques can be applied to promotion. It follows the same model as the old Choose Your Own Adventure books mentioned in Chapter 1 where the user (the reader, in the old days) is asked to make a choice at crucial points in the story, and the choices affect the way the game will end. It thus uses the classic branching structure described in Chapter 7. But even though the structure is hardly innovative, the story is clever and fresh, and you as the user feel quite engaged.

The Way Beyond Trail, shot on video, is a tale about three hip young adults traveling around the backcountry—in what else but a shiny new Jeep Patriot. When you first log on to the story, you are asked to fill out a passport with your name and gender. Thus, you become the fourth member of the party and are even addressed by name at a few points. The camping trip soon turns into a search for buried treasure, and things soon become a little wacky—just how wacky depends on the choices you make. But you will almost certainly make several wrong turns before you find the treasure and encounter some bizarre individuals along the way, a little like characters from the classic TV series Twin Peaks.

The Way Beyond Trail works well as a branded content story because the user is actively involved and pulled into the adventure. Furthermore, the promotional material does not intrude in the story. Of course, as you and your new friends drive around the woods and search for the treasure, you get a good look at the Jeep’s interior and exterior and get to see how well it maneuvers on rough terrain. Also, as with the athletic shoe advergame, it has a subtle subtext: By owning one of these Jeeps, the story implies, you, too, can go on cool adventures with cool friends and have a great time.

In quite a different application of branded content, Meow Mix cat food created a reality show in 2006 that followed all the conventions of the genre, except that the contestants in this case were all house cats. The show, Meow Mix House, was a transmedia entertainment, using television (broadcast on the Animal Planet network), the Internet, and a real-world venue, a custom built home for the cats in a storefront on New York’s Madison Avenue. Visitors to the website could view the 10 competitors through webcams, read their bios, see recaps of the episodes, and vote for their favorite feline. Just as with a human reality show, the cats were given challenges, but these were more in line with their natural talents. They were judged on such things as purring, climbing, and catching toy mice. The website was an enormous success, receiving over 2 million unique visitors.

Social Marketing

Social marketing is a specialized form of promotion that is designed to change the way people behave—to motivate them to break harmful habits like smoking or overeating and to encourage them to take up positive behaviors, like wearing seat belts or exercising. Though digital platforms have only recently been used in social marketing campaigns, the concept itself has been around since the 1970s, when social marketing campaigns were mostly conducted through televised public service announcements.

Today’s digital social marketing campaigns are far more sophisticated. They avoid lectures and scare tactics and instead are positive, upbeat, and involving. America on the Move, for example, is a healthy lifestyle campaign to get people to walk more. Individuals who register for the program are encouraged to go for daily walks and to gradually increase the number of steps they take, measuring their daily distance with a pedometer. As a motivator, the website contains a virtual trails system with such routes as Alaska’s Iditarod Trail and China’s Silk Road. Participants pick a trail that interests them and try to complete it within a certain number of days. At the end of each day, they log in their steps, and the steps are converted into miles along the trail. Their progress is charted on an online map, and they can even enjoy some sightseeing as they “hike.” To further motivate the participants, daily emails are sent out with tips and encouragement, and they receive a certificate suitable for framing when they complete their trail.

Public Advocacy Campaigns

Like social marketing, public advocacy campaigns are meant to sell ideas, not products. Such campaigns are intended to raise public consciousness about serious issues and to inspire people to take action. To date, one of the most successful ways of doing this with digital media has been to combine Flash animated cartoons with calls to action. Unlike objective informational pieces, social advocacy cartoons take a strong position on whatever issue they are tackling, though the stand they take may be supported by solid facts.

As an example of a public advocacy campaign, let’s consider the case of a series of clever little Flash animated cartoons called The Meatrix. The cartoons are a parody of the popular film, The Matrix, and are a call to action against factory farming. The first Meatrix debuted online in 2003, with sequels Meatrix II and Meatrix II1/2 coming out in succeeding years.

Produced by the design firm Free Range Graphics, The Meatrix tells the story of a naïve young pig, Leo, who is living contentedly on a bucolic family farm until he meets a cow named Moopheus, an underground resistance fighter. When Leo takes the red pill Moopheus offers him, he is introduced to a ghastly alternate reality and learns the shocking truth: Family farms are mostly a fantasy, having been stomped out by agribusiness and replaced by cruel, filthy, and diseconomic factory farms. (See Figure 12.1.) Leo joins Moopheus as a resistance fighter, and the sequels continue his adventures and include more shocking revelations of the meat industry.

Figure 12.1 A scene from The Meatrix, with Leo and Moopheus silhouetted in the foreground. Moopheus is explaining the reality behind the Meatrix.

Image courtesy of Free Range Graphics and GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment).

