KNOWLEDGE

The three core concepts central to our thinking about the current media landscape are:

• Transmedia Entertainment
The flow of stories, images, characters, information, and sounds across media channels in a coordinated fashion which facilitates a deepening and expansion of the consumer’s experience.

• Participatory Culture
The ways consumers interact with media content, media producers, and each other as they experiment with and explore the resources available to them in the expanded media landscape. Consumers become active participants shaping the creation, circulation, and interpretation of media content. Such experiences deepen their “emotional investment” in the media property, expanding their awareness of both content and brand.

• Experiential Marketing
The development of approaches to branding and marketing which play out across multiple media channels so that the consumer’s identification with the product is deepened each time they re-encounter the brand in a new context.

SO WHAT?

These changes are generating a movement from impressions to "expressions", from intellectual property to emotional capital. Such approaches may be the key to breaking through a cluttered and fragmented media environment, relying on the consumers themselves to help knit together information and impressions gathered from multiple media experiences.

The convergence of "Madison + Vine" calls for a renegotiation of expectations between media content producers and advertisers; this new environment also requires a renegotiation of expectations between media producers and consumers, one that starts by shifting from "consumers" to "participants."

Advertisers are seeking new ways to engage consumers with their brands, embedding brand messages into entertainment content via product placements, extending the brand message into new interactive spaces, or building brand cultures which reward the most active and hardcore consumers.

Such experiments require monitoring if the most valuable insights about the media are going to shape future development in this area. Miscalculations may alienate rather than engage consumers, damage brands rather than enhance them. At such transitional moments, established wisdom becomes less valuable, requiring new research.