One Child Transmedia-Storytelling Experience
The Client: Enthrill Entertainment
Description: What happens when a best-selling author approaches an award winning experience based marketing firm? Well, a little something called a Transmedia-Storytelling Thriller… the project (slash/book) was named, “One Child” by Jeff Buick.
A couple years ago, Jeff Buick heard our fearless leader, Kevin Franco, speaking at a conference about immersive marketing and creating brand experiences. He was intrigued and approached Francomedia to see how we could do an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) as part of his next thriller novel.
We had some interesting ideas, but it just wasn’t enough. Over time, Jeff assembled a dream team of business professionals to form a new digital publishing company called Enthrill Entertainment. Kevin Franco of our little company was also a co-founder. Enthrill’s mission became ‘enlighten, engage and entertain’ which we set out to do with our first thriller, One Child.
Even as late as 3 months before launch date, we were still developing an ARG… but it just didn’t seem right. Thriller readers aren’t ARG players. We figured that out - so we began working on an immersive experience for the novel.
Our Heroics: What we put together was an experience like no other. The first Transmedia Thriller. Nice, but what does that even mean.
Jeff wrote a fantastic story following the lives of several people, seemingly un-related, over a 30 day period in the summer of 2010. We decided to release the story in real-time as it happened, over those 30 days. In addition, we created social media profiles for each of the characters, allowing readers to engage with, interact with and follow along with characters in the story, as if they were real people. Some characters also had blogs and twitter posts that pre-dated the story and added a character depth never before seen in a new novel before.
We took this a step further even, building web sites for fictitious corporations in the novel, including one in Russian. This added another layer of story-telling as now you could learn more about the company and how it may be perceived in the ‘real world’ - you know, ‘how a legitimate corporation could look with all the flaws behind the exterior corporate walls.’
We even created a faux radio station that broadcast fresh audio everyday with news reports that incorporated actual events happening in New York and the rest of the world, coupled with the news and events happening within our story. Each new day in the story begins with a radio broadcast. Again, adding another layer to the story and making the experience that much more in-depth. Readers began to question their own reality during the 30 day experiment. Our blending of fact and fiction (or faction as we called it) really added to the story and gave readers an emotional roller-coaster, more so than a traditional thriller would.
Our online book incorporated a sound track, a fine grouping of compositions put together by heavy metal guitarist, Rick Plester (unbelievable talent) - which helped to set the mood as you read various segments in the book.
In addition to all of that, we re-created and filmed 4 segments of the book. So, if you read one of the news reports you could click it and watch it, right there on your iPad or desktop reader.
Which brings us to the technology we incorporated to make this all happen. There was a lot, not so much in way of developing it but manipulating it to do things differently than they’ve ever been done before. We had a some help in doing this.
The result? Well, we had several hundred people part-take in our live 30 day roll out and thousands of people read the book in the various formats (8 ISBN numbers). There are numerous postings and reviews on both the book and the live experience online - check them out.
QUOTABLE
“Creating a transmedia-storytelling experience is a lot like being placed into a vacuum. You live it, breath it, non-stop for months on end. If you are thinking of doing this, think again… it does you.”
-Kevin Franco