Transmedia Brands: Are Automobiles the Pioneer of Transmedia Storytelling in Non-Entertainment Products?

Most of the transmedia scholars and practitioners agree that transmedia storytelling (TM) is not limited to entertainment contexts but also applicable to a wide variety of non-entertainment brands including political figures like Obama, consumer goods like Coca Cola, or sport franchises like WWE. Transmedia is an equally relevant and lucrative strategy for non-entertainment brands. Audi 5, for example, is found out to be one of the most engaged brands on Facebook and, similarly, Coca Cola, Starbucks, and Obama are among the most popular Facebook fan pages in a list surrounded by several entertainment brands like Eminem, Gaga, and Bieber. Despite its huge potential, transmedia hasn’t fully utilized this promise in non-entertainment product categories. In the contemporary marketplace, every product and brand has the entertainment zest or at least the potential for it. In Rob Kozinets’s words:

‘Consumer culture and pop entertainment culture have collided and intermingled…Soda pop and pop culture. Marketed together, and marketed the same ways.’

I am very much interested in transmedia brands and how TM can be utilized by brand managers to tell stories of brands across social and traditional media platforms. While trying to understand the extent and the ways transmedia can be applied to non-entertainment products, I came across several examples of automobiles\cars that employed these transmedia principles as part of their IMC and branding strategies. Full-fledged transmedia projects that use variety of media platforms where stories are systematically distributed and coordinated are still very limited in number. Even in this particular product category. Yet, some IMC campaigns of cars -- although in varying degrees -- make use of TM principles: creating intertextual, layered and complex brand stories, coordination and use of multiple media platforms to disperse some back stories, and worldbuilding.

Creating and perpetuating deep brand meaning through narrative –– the narrative view of brands–– is not new to marketing scholars. Although a brand’s use of stories is not sufficient to label any IMC campaign as transmedia, I think, it is an important early stage of transmediation. In a marketplace and mediascape where most of the brand building and brand development strategies are dominated by studying brands as collective of associations –– attributes or benefits that differentiate a brand from competing brands –– changing the lens to the narrative view would definitely help with the transition of non-entertainment brands to the transmedia-scape.

Several car brands recently adopted this narrative view. In spite of the general car commercials that focus on the attributes of the cars like reliability, precision (e.g. Honda ) safety etc. , Toyota’s Happy Camry Family commercial, for example, portrays  each family member telling his or her own experiences and memories of Toyota Camry.  Some brand stories also embed cultural references into their stories. This intertextuality is an important characteristic of layered and complex transmedia narratives. Chrysler’s very recent Super Bowl ad story-fies this American-made car brand using the intertwined stories of the Detroit City, the American car produced for the American people, and industrialization in US. The commercial stresses that this is the backstory of Chrysler as told by the people living in that Motor City. Moreover, Eminem’s story as a rebellious rapper from Detroit adds some depth and layer to Chrysler’s brand story.  Similarly, the latest Volkswagen commercial The Force uses one of the well-known cultural references of the American popular culture – Star Wars.  The commercial, in a very emotionally engaging way, tells the story of a girl who is in love with Star Wars –– the pink rooms, the dolls, yes I think it is a girl –– and her failed attempts of using her Force.

Besides using narratives and cultural references, some IMC campaigns perform worldbuilding practices through coordinated storytelling across a multitude of media platforms. By creating stories that cannot be fully explored within a single work or even a single medium, these producers court consumers across media platforms. This is one of the basic principles of transmedia storytelling. In 2001, BMW released The Hire campaign, an eight-part web series directed by eight major filmmakers, including Guy Ritchie and John Woo starring Clive Owen ad Madonna. Over 21 million people watched the series on the web in its first year alone, and in four years the series has been watched by over 100 million viewers. In addition to DVDs and streaming, BMW extended the storytelling to comic books. The Hire campaign illustrates the successful integration of content and media in an integrated marketing communications campaign to build brand visibility and awareness in a new younger target market. In addition to cross-platform consumption, The Hire also assisted with the community building for the brand.

Simiarly, Audi launched the Audi Heist campaign in 2006.  The campaign started with a viral video showing Audi 3 getting stolen from the dealership a night before the car was supposed to make its first appearance in one of the biggest auto shows in America. Participants got involved in the mission to find the stolen car by following bits and pieces of the puzzle in various mediums like ARG (Alternate Reality Game), Yellow Pages, flyers, across the Net, newspapers, and magazines. Producers’ attention to detail and authenticity in this campaign showed the importance of coordination in TM branding campaigns.

Although on a smaller scale, Mini’s latest mobile hunting game uses a similar mobile-offline transmedia involvement with the brand. Mini’s “Capture the Mini Stockholm” campaign asks participants to hunt and catch a virtual Mini in Stockholm using their mobile apps. Participants locate the virtual Mini on their app, try to get 50m close to it, and then get (possess) this virtual car.  Any other participant who gets within 50 meters can steal the car away from then-possessing participant. The objective of the game is to get\catch the virtual Mini and also to protect it for a week. If you have the Mini on your phone for a week of gaming, you win a real Mini Countryman.  So don’t be surprised if you see people running away from you on Stockholm streets ;p

Following its pioneer role in The Hire, BMW has recently started the Activate the Future campaign to create some awareness before the launch of their first electric car, BMW ActiveE.  Activate the Future campaign focuses on the concept of the future of mobility.  The campaign uses several media platforms to tell the story of the future and the mobility from the perspectives of astronauts, futurists, designers, city planners and so on. Activate the Future campaign uses documentaries, Facebook fan pages, mobile apps, twitter accounts, and also links to some books about the future and the city as media platforms. I am following BMW’s Activate the Future “Wherever You Want To Go” campaign very closely. I will blog about BMW ActiveE more in the coming weeks. Seeing Faris Yakob, a familiar name for the transmedia circles, in the steering wheel of this campaign makes me more curious about how Activate the Future campaign would unfold. Faris,  hints at the transmedia idea behind the documentaries and other media as: "The films are designed to be non-linear and hypertextual. You can explore additional pieces of content around the primary narrative."

In short, the ways we use stories for branding have changed. We have come long way from using BMW’s in James Bond’s movies as product placements. Although those were also very creative use of marketing tools at the time, we don’t only put brands in stories anymore but we create and develop stories around and about brands. My objective with this post is neither to present some recipes about extending transmedia to non-entertainment products nor to provide a roadmap. I am doing that in a journal paper. Talking about transmedia ;-) In this post, I am just playing with the question: In spite of the sporadic and idiosyncratic use of transmedia principles in non-entertainment contexts, might these many examples in a specific product category point out to a pattern that we should study further?

Unfortunately, as transmedia scholars and practitioners, our discussions are still focused on defining what transmedia is or what is not. At this juncture, more interesting questions about transmedia explore the possible and relevant manifestations of the concept like transmedia consumption (my dissertation explores that. Stay tuned!), transmedia branding, transmedia education, or transmedia activism.

What can we learn from the use of TM  in the above examples so that we can expand the application of transmedia branding strategies to wide-variety of non-entertainment brands? Can automobiles\cars be the pioneer product category that better lends itself to transmediation compared to other non-entertainment products?Is transmedia branding a good strategy for some products or brands and not for others?