Though The Meatrix has a troubling message, it has been so skillfully integrated into the story that the series feel more like entertainment than a sermon, even though the serious points shine through clearly. Those who are unsettled by its message are not left hanging. At the end of each cartoon comes a call to action, offering various measures people can take.

The Meatrix has been an unqualified success story for a public advocacy campaign. Free Range Graphics estimates that over 15 million people have seen the cartoons, which have mostly been spread by viral marketing, and the series has won basketfuls of awards. The Meatrix proves the value of having a smart script, a striking visual style, and the right balance between entertainment and message. It also demonstrates the enormous power of using popular iconography like The Matrix to help get an idea across. It puts the cartoons into a context that people can readily understand, avoiding the need for heavy explanations, and the witty references to the movie are almost certainly a major reason for its success.

A CROSS SECTION OF GENRES

A great number of genres have been used for digital promotion and advertising, and we can expect to see new ones emerging on a regular basis. Novelty is a powerful asset in this arena because it helps attract welcome attention to a campaign. Let’s take a look at some of the genres and innovative techniques that have been used thus far.

Webisodes

Webisodes—serialized dramas broadcast in installments—are often used as promotional vehicles for TV series, as we saw in Chapter 9, where we discussed several examples. Mobisodes can be employed in this way, too. In addition, however, webisodes are being used to promote such products as automobiles and beauty products, and they can be viewed as a form of branded content.

In 2006, Dove, which makes beauty products for women, created a somewhat loony webisode, Nightime Classics, that highlighted its Calming Night line of products. In the series, Felicity Huffman, star of the TV series Desperate Housewives, dreams she is visiting the fictional homes of vintage TV shows, like Leave It to Beaver and The Brady Bunch, and she is interacting with the characters who live in each household. With veteran director Penny Marshall at the helm, new footage was shot and skillfully interwoven into excerpts from the classic TV shows, so it looks as if Huffman is actually conversing with the characters in the old series. The escapist dreams that Huffman enjoys tie in nicely with Dove’s nighttime beauty products, and the campaign included a call to action: Women who viewed Nighttime Classics were invited to request free samples of the products.

In quite a different take on promotional webisodes, Ford created two live-action interlocking dramas to promote two brands of cars. Together they told the story of a novelist who was having trouble with one of her fictional characters— he was starting to intrude in her life in an all-too-real way. Lovely by Surprise (for the Lincoln Zephyr) was the novelist’s personal story, and The Neverything (for the Mercury Milan) was about the novel she was writing, a tale of two eccentric brothers who live on a boat in the middle of an empty field. Highly sophisticated and handsomely produced, the webisodes took a very low-key approach to promotion, though each webisode thematically reflected the motto of the car it was promoting: discovery in the case of The Neverything and fulfilling one’s dreams in the case of Lovely by Surprise.

Alternate Reality Games

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are often used to promote entertainment properties, and we noted one example in Chapter 9, The Lost Experience. But in addition, ARGs are being used to promote restaurant chains, automobiles, and other products. They are particularly effective as promotional vehicles because players become deeply invested in them and in the brand being promoted, often for weeks at a time. Furthermore, these games are especially enjoyed by people between the ages of 18 to 34, a prime demographic for advertisers.

For example, Who is Benjamin Stove, sponsored by General Motors, promoted the awareness of ethanol fuel and, in an extremely low-key way, the awareness of their Flex Ford line of vehicles. The mystery story involves an enigmatic character named Benjamin Stove as well as crop circles, sacred geometry, and mystical archeological sites. According to Dave Szulborski, the game’s puzzle designer and a story consultant on the project, the game was unusual in that it kept the identity of the sponsor, General Motors, a secret until very near the end. General Motors actually stepped into the game as a character, addressing the fictional Benjamin Stove in an ad that appeared in the USA Today newspaper and website. (See Figure 12.2.) Who is Benjamin Stove will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 17, as will ARGs in general.

Figure 12.2 General Motors took out this ad on the USA Today website as a way to step into the Who is Benjamin Stove ARG, without revealing that it was actually the sponsor of the game.

Image courtesy of Dave Szulborski, GMD Studios, and General Motors’ Live Green, Go Yellow campaign.

Music Videos

In 2006, a music video called Tea Partay debuted on YouTube, and it may well have been the first music video on the Internet to be used for promotional purposes. The clever tongue-in-cheek video, sponsored by Smirnoff, featured a group of East Coast preppies rapping about a new Smirnoff beverage, Raw Tea. Spread quickly by viral marketing, it was viewed an estimated 3.5 million times on YouTube alone. This was a great coup for Smirnoff, since YouTube viewers are a prime demographic for their new beverage. A year later, in the wake of this success, Smirnoff released a follow-up video, Green Tea Partay, featuring a rival group of rappers on the West Coast singing about another Smirnoff beverage. The company has now created a whole website revolving around this alleged East Coast/West Coast rivalry, complete with a Prepsta Party Guide.

