Author: James Mitchell (@jamescmitchell), Strategist, BBH Labs

Preparations for our night of storytelling for Internet Week Europe are almost complete. And with less than a week to go until Thursday the 10^th, we thought we’d share a little preview info of some of our speakers. Tales will include…

Simon Sanders – “Postcards ‘n’ mix-tapes, Skype ‘n’ status updates”
Creative Strategist / www.simonsanders.net

Basheera Khan – “Tales from the Crypt-ograph”
UX Architect, EMC Consulting / http://bash.posterous.com

Katy Lindemann – “Ye olde days of (web)logging: when it still began with a ‘w’ and people thought it would never take off…”
Freelance Strategist / http://www.katylindemann.com/

Rishi Dastidar / Matt Busher – “Self Portrait Postcards”
Senior copywriter, archibald ingall stretton… / Designer, mandatory thinking selfportraitpostcards.com

Claire Burge – “From Mud Pies to Geek Chick”
Photographer / www.claireburge.com

It’s looking to be a lot of fun. It looks like we’re at capacity, with a heavy waitlist – but there is still one way to get in. We’ve still got space for a few micro-stories: that is, tales of five minutes instead of ten. So, if you have any internet incidents that you think might amuse and enthrall and you want to come, drop me an email at james.mitchell@bbh-labs.com in the next few days.

And if you just can’t make it but want to tune in, watch this space – we’ll try to get a stream up and running on the night, right here.

Until then,

James

Here at Labs, we’re fond of many things, but here’s two: the internet, and storytelling. (Mel also likes robots, but that’s her choice ) We wondered if this year, we could combine them.

In the main, Internet Week Europe is about making better use of the internet, from bringing out the amateur behaviourist in all of us to trying to master its very nuts and bolts. And BBH Labs has been no exception: last year, we got together with google for the binary bootcamp that was Coding For Dummies.

But while we should strive to do more with the net, it’s already done much for us to celebrate. The much-feted promise of connection that was heralded in 1990 has come true for us all, whether through Facebook, Twitter or a dodgy backroom BBS. And while it’s easy to talk about the macro impact cases, from Libya to London, the personal stories often remain just that: personal.

So as part of IWE’ 11, on Thursday 10^th November, join us at BBH from 7 for TaleTorrent: a night of true stories about the internet. It’s a conference, a campfire, a confessional. Eight storytellers will take ten minutes to tell us something.

There are two ways to get involved. One: come along by grabbing a ticket on our Eventbrite page.

Two: we are still looking for a couple of people to tell their stories – it could be five minutes, it could be fifteen – in our little gathering. Funny, sad, uplifiting, anything you like. If you’d like to share with us, get in touch with me at james.mitchell@bbh.co.uk.

Labs were lucky enough to be invited back to Power to the Pixel’s Pixel Lab held at Schwielowsee this week. The attendees – writers, filmmakers and producers among them – spent most of the week intensively workshopping their cross-media projects, punctuated by tutorials and talks from external experts.

Raising money in a still nascent format is always going to be challenging, so Pixel Lab participants were keen to know how brands and advertisers viewed transmedia storytelling as a platform and what approaches were likely to lead to successful fundraising.

Using the smart thinking from Metafilter forum user blue_beetle as the starting point I suggested that rather than try and sell a story to a brand, selling the audience might be a more productive approach. This is partly because it’s so noisy out there that a brand needs to work exceptionally hard to cut through with a story and also because increasingly brands see participation (through a variety of mechanics) as a good route to engaging an audience and building brand loyalty.

It wouldn’t be a Labs talk if we didn’t reference Kevin Kelly, and his ‘Six words for the modern internet‘ made for a useful primer on participation and behaviours. Taking each of the behaviours and looking at campaigns that had shone them through a branded lens I asked whether it was possible to extend the idea of audience as product and ask what they paid with for each form of participation.

With each of these costs of participating the audience clearly need to be rewarded and this reward will vary with the depth and type of participation. The reward might be a story or another form of transmedia experience but there are other rewards for participation and access and engagement might sometimes be reward enough.

The full presentation is below – let us know what you think in the comments.

Last Thursday (on Thanksgiving, if you are so inclined) the great and good and up-and-coming of London’s planning community gathered at the British Library for the APG/Campaign Battle of Big Thinking, an annual event that pits mind against mind for the chance to be crowned the Biggest Brain of All.

