The Transmedia Marketing Discipline

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All things transmedia are not marketing, but in our current world, almost all good marketing is multimedia, and often transmedia.

Transmedia marketing is a practice of transmedia that merges old and new concepts:

    • What was always true: marketing across more than one platform is more likely to reach people more deeply
    • What’s new: integrating your media property’s story with its promotional messages in a multi-platformed content creation system fully engages your audiences in an overall immersive experience

To successfully make and market media today, you should embrace transmedia marketing.

 

What Is Transmedia Marketing?

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman by Reynold Brown; Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

 

Transmedia experiences have been enabled by broadband video streaming, mobile access, and social media, which have bypassed top-down production and distribution models and created a new stream of media makers, marketers, critics, and ambassadors. Their bottom-up creative impulses, along with new technologies’ capabilities allow transmedia content to simultaneously and indistinguishably propel and promote your story.

 

Courtesy of Annoying Orange, Inc.

Transmedia marketing, defined by Transmedia Marketing: From Film and TV to Games and Digital Media is a holistic content creation approach —both storytelling and marketing—simultaneously across multiple media platforms. It’s part of a thoughtfully-designed plan to achieve enunciated goals with key target audiences. 

 
Transmedia Marketing is the holistic discipline of making media and marketing media across multiple platforms—on air, online, and on the go—through engaging storytelling, rich story worlds, and interactive audience experiences. The story is the overall media project – both its narrative content and marketing experiences. The worlds are the project’s story universe and the target audience’s real life.

Developing and marketing media projects simultaneously across multiple media platforms creates an integrated transmedia project with multiple pathways for audience engagement – spawning loyal, participatory fans. And using best practices from film, television, radio, print, games, online, digital, and experiential platforms creates stand-out, relevant media experiences.

– Anne Zeiser, Transmedia Marketing: From Film and TV to Games and Digital Media   

Transmedia Marketing provides a comprehensive foray into transmedia marketing – from defining and planning for it to creating with it and measuring it.

I don't think there is any difference between what’s marketing and what’s content. Once content is your marketing then there’s no difference between the content and the context. You have to grab their imagination right from the beginning and hold it all the way through until you’re ready to release that audience member. In good execution it’s one continuous experience and there is no dividing line.

-- Jordan Weisman, transmedia pioneer, founder of 42 Entertainment and other innovative entertainment companies

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