“Construction Kit” Commercials

“Construction kit” commercials are online promotions in which users are given all the tools they need to create a commercial for a specific product, competing for prizes and recognition. As we saw in Chapter 4, Chevy used this technique with its Chevy Tahoe, but the venture backfired badly when some users created venomous commercials about the SUV. Nevertheless, the concept itself is a promising one, encouraging interactivity and engagement, though for it to be effective for promotional uses, some restrictions would need to be built in.

Faux or Fictional Blogs

Faux or fictional blogs, like webisodes and mobisodes, are often used to promote TV series. We examined one such blog in Chapter 9, Nigelblog.com, and there is every reason to think that such blogs can be effectively used to promote other types of things, not just entertainment properties. However, it should be noted that blogs, like construction kit commercials, have the potential to backfire.

In 2006, NBC attempted to promote a new TV series, Studio 60, by a faux blog called Defaker, modeled closely on a popular real blog, Defamer, which covers entertainment gossip. Defaker’s first entry was mostly an uninspired rehash of the first episode of Studio 60, and almost immediately the negative comments poured in, posted on the blog’s own comments section, on other blogs, and even in mainstream news media. Scorn was heaped on Defaker for being a poorly written, clumsy, blatant plug for the show. Defaker soon became the poster child of a fictional blog gone wrong, making NBC something of a laughingstock. The blog was pulled in just a few days.

The Defaker fiasco is a vivid illustration of the importance of using a light hand and a fresh approach when employing digital media for promotion.

Video Games

As briefly noted earlier, entire video games are sometimes devoted to a single promotional objective. In Chapter 11, we discussed one example of this, Left Behind, a game that promotes a fundamentalist form of Christianity. America’s Army, launched in 2002, is another such promotional game. It was made by the United States Army with the goal of recruiting young people to join the armed forces.

America’s Army realistically but excitingly portrays army life and combat, taking players from boot camp training right through to dangerous combat missions. The weaponry and tactics are all authentic. The developers took great pains to be accurate, while focusing, of course, on the most thrilling and glamorous parts of military life; KP (Kitchen Patrol) and pushups are not featured in the game. To make sure they were getting everything right, the developers even rode in Blackhawk helicopters and jumped out of airplanes in parachutes.

America’s Army cost an estimated $5 million to make, but the military considered it a worthwhile investment because, without a national draft system, it was essential to get young men and women to voluntarily enlist in the armed services. In a leap of faith, they gambled that a game would be far more effective in attracting prospective recruits than the usual way of doing things, with some old Army guy in a dreary recruitment office trying to sell young kids on life in the military.

The game exceeded all expectations, in part because of its content and in part because it was perfectly aimed at its target demographic, the young men and women who love to play video games. It has become one of the most successful video games ever. As of mid-2007, according to the game’s developers, over 8.6 people had registered to play. The producers offer regular updates, and versions have been made for cell phone games and the latest game consoles.

Short Films

Short films for the Internet, both linear ones and interactive ones, are logical vehicles for promotional endeavors. Earlier in this chapter, we examined the interactive film, The Way Beyond Trail, launched in 2007. But the concept of using short online films as branded entertainment dates back to 2001, when BMW began promoting its sleek, high-end vehicles online via a series of sleek, high-end short films. Collectively called The Hire, the eight films were united by a recurring character, a mysterious driver-for-hire, who operates the car in all the little movies. Heavy hitters like Guy Ritchie, John Frankenheimer, and Ang Lee directed the films, and one even stars Madonna. No overt advertising was contained in any of them. The Hire has received many accolades and brought much favorable attention to BMW. The films have even been screened at Cannes, though they are no longer available online.

Promotional MMOGs and Virtual Worlds

To some extent, MMOGs are being used as promotional devices, though so far this technique has been limited to cross promoting other entertainment properties. For example, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online (described in detail in Chapter 16) ties into the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and theme park ride, and Toontown Online (also described in Chapter 16) ties into the Toontown area in Disneyland and into popular Disney characters. Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, which is part MMOG and part social networking site, brings a virtual Disneyland to the Internet. Participants create avatars, chat with each other, and play minigames based on rides in the real-world theme park.

MTV, another entertainment giant, is also making use of virtual worlds, as noted in Chapter 8. As of this writing, MTV operates six virtual worlds, mostly based on their popular TV shows. It will be interesting to see if nonentertainment entities will also find a way to utilize this approach.