BBH London was well represented, with Peter Sells sharing thoughts on ‘The Fall of Capitalism, Bloody Revolution and the Destruction of Civil Society ….. And it’s Effect on KFC AM sales in the Tyne Tees Region” and winning his category in style. I apparently offered what was described as ‘an entertaining after-dinner speech’ on “What I have learned in 39 days in the advertising Business” and didn’t win my category which was won by an excellent pitch for a planner-owned product by PassionBrand. We’ll put these presentations up when the videos of the day become available.

But the star of the show and a very, very close runner up to the eventual overall winner was James Mitchell, who provoked and entertained the audience with his smart thinking and charming discourse on advertising, caring and storytelling.

So here is the extended remix of James’ talk – put on some headphones, hit play, enjoy and be provoked.

Audiences no longer think in silos – the recent 2Screen evening demonstrated the power of creating compelling behaviour drivers and experiences across multiple platforms. Power to the Pixel’s recent centrepiece event, the Cross-Media Forum in London, brought together leading thinkers and pioneers from across the media industries who are instrumental in changing the way stories are conceived and are reaching audiences.

Below, PttP’s CEO Liz Rosenthal and COO Tishna Molla picks out some themes that are emerging from their work and, for anyone interested in new tools for storytellers, links to deeper thinking from the Pixel Report.

Story experience

“The best storytelling devices are, and have always been, rooted in human behaviours and desires,” says Mike Monello, Founder of Campfire and Co-Creator of The Blair Witch Project. His keys to creating a successful story experience are;

• Communal experience
• Making it tangible
• Fostering discovery
• Making it personal
• Building a world larger than your characters

Story = brand

Whilst marketers have long been used to advertising products across multiple platforms, do they really understand how to keep audiences engaged? How do you begin to find your audience, let alone engage them? How do you decide which platforms to use to tell your story, let alone work out how to use them? Director Jon M Chu, is an expert in how to not only reach, but to sustain an audience. He conceived The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (The LXD) – “a living, breathing comic book” – first and foremost as a brand, enabling connections with different audiences across multiple platforms.

Power lies with the audience

With the impact of new technologies has come a shift in authorship and access. Audiences have moved from passive viewer to active collaborator, stakeholder, co-creator, marketer, distributor, even financier. There’s a new breed of storyteller emerging, one that understands the new technologies, tools and services that are changing the way that stories are told, how and where audiences can interact with them and, as a result, the whole business of storytelling.

Lance Weiler (@lanceweiler), US filmmaker and story architect, grew his audience for Head Trauma - a fusion of feature film, live performance, mobile interaction, online gaming and remix – by allowing the audience to discover and expand elements of the story, moving them from one platform to the next in the process. Audience numbers grew in direct correlation to the number of access points made available to them.

Finnish director, Timo Vuorensola is an expert at collaborating and engaging with his audience throughout the development, production and distribution of his films. Crowd Controls is one great example of a tool that he uses to harness the power of the audience.

With technology advancing so rapidly, the possibilities for storytelling and audience interaction seem limitless or intimidating, depending on your point of view. No-one has all the answers anymore (if they ever did) which makes it essential now, more than ever, to share information and foster new networks, collaborations and partnerships. Which is what we do @powertothepixel.

One of the things that caught our eye last year was a blogpost from Len Kendall sharing the plan for a simple, yet audacious lifestreaming project. Every day for 365 days, Len and co-founder Daniel Honigman were going to get a different person to write about their experience that day. If you will, a crowdsourced diary for 2010: the3six5 Project.

Just under a month in and c.250,000 site views later, the project is growing into something with real currency AND potentially long lasting value. Before we get into the interview with Len and Daniel, here are a few early thoughts on why we think the project is turning out to be so interesting. As always, we’d love to hear other points of view, so please let us know what you think.

1. Currency: the3six5 mashes up three communication themes – crowdsourcing, curation and lifestreaming – neatly in one idea. (At the same time it’s a simple journal. The combination is very seductive: it feels experimental and familiar at the same time).

2. Cultural value: if the entries continue in the vein set down so far, it’s a time capsule of intensely individual thoughts. One year seen through 365 different minds, gathered in one place.

