The good news is that there already appear to be some answers emerging, all with the potential to lead somewhere interesting and worth recording. I’m going to approach this pretty organically and see where it goes. Please feel free to jump in, disagree, debate, add your own suggestions etc.

First up, a theme that may seem controversial to some: the wholesale reinvention of a (sometimes much maligned) skill, the art of storytelling.

Ben’s second post caught my attention with the observation that “there’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web” and this got me thinking.

Part of the issue behind this, I would hazard a guess, is the fact story telling as a skill has come to be associated with the old school mores of broadcast advertising. By way of illustration, in his NMA column last week Mark Cridge talked about the need for a creative director to be comfortable with the idea of curation, rather than control. A thought that made complete sense – no question. His piece then went on to conclude “If these are the skills that are going to be important from now on, which type of creative director would you rather work with: a big budget brand storyteller obsessed with control, or one more comfortable with the ebb and flow of the interactive world?”

Reading this, you’d be forgiven for thinking storytelling no longer has a place or is badly in need of rehab. In truth, and I am going to nail my colours to the mast here, it’s never had the potential to be more relevant or exciting.

(For full post click below)

Entertainment brands are showing us how it’s done. The days of film trailer after film trailer featuring near-identical Don LaFontaine or James Earl Jones voiceovers are kinda over. Undoubtedly these brands do have it easy – acres of high value (okay, not always the case..) content people are already prepared to pay good money to see. How hard can it be to chop up bits of a film or game into neat trailers and distribute to a waiting fan base on the web? But, in fact, they are doing so much more than that. The new movie marketing model (the latter also recently examined here by Noel Bussey) shows us that storytelling doesn’t need to be written off as antiquated, one way communication, quite the opposite. Sophisticated stories are spun around the core characters & concept behind a film, all with the aim of driving anticipation, buzz and deeper, more rewarding relationships with fans.

There are a multitude of examples to prove the point from an ever-growing line of films and TV shows (Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, Lost, Heroes, The Sopranos etc), but I am going to pick just one: Watchmen. Whatever you may think of the graphic-novel-turned-film, the marketing content was near flawless. The creation of a fictional, immersive world in which a fan could lose themselves happily over a prolonged period of time. If you haven’t read it already, check out Dan Light at PPC’s account of producing it all here. His story is a rare and useful thing: collected in one place, a candid, informative & riveting account of how a seamlessly integrated & interactive campaign was created.

Compared to an fmcg brand, say, of course we can argue that it’s easier to create an extended fictional world around an entertainment brand, especially one as hotly anticipated as this film. However, if we buy the linked principles of (a) moving from interruption to engagement (b) moving from one night stands to ongoing relationships with consumers, and (c) shifting £££ from bought to earned (& owned) media, then we have to accept we have a lot to learn from how entertainment brands are approaching these very same challenges.

At a conceptual level, they teach us that the fundamental shift in storytelling is simply this: we are now in the business of starting stories, not attempting to nail them down from beginning to end. Letting stories take on a life of their own, to be played with, passed around, modified and enriched by the audiences they’re developed for.

Here are a few observations about what it takes to put this into practice, drawn from what Light had to say:

1.The importance of starting out early and producing a LOT of content from that point on. The first part of the jigsaw, the ‘movie countdown widget’ (now a ubiquitous part of any movie launch) was available 10 months before the film was released, compared to the average 8-10 weeks. And, as Dan says, “In the case of Watchmen, content-wise, we really went for the mother lode”. See the post for why that was important.

2. Don’t expect a linear process: brief->concept sign-off->production. To get some things approved, you need to make them without being asked. There’s a risk, but proto-typing and producing at low cost & high speed means the pay-off is worth it, most of the time.

4. Fans may want to be “hunter gatherers” (see Henry Jenkins on the subject of world-building), piecing together dispersed pieces of content in order to build a fictional world, but they only have so much time to do so. The Watchmen downloadable widget was a countdown to the movie, but also a – updated weekly – portal to most of the content surrounding it.

5. The crucial importance of creating a tightly woven team (see Warren Bennis on Great Groups for the theory behind why this is critically important). Dan and his team created a space which removed them from their usual environment. It was the loading bay at their offices – effectively a stripped down warehouse area – nothing fancy. Then they gave that team the tools they needed to do what they do best. For writing purposes they used software which allowed them to co-create whilst still keeping individual ownership.

6. Seed aggressively / mobilise your network. Journalists, bloggers, fans. Despite Dan’s modesty about how last minute some of the meet-ups were, truth is, this probably added to the excitement. These relationships were all carefully identified and nurtured ahead of time. He knew a lot of them personally. Bear in mind, this was in addition to the actual movie’s pre-launch activity orchestrated by the director and production company.

