Transmedia what now?
Fox 8 have been heavily pushing SLIDE, their new (Skins inspired) teen series pretty hard. What’s been interesting to me is the use of transmedia story telling. Sounds jargony. Fox 8 have been using webisodes, an interactive graphic novel, trailers and blogs to create ‘the world of SLIDE’. The hope, of course, is to immerse teenagers in the lives of the characters with the expected outcome being some degree of social media buzz.
Before the show had even started, a SLIDE forum was set up. The target audience were also encouraged to get to know the SLIDE 5 by moving through a series of previews and games. Before bits, after bits, behind the scenes and making of bits are all freely available. ‘Bits’ clearly suit mobile device consumption making this a clever strategy. The free app hosts all of the video content but also connects kids to i-tunes so that they can purchase the music played on the show (or the rather ‘the music the characters listen too’).
The characters, it seems, are adept in social media. Each character has a twitter account and when I wrote this, Eva’s most recent tweet was twenty minutes earlier and directed to Scarlett (another Slide character). The tweet references a plot development and having not viewed the show makes no sense to me. One character even has a fashion tumblr blog and blogs as her character, Scarlett. This is risky business – will the audience accept this as authentic.
Ok, so this isn’t transmedia storytelling at all, this is transmedia marketing. Each of these extras are a push to get you to watch the key text . There are multiple entry points to the show and there are also some nice story extensions provided by graphic novels and these tweets. Yet, you wouldn’t really consume these without having come into contact with the show. I’m actually really excited by this 360 degree (sorry, more jargon) entertainment experience and can’t wait to see if audiences get ‘involved’ or ‘participate’.
That was just some of the SLIDE ‘transmedia marketing’, or shall we just call it advertising?!
Ryan