3. As communication models go, a continuous, virtuous circle. Fresh, surprising content, which in turn its originators & their supporters want to promote and propagate.

4. Great content: none of the above would mean anything if the words didn’t leap off the page. And boy, do they. A lot of writers have taken Daniel & Len at their word and taken risks, others have brilliantly evoked the day and their state of mind, often to profound effect.

5. Success or failure depends on the community: The project has the chance to go wrong at any point, all it takes is a missed post. If we’re honest, that adds to the frisson around the project. It also proves yet again that crowdsourcing is no cop-out for the curators. As wonderful as everyone is, we suspect it can still feel like herding cats at times. As one of the contributors so far, I can also testify to a what-if-you-fail-to-come-up-with-anything? feeling in your gut as you sit down at the end of the day to write a post to an immovable deadline.

We caught up with Daniel and Len, to hear how it’s going so far from their perspective, as well as their hopes and expectations for the rest of the year.

The 3six5 project is nearly a month in. What’s surprised you so far?

LK/DH: We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how personal these posts have been. Often when it comes to blogging, people write about their observations of the outside, or what they suggest OTHER people should do. We encouraged our authors (listed here) to examine themselves on their day and share something that would let the reader walk away knowing a bit more about who THEY were. This is something we feel is lacking in today’s world of “social media” and are happy to see our writers are stepping outside of their comfort zone while they have the spotlight.

How are you personally finding it running the project? What have you learned?

LK/DH: One might think that having other people write a blog for you is really easy. It’s not. In fact it’s probably 10 times harder to do it this way because managing 365 people is quite difficult. Not only are we in constant flux in terms of our schedule of writers, but some of our more “famous” writers are hard to get a hold of when quick deadlines are approaching.

One of our most recent challenges was receiving a post from one of our authors in Haiti. He was there helping with providing medical treatment to a rural village (one day before the earthquake) but didn’t have access to the internet. We ended up writing the post for him as he dictated his writing to us via the local phone. Things like this put us “on call” quite a bit. It’s extremely important that we don’t miss a day because it will take away from the macro result this project is aiming to produce.

That being said, there’s a laundry list of things we’re learning (only 22 days in) about this project, by the end of this, the case study on how we managed it will probably be just as interesting as the 365 day story that ultimately was created.

Content-wise, do you think there are some themes emerging?

LK/DH: There are two themes emerging in this launch month.

The first is the past. We’ve stressed to our authors that we don’t want them pre-planning their posts or picking days like anniversaries, birthdays, etc because it will cause them to write about something that happened earlier in their life, rather than what is happening that day. As the project is meant to be a chronological story, it is key that people reference how the present influenced their life and thoughts. That being said, we cannot escape the past either. People have done a great job with taking anecdotes from their earlier lives and weaving them into the present.

The second theme has been technology. Based on our set of authors, and the age we live in, the topic of technology is going to show up. It’s a utility in our life just like water, electricity, or transportation, it’s just a lot more fun to talk about because it evolves faster than any other utility out there.

What do you hope to achieve by the end of the year with this?

LK/DH: We have a few basic goals for this project right now, but they will obviously continue to evolve as we learn more.

First of all, If we reach success by day 365, then that will not be the last day of the project. We’ve received far more applications from people wanting to be authors than we could possibly fit into a mere 365 days. That being the case, if the demand to read/write these posts is still high, then we will begin again in 2011. (That’s when interns become a very serious consideration for us in effort to maintain our sanity).

Secondly, we want to be able to create something tangible out of this digital project. We’re already having discussions with other artists about collaborating to create a creative mash up of our words and their visual/audible works of art. Additionally, if it is financially viable, we would love to turn the end project into a book for all our authors. The 365 people who create this story deserve to have some kind of memory on their shelf. It would be incredibly rewarding to be able to give them that for free.

Thirdly, we want to walk away knowing 365 people a little bit better. This current iteration of the web has made it incredibly easy to meet people, but it has made it much harder to KNOW people. Through the posts, and the correspondences we have with our authors on the back-end, we’re developing new relationships with people that we never would have encountered in life otherwise. This alone, makes the project worth managing.