All this leaves me feeling there is a real and significant opportunity for brands to excite and inspire again through storytelling. That it is possible to reinvent a lost art, rather than dismiss it. That storytelling can be a powerful tool to drive new creativity in the interactive space. That the storyteller’s story does not, after all, end here….

Some great, insightful and provocative replies to the earlier question around the perceived paucity of great work in interactive.

First off, I found it fascinating that – to date at least – no one’s responded with a great list of knockout creative, or, in fact, with any knockout creative. This would suggest that there is indeed a problem and that it’s not just perception. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’m reassured that various folks who ‘know their shit’ have commented here, and I’m certain they would have picked out the gems had I missed them in my haste to make the point.

Second, what we have emerging is a really very useful list of factors that, together, explain why we’re not yet seeing consistently great work, and in particular strong enduring campaigns, in the interactive space. Factors cited by contributors will be familiar to many, and include the following, which are reported not as fact but as supposition, at least at this stage:

1. SPEED – Our lack of speed in responding to the changing landscape, a blight suffered by agencies of both old & new skools, digital & analogue, hampers creative innovation.

2. ENDURANCE – We suffer a particular weakness at creating . . . (more)

. . . work that endures over time – what Bud Caddell captures well as ‘long is the untapped market’.

3. VALUE – There endures a disparity in budget allocation between offline & online worlds, suggestive of a pervasive disparity in value in clients’ eyes, perhaps.

4. EFFECTIVENESS – The online mix is inevitably ‘optimized’, resulting in the replacement of brand building content for ‘hard sell’ work that ‘really delivers’ (Griffin Farley nails this powerfully in his response, suggesting that we currently encourage clients to look at media through the wrong lens).

5. PASSION – Interactivity can certainly make an ordinary brand more useful or more relevant, but truly great interactive ideas still tend to come from brands that people care about already (Tom Morton, as ever, sums this up infinitely better than I could).

6. LINEARITY – Involvement of the specialist digital agencies occurs too late for them to show what they can really do; they provide a microwave meal-style service rather than the full Cordon Bleu of which they are capable; they manage rather than soar.

7. BELATEDNESS – Even when the right people are cast together (the geeks, the strategists & the creatives) it’s often too late for that fertile collision to produce the magic that should be possible.

8. NOT INVENTED HERE – We’re frequently seduced by the temptation to want to invent from scratch rather than borrow (&, critically, credit) with pride.

9. NARRATIVE – There’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web (possibly linked to numerous points, above, including one made by Rory Sutherland about the instant disposability – & thus perceived low value – of much interactive work). I look enviously at the output of Campfire and other such agencies in this respect.

10. RISK – We’re crap at taking risks, partly because there’s no facility for doing so (& I liked Gareth Kay’s point about the CDP studio in the basement where people could flex their muscles and stretch the boundaries), but partly because many of us think we’re already taking risks, or being ‘new skool’ just meddling in digital. We’re not.

Hmmm. So what now. While many of these factors remain out of our immediate control or require significant re-tooling of our ‘factories’ (client budgets & pressures, archaic processes, the dreaded ‘optimization’ of media plans at the last second, the fact that people are more likely to be moved by atheletes or music than by fabric conditioner or banks), actually so much is easily within our remit to change. Now.

As Sir Winston Churchill noted, with Churchillian economy, ‘attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference’.

Around half of these factors seem – at first glance – to be matters more of approach than of structure. Creating an environment for experimentation, giving away credit (or at the very least ensuring it’s shared with those who deserve it), encouraging early and respectful collaboration . . . these might surely be actioned today? What’s stopping us?

Some of the more structural issues – around the value of interactive, linear process, cumbersome execution of that process – present more of a headache, but remain ENTIRELY within our control. The one area I feel I particularly disagree with contributors on is in instances where the client is blamed for something. I’m not absolving certain clients from responsibility for poor interactive work, but I am clearing them of the responsibility for changing the situation. It’s down to the folks who runs the businesses which are dysfunctional to change those businesses. That’s us, by the way.

So moving forward I’d really like to hear about solutions to some of these issues. It has to be the most exciting time to be doing what we’re doing since Mad Men. We’re only going to be doing this – if we’re lucky – for a few handfuls of years. So my mantra is fight for change today, not tomorrow. And don’t even think about complaining if you’re not also actively engaged in changing.

Would really value your thoughts on accelerating transformation.