Webcam Peepshows

Webcam peepshows, where the user can type in commands that the person shown on the webcam video must follow, have to be among the most bizarre methods of promotion ever devised. Evidently, webcam peepshows are fairly common forms of pornography, but it takes a leap of imagination to consider this as a model for promotional purposes. Yet Burger King did just that with its edgy Subservient Chicken campaign in 2004 to promote chicken sandwiches. News of the website spread like wildfire through viral marketing and TV tie-ins.

The show featured a person dressed in a chicken costume and a garter belt who would obey approximately 400 typed in commands. Though made to look like a live feed, the videos were actually prerecorded responses triggered by key words. The peepshow cleverly reflected Burger King’s slogan, “Get chicken your way.” The chicken would even turn itself into a chicken sandwich, if requested, by tucking itself in between two cushions.

According to the ad agency that oversaw the website, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Subservient Chicken received a million hits within hours of launching and over 15 million hits within a few months. With a success of this magnitude, it would be surprising if others did not imitate it.

OTHER BUSINESS PURPOSES

As we have seen throughout this chapter, techniques of digital storytelling lend themselves extremely well to promotion and advertising. And, in Chapter 11, we explored how digital storytelling could be used in corporate training. But other than these endeavors, businesses are still struggling to find the best way to make use of the new opportunities presented by digital media other than their obvious technological and communications capabilities.

For many companies, virtual worlds like Second Life seem to be the most promising new territory to explore. As of this writing, at least 85 major brands have established outposts in Second Life. They have been dipping their toes in these virtual waters in various ways: setting up retail stores; offering customer support; testing designs for new products and buildings; collaborating on projects; and holding meetings, events, and international conferences. The results have been mixed because there is an inherent clash of cultures between the fantasy role-play typical of virtual worlds and the suit-and-tie mentality of the business world. But corporations are slowly beginning to discover that their ventures in virtual worlds fare best when done in the spirit of these environments.

For example, Nissan has retooled its Altima Island base several times, trying to find an approach that would appeal to Second Lifers. Its first attempt, a conventional virtual showroom, drew little interest, and after another unsuccessful design, it launched its third offering in 2007. This version is a fanciful automotive amusement park where avatars can ride hamster balls and test drive vehicles on a gravity-defying track. They can even design their own custom vehicles using open-source codes. As of this writing, the Altima Island redesign is still too new to be able to judge its success, but it seems far more in keeping with the Second Life ethos than Nissan’s earlier attempts.

In a similar fashion, an executive with Sun Microsystems, Chris Melisinos, has also adapted to Second Life culture. He regularly visits the virtual world dressed in a sci-fi cowboy costume. In an article in Information Week (February 26, 2007), he noted he would not be well received if he dressed instead in a business suit. “If you try and paint on that corporate face,” he noted, “you devalue your message and basically announce that you are just using the space for PR.”

And do you remember William Gibson’s book reading described earlier in the chapter? That also had an appropriate virtual world twist. An overflow crowd of avatars squeezed into the hall where the event was to take place and eagerly awaited Gibson’s arrival. But Gibson’s avatar did not make his entrance from a mundane side door. Instead, he descended from the ceiling in a large object shaped like a tanker container. The doors of the vessel opened, and Gibson’s avatar stepped out to huge (typed) applause.

It remains to be seen how, in the long run, businesses will adapt to virtual worlds and other new digital genres. It is also too soon to know how, if at all, digital storytelling will fit into this picture. But as these examples illustrate, an element of playfulness and fantasy—close relatives of storytelling—can certainly help bridge the disparate cultures of business and digital media.

CONCLUSION

As we have seen in this chapter, digital storytelling techniques can be applied to advertising and promotion in a great many ways, and these works can be highly entertaining and engaging. However, we have also seen some instances where projects did not succeed as anticipated and, in fact, some badly backfired. We can learn a great deal both by the successes and failures that we have studied.

First of all, it is important for content creators to give thoughtful consideration to the message they want to send, the culture of the medium they are using, and how best to appeal to their target demographic. Care must be taken to seamlessly integrate the promotional content into the narrative content, without allowing the promotional message to intrude jarringly. Humor is always an asset and should be used to the maximum degree appropriate, since it is the rare individual who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh now and then. As we have seen, material that is fresh, fun, edgy, and original has the best chance of reaching a wide audience.

Finally, it can be risky to give users too much control because they might be tempted to play havoc with it. This is far less likely to happen, however, when they enjoy and genuinely respect the material. This respect for the material must originate with the creators themselves. If they feel they are “slumming” and don’t exert themselves creatively, this attitude will be perceived by the users. The truth is, creating a successful campaign in this arena requires pulling out all creative stops.

When digital storytelling techniques are used imaginatively, and when everything comes together in a well-planned campaign, it can result in a resounding success. Furthermore, the process of developing such a project is hardly drudgery. Instead, the work can be a creative joy.

IDEA-GENERATING EXERCISES