**

Check out the 3six5 project here and follow the project on Twitter here

Follow Len on Twitter

Follow Daniel on Twitter

Look out for Ben‘s post, due up on February 2

And, for a great introduction to the project ahead of its launch, we strongly recommend you also check out @Brainpicker’s interview last year with them both.

We were stopped in our tracks by this concept video from the design consultancy Berg for Bonnier R&D. There is a fluidity and beauty to the design that suggests a significant step forward from the first generation, ‘push button’ e-readers. We particularly liked the fact the prototype (which makes its debut around 1 minute in) suggests it has been designed to create a better reading experience, as opposed to recreating slavishly the experience of reading a magazine. Not that this has been ignored: Berg make the point that magazines still arrive in separate issues, for the simple reason that “people like the sense of completion at the end of each.”

You move through the magazine by scrolling articles placed side-by-side (they call it a ‘mountain range’) and whilst they were aiming to create a “a space for quiet reading. It’s pleasant to have an uncluttered space”, you can heat up the words and pics to share, comment, and to dig into supplementary material. It certainly seems a logical and neat way to resolve the oft-discussed need to balance our thirst for more, more, more information, with the requirement to concentrate on one thing from time to time.

If you’ve been following the fortunes of e-readers, none of this may sound particularly radical. The bit that’s impressive is the execution. And, in their own words, Bonnier are interested in “sparking a discussion around the digital reading experience in general, and digital reading platforms in particular.”

That discussion is certainly happening. Aside from the general rants and evangelism, there are more balanced points of view on the topic, not to mention an excellent follow-up post here from Tim Maly at Bookfuturism that examines the operational, production process piece missing (possibly inevitable at concept stage…) and why it’s important. Well worth the read. There’s clearly huge scope for development: our own Richard Schatzberger notes the multimedia opportunities haven’t been looked at deeply enough. “The move to magtabs will start to break down the barriers between web broadcast and print. Live news playing inside the article about the same subject, your friends opinions connected to the content, live audio conversations about the story as you read it (like being in a coffee shop and hearing everyone talk about an article in the times).”

Either way, we liked the concept and we look forward to seeing where Berg and Bonnier take it. One thing is for sure:

“Ebook readers will be completely different in 2020. And paperback books will in all likelihood still be very much around, and pretty much the same.” Comment from tcarmody on Bookfuturism’s “Nostalgic Myopia” post

Here’s the introductory post in full from Matt Webb, MD of Berg London.

Thanks to James Higgs (@higgis) for pointing us in the direction of the articles above, not to mention the discussions he’s been sparking of his own.

What’s even more impressive, for us, is that this was all achieved in one take, with no editing done afterwards. Apparently there were 40 takes in total, and this was the last, completed at 8pm on the last day of the shoot. When you see how finely timed this is you’ll see why we’re in awe of the production.

There’s a great interview with the Director, Jamie Rafn, on the Shots site which goes into detail about how the piece was shot and some of the considerations that affected how it turned out. Definitely worth checking this out. Rafn took on a challenge many others thought impossible. As Mick Mahoney, BBH London Creative Director of the project told us:

“Every director we spoke to told us that it wasn’t possible to do what we wanted. That we would need concealed cuts and so on. Which would still have made a good film, but it’s the undertaking, the commitment, of doing it all in one take that makes it.  Jamie Rafn was the only director who felt the same. Getting Robert Carlyle to do it then just took it up a gear. He has exactly the screen persona that we wanted. Tough, uncompromising, enigmatic.”

The inspiration came straight from the brand. Mahoney talks about the relentless, unstoppable progress, & tough, no-nonsense men that marched the brand forward: “Justin and I decided that the best way to realise it would be a single continuous take. No cuts, no cheats. Just a genuine, bullish progression”.

We were curious about what came first, the time frame or the idea, but Mahoney’s clear that time length was never an issue. “It just so happens that that was how long it took to tell the story. We were concerned though that it was going to end up too long. But we felt that if the performance was strong enough and the single take mesmerising enough we would be ok.”

Although one would expect us to be heavily biased (and yes, we are), we think it’s very strong work.

For a start it’s one of those pieces of content that you look at and wonder how on earth it was done, so it has that element of magic that’s so important for a propagation-based media approach (this was produced originally as a film for internal use, with zero formal media budget behind it).