Well let’s get one thing out of the way right away. It’s almost certainly the case (please argue with me if you think this is not true) that the percentage of “great work” in interactive is no less than that on any other canvas. Great work is rarer than a Texan in a Smart Car. Full-stop. But there seem some quite specific reasons why there’s not a whole load of stunningly great creative in interactive.

So, a few linked observations about why this might be the case.

One, as an industry, it seems as if marketing is mesmerized by the (very welcome) potential efficiencies & measurability of digital and that this can lead to blindness when it comes to the creative opportunities. The talk is frequently of driving costs down through zero wastage, or improving efficiency (all good of course), and less often about increasing engagement, forging deeper links with consumers over time, storytelling across screens, and so on. How far away are we from work of the quality and ambition of Aaron Koblin or Jonathan Harris in what we produce for clients? To some extent, even average digital work can be more accountable than much of the work produced for the offline world, and sometimes that accountability can veil what is actually remarkably humdrum work. Here one’s reminded of the John Banham quote: In business we tend to value most highly that which we can measure most precisely. Traditional agencies are, in particular, often in the position of knowing they need to produce both more effective and more emotive interactive work, but not knowing remotely how to develop it.

Two, we probably need to stop looking at digital creativity as somehow different . . . (more)

. . . and divorced from the other elements that a brand uses to engage customers & prospects – a separate stage or world. Too often interactive agencies and skills are involved way too late to give them the best chance of producing greatness, because interactivity is something that needs to run through campaigns like a strand of DNA, not a module that can bolted on to something that’s already been produced. Partly this is a structural issue to do with different companies working together, often a tricky area clouded by egos and budgets. Partly it’s an attitudinal issue, with agencies sometimes wary of involving anyone else until they are forced to. One approach to solving this disconnect is to merge the teams of different people & skills currently tasked to separately produce on and offline. There must be an improvement in creative collaboration, perhaps through the deliberate creation of what ex-MIT organizational consultant Warren Bennis refers to as ‘Great Groups‘ – handpicked teams of people gathered by a (hopefully) visionary leader to produce exceptional results in the creative or innovation fields (examples he’d cite might include those involved with Pixar, Apple, Manhattan Project, Lockheed’s Skunkworks or more recently Obama’s campaign team). These groups are full of talented people who can – and want to – work together and who frequently believe they’re on some kind of ‘mission from God’. They are optimistic, not realistic. They bury their differences for the greater good of the objective. Most of us have at one point of another been part of these kinds of teams, and it is an enthralling and inspiring experience. This may mean (shock, horror) that we need to collaborate with people who don’t work with us or for us at the moment. I say, bring it on. I think it was an ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems that once said, ‘no matter where you work, most of the smart people work somewhere else’.

Three, and in a related vein, we don’t always build the right types of skillsets and backgrounds into the teams that do develop the work. The whole configuration of account & creative teams needs to change, with the introduction of technologists and engagement thinkers as central contributors to creativity at the very earliest stages of the development process. That means Day One. They must be used as architects, helping provide some of the art and magic, not just bricklayers, ironing out the issues around execution & deployment. Together, the ambition of these hybrid teams should be to engage the hearts and minds of the people they are talking to with content, tools, & experiences that move them – to do something, to think something, to feel something.

Four, and again linked to the first three points, we need to agree on what ‘great work in interactive’ is. This is a debate we’ve all heard again and again over the last 5 or so years, with little resolution or consensus. My take is simple. That great work in interactive is actually not that different to great work in offline. And my starting point here would be to look to how we benchmark breakthrough creativity in non-digital channels to help us work out how we might generate more breakthrough work in online. Does it tell a story? Does it have impact? Does it leave room for the reader, viewer or user? Does it credit the consumer with intelligence? Is it based upon a compelling insight? And so on.

In particular, though, I think there’s too often there’s a gap between technical knowledge and geeky creativity on one hand, and marketing know-how and strategic savviness on the other. Too often half the smart people – the digital artists, geeks & information designers for example – aren’t talking or spending enough time with the other smart people.

If we do nothing else except start to build bridges across that gap then I sense we’ll be on our way to seeing interactive work that genuine moves & touches people, that feels like magic, and – as the Americans would say – hits the ball right out of the park for clients.

We certainly do not have all – or perhaps even any – of the answers. Would love to know what others think.

(NOTE: a follow-up post to this original post, in which I attempt to summarize some of the emerging themes, can be found at: http://bit.ly/14HVJo; the conversation continues there, B)

(A version of this post was previously published on Revolution’s new – & tremendous – website: http://bit.ly/3JfrTL)