Second, in a world that feels at times mesmerized by the new, the shiny, the glossy (and we’re certainly guilty of swaying in that direction occasionally here at BBH Labs), it’s actually delightfully refreshing to watch something that takes that long to watch, that involves relatively little post, and is, in effect, a piece of film that could have been shot decades ago (someone far more expert than us will surely be sharpening their pencil to tell us that this is in fact not the case).

But more than anything, it’s a reminder of the awesome power of a story, well-told. At BBH Labs, we’re heavily into the role of new forms of narrative from brands that involve audiences in novel ways. We’re also into forms of storytelling that use emerging technology platforms to engage people more deeply, particular across platforms, and in a social fashion (see our posts on interactive storytelling & the art of storytelling, for example). “The Man Who Walked Around the World” is, in one sense at least, back to the future. It’s long form, it’s linear, it’s free of special effects. Yet it engages because the story is strong, the delivery is (as far as we can tell) flawless, and the role of the brand – whilst central – is carefully nuanced.

As one of our favorite media thinkers, Griffin Farley, of agency 22squared, rightly points out when discussing the piece on his ‘Propagation Planning’ blog, it’s frequently the case that online video features fly-by-night production and little (if any) talent. That’s not to say that this rough & fast approach can’t work (it very often does), but when something of tangibly better quality comes onto the radar, it’s a reminder of the value that can derive from spending a little more time and money on making the production stand out. Yet it’s also a reminder of the power of a well-written story, told exceptionally well.

Watch out for plans to develop & extend the platform. We think this story is just beginning.

CREDITS

Brand: Johnnie Walker whisky

Agency: BBH London

Agency Producer: Ruben Mercadel

Creative Director: Mick Mahoney

Creative: Justin Moore

Planner: Lisa Matchett

Business Director: Jason Cobbold

Business Director: Pablo de Arteaga

Director: Jamie Rafn

Production: HLA

Producer: Stephen Plesniak

Director of Photography: George Richmond

Post Production: Glassworks London

Editor: Kate Owen

Launched last month under their Puffin label, We Make Stories is the latest in a long line of digital publishing innovations masterminded by Jeremy Ettinghausen (@jeremyet), Penguin’s Digital Publisher.  This is the second piece we’ve done in recent months looking at the publishing industry as a whole.  Back in May we wrote about the transformational change going on at TMG in the UK (also check out the ever brilliant Nieman Lab for a far deeper examination of journalism in this respect).  Why are we so interested in what’s going on here? In short, we’re witnessing a radical re-shaping of an industry we believe we can learn a lot from. An industry which – aside from its sheer cultural importance in the first place – has been experimenting with new creative & organisational solutions for some time now.

The launch of the new service from Penguin was a good excuse to catch up with Jeremy and find out what he’s learned from this and other past projects, as well as ask him to share his thoughts on the future of digital publishing, the struggle to monetise content & services online, the impact of the web on storytelling and finally, what role he sees for brands in this space.  So just a couple of meaty topics then…

Before we get much further, a recap on some of the interactive projects Jeremy’s been responsible for during his 12 years at Penguin, which include an early foray into Second Life and the insanely audacious wikinovel project, A Million Penguins:

And, more recently, the award winning digital fiction project We Tell Stories:

The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, a story you follow as it unfolds across a map of the world

Which brings us to Penguin’s latest interactive project, We Make Stories.  The service strikes us as a wonderfully designed, useful tool to help children create, print and share their own stories in different forms. If you want to know more about the site, check out the Penguin blog on the subject and the site itself. It also includes some tips on storytelling that wannabee grown-up writers might do well to read.

Labs: On your blog you describe WMS as part of a experimental new approach for Penguin, the creation of a publishing service versus conventional content. Could you tell us a little more about that?

JE: I guess my interest in creating services comes from all the debate about the falling price of digital content. At Penguin we spend a lot of time discussing what we can charge for content – whether it’s for ebooks, iphone applications, or print titles. I’ve also been thinking about the music business – how sales of music have become a loss leader for other music services such as concerts, merchandise and access to artists. So I’ve been thinking about what our expertise is as publishers, and whether it is transferable from content into services that people might pay for. What do we know that we can sell, and who can we sell it to?

Labs: Where did the idea come from?

JE: It is a cliche but the idea came from watching my children, particularly my son and his (obsessive) computer use. I tried to get him creating a comic using comiclife which is an excellent and really sophisticated tool to create comic books. This gave me the idea to produce similar storymaking tools specifically designed for young readers and writers. When I started looking I couldn’t believe that there was nothing similar out there.

We Make Stories: Ettinghausen's 'research assistant' shows him how it's done

Labs: What about the behind-the-scenes practicalities of producing a project like this?

JE: We started seriously thinking about the site nearly a year ago and spent a few months finding developers who shared our ideas about how the site might work. We’ve actually used four different developers to build the various tools which has been a challenge, but has given each of the tools their own identity. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about user experience, particularly with the audience the site has aimed at. There is a huge range of abilities and experience in the target age group (6-12 year olds) and we’ve been conscious about creating tools that are child-appropriate but also sophisticated enough for children who have grown up gaming to enjoy. It’s been a really interesting process – happily I have a tester at home who has provided me with unfiltered feedback at every step of the way!

Labs: What would you have done differently with the site, knowing what you know now?  Do you have any plans to develop the site further?

JE: We are making some tweaks to the site – nothing major, but adding a walkthrough video so people can see what they are paying for in advance and being a little more blatant about the fact that it is not a free service. If all goes well, I’d love to add further tools (perhaps looking at sponsored tools) and make it a deeper and richer experience.

Labs: There’s a huge amount of discussion and opinion at the moment about the ‘free economy’: the expectation that services and content online should be provided free, with monetisation occurring when you offer an upgraded experience in some way. Did you consider offering a free version of WMS?

JE: With the budget we had we didn’t really have the option to offer a free version and add enough material to make a premium version worth paying for. We are looking at how we might offer schools a free trial. One of the things about the site is that we are not using it as a stealth marketing route to sell books – it’s about selling a service, not selling books. If we didn’t charge for it there would be no business justification for it to exist.

Labs: What about the criticism that Penguin is getting children to write stories to which Penguin then owns the publishing rights?

JE: We have to include legal language in the terms and conditions which allows us to reproduce, transmit, publish and display the stories, but the children retain ownership of copyright and other rights in the material they have created.

Labs: How have/will you judge success?  How is the site doing so far?

JE: So far so good – unlike previous projects I’ve been involved in (http://wetellstories.co.uk and http://amillionpenguins.com) wemakestories can be judged by sales and revenue, not simply traffic and attention. I’m discovering that money is a very focussing force.

Labs: What do you see as the key emerging trends in the publishing industry? Where do you see publishing in 18-36 months’ time?

JE: It’s been an interesting year in digital publishing and I don’t see the converging pressures on publishers easing at any point soon. There are going to be all sorts of channels for us to try and reach readers and one of the challenges is choosing which channels to go down and what deals we should strike. I think everyone is scared of doing a deal now that comes back to bite us in the ass 18months from now, which probably makes publishers look more luddite than they really are.

Labs: Technology seems to have had an explosive impact on the industry.  In terms of hardware like Kindle, through to the fact there are so many new ways to tell stories: cross-platform, interactive etc How would you describe technology’s impact on storytelling?

Labs: Do you think interactive storytelling improves the reader experience?

JE: I’m going to link these two questions together because I think that technology is not simply impacting on the way that readers interact with stories, but on the way that people interact with content. I was struck by the comments of Fred Wilson when the Kindle first launched “I don’t want to consume media that I can’t interact with,” he wrote. “When I come into contact with media, I want to do something with it. Tag it, post it, reply to it, comment on it, favorite it, share it, gift it, quote it, whatever … When are people going to understand that digital media, be it a book, a song, a film, an article, or whatever else, is not passive media. That was analog’s gig.” So I think that the change in reader expectation is the significant thing, not that we can tell stories across different platforms. The great web movement is towards openness and collaboration – printed, single authored books, by their very nature, are closed. This is something that will undoubtedly change as books and stories move online.

Labs: You seem to embrace ‘remix culture’ pretty fearlessly.  How have you navigated copyright issues with previous projects?

JE: By being open and transparent about the fact that we are experimenting and don’t know all the answers.

Labs: Looking to the future, what are you excited by?

JE: Whilst not a gamer I think games are really interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can make books and the reading experience more playful and game-like. Levelling-up would make most experiences more interesting.

Labs: Do you see a role for brands working with Penguin in future?

JE: Definitely – we love partnerships that can bring us and our authors to a new potential audience. We’ve already worked with some awesome partners and since, as a general trade publisher, we publish for every age-group and demographic there are spaces around the Penguin list for all sorts of relationships.

Labs: What advice would you offer a brand looking to partner a publisher?

JE: As with any other partnership – everyone’s got to have a win. For Penguin the wins have historically been the ability to reach (and sell books to) a new or clearly defined audience. But cash also works.

Labs: Penguin has a longstanding, much celebrated heritage of great design.  Again, recently we’ve seen some stunning limited edition collections.  Not to mention the Flickr sets dedicated to vintage Penguin bookcover design… Is design something you see as key to Penguin’s future?

JE: Definitely – there is so much competition out there for people’s attention and their money. So everything we sell should be remarkable, both in terms of content and as a product. We’re really flattered when we see people using Penguin’s iconographic design creatively, like this and this – it’s a lovely position to be in.

Labs: Could you tell us a little bit about what your job involves?

JE: As Digital Publisher at Penguin Books I am responsible for examining and developing new methods, technologies and business opportunities for Penguin to promote, sell and distribute the works of our authors. A proportion of my job is focussed on ebooks and working with sales teams to make sure that the right books are getting to the right channels. But as our definitions of book and story and indeed author stretch, and the variety of channels grows, so does the opportunity to spend time doing creative digital publishing and inventing new forms.

Labs: What’s been  your proudest achievement at Penguin?

JE: Probably We Tell Stories winning the best in show at the SXSW Interactive awards. I’m also perversely proud of producing the wikinovel A Million Penguins, described on several blogs as ‘the worst novel ever’.

Labs: What persuaded you to get into publishing in the first place?

JE: It was as an accident – I went to journalism school, learned to type and got a job at Penguin as a temporary secretary. I realised that publishing was full of smart interesting people who didn’t mind me reading books at my desk, and that was that.

Labs: Finally, which other publishers (companies, individuals) do you admire most and why?

JE: Harlequin (in the US) – out of all publishers they seem to be the most reader focussed.

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To conclude, lots to chew on here, but our initial thoughts in terms of the implications for brands and marketing are as follows -

1. Marketing as Service, Service as Marketing. Tangible services and products you can share, discuss, review are marketing and PR platforms in their own right. Obvious conclusion no.1: think about how your marketing campaign is helping people do stuff better, quicker; would they pay for the privilege? Conclusion no.2: think about talkability at the outset when you’re designing new services.  Conclusion no.3: brands need to do more to explore their own territories in this respect: create platforms, partnerships etc.  We’re seeing more and more brands behaving like this, but it still feels like early days.

2. Commercial accountability only gets more important, not less. Whether it’s the economy or the nature of interactions on the web, nowadays there is both more pressure & more opportunity to create and measure direct commercial impact.  Or put another way, more pressure to demonstrate the value of brands as intangible assets.

3. Experimental thinking is nothing without experimental doing. And the importance of a company culture that encourages this.  Was the wiki novel (the sheer audacity of which we love) a failure or a success?  Discuss. Okay, so we’ve revealed our bias already – but at the very least it laid the ground for future Penguin projects that perhaps have been deemed ‘successful’ in the more conventional sense of the word.

4. If It’s Digital, It Must Be Interactive. In a wholly digitised future, is there any room for content you can’t interact with, content you can only passively consume (in other words, get with the program or die with analogue?) OR conversely, in future will there be secret libraries with zero connectivity where nostalgic readers can go sit, smell the pages of old books and read in Zen-like contemplation?

5. The Rise and Rise of Game Culture. Because games are by their very nature interactive…Jeremy is not alone in being excited by how gaming can invigorate storytelling, often blending real and virtual worlds.  The likes of Campfire already do this with considerable style (their Frenzied Waters work out earlier this month just one recent example), with Mike Monello also drawing our attention to The Hidden Park iPhone app with his comment on our recent Foursquare Town Holler post.

As always, please let us know what you think.  In the meantime, a big thank you to Jeremy for the interview. In his own words: “I guess I feel strongly that in good times, experimentation is a luxury and in bad times perhaps it’s a necessity.”  Amen to that.

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….