Steve Sponder's Blog

Transmedia Lens Framework

Further to my briefing on the Paid, Owned and Earned Media model I've been thinking about how it could be evolved in order to be a more robust planning tool and have come up with the following thoughts.

I think four criteria can be used to catagorise the different forms of media 1) is there a direct cost for placing the content/message 2) who owns the media and 3) what editiorial control does the brand have with regards to the the content/message that's being placed and lastly 4) what generation of exposure are we achieving.

So the resulting media catagories look like this...

Paid Media

• Direct Cost - Yes
• Editorial Control - Partial
• Ownership - No
• Generation of exposure - 1st
• Examples: advertising on commerical media such as radio, TV, websites, newspapers and magazines, cinema, 48 sheets, bus sides.

 Owned Media

• Direct Cost - No
• Editorial Control - Full
• Ownership - Full
• Generation of exposure - 1st
• Examples: website, blog, email, catalog, packaging, vehicle livery, owned retail stores.

Network Media

This is an additonal media catagory, these forms of media are controlled by people or organisations which you have a relationship with to the extent to which they will consider placing your content/message. It is helpful to think of these as the media plaftorms of your network.

• Direct Cost - No
• Editorial Control - No
• Ownership - No
• Generation of exposure - 1st
• Examples: media relations, blogger relations, community relations.

Borrowed Media

This is an additonal media catagory, these are forms of media that your organisation is borrowing so although you have psudo control you can not stop the platform from being closed or from competitor content from being displayed alongside yours.

• Direct Cost - No
• Editorial Control - Partial
• Ownership - No
• Generation of exposure - 1st
• Examples: social network accounts such as Twitter or Facebook, public places used for guerilla tactics and location-based PR stunts.

Earned Media (aka word-of-mouth, buzz, 'viral' effect)

• Direct Cost - No
• Editorial Control - No
• Ownership - No
• Generation of exposure - beyond 1st
• Examples: people using their own media for your content/message; sharing, tweets, comments, likes, check-ins, reviews, bookmarking and general conversation.

The paid, owned, earned media model is one of the fastest adopted marketing related models I think I've ever seen. However it's interesting to see how it is being adapted and misinterpreted to the point where it could become useless.

It was first seen in the wild on Dan Goodall's (@dagood) blog in March 2009, although in his blog post he used the terms 'Owned, Bought and Earned'. He spoke about how it was an approach that he had been using internally at Nokia over the previous 12mths. With regards to Dan's definition of earned media he talks about creating 'something so cool or interesting that people want to use their own media to tell others about it, and hence you earned media'. I've spoken previously about creating value content in my post 'The 5 types of Social Currency'.

Later that year in December Forrester's Sean Corcoran (@seancor) brought the model to a wider audience in the blog post 'Defining Earned, Owned And Paid Media'. They put more meat on the bone by using examples to show which media sat in within each category. They gave viral, word of mouth and buzz as examples of earned media. So far so good.

After that we had a flurry of revised models which attempted to enhance Forresters. In March 2010 Dave Fleet (@davefleet) suggested that instead of the brands social media accounts being within the owned media category they should be in a category of their own called Social Media. In principle that makes sense to me as a brands gives up some control within these media spaces.

In November 2010 McKinsey weighed in and suggested adding 'Sold' and 'Hi-jacked' to the categories plus they gave some more examples of earned media; 'Organic search placement, consumer ratings and reviews' - again this makes perfect sense to me.

Interestingly, the focus and nearly all examples from all models and iteration appear to be online at this stage.

Since then we've had an explosion of variants and mutations from various agencies across the whole industry landscape.

Click here to download:

Paid_Owned_Earned_Mutants.pptx (987 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Paid_Owned_Earned_Mutants.pptx (987 KB)

Some agencies and individuals are true to the Dan Goodall and Forrester definition of earned media, WOM, buzz, viral, basically when people become the media, passing the brands message and content on to others. It goes without saying that this will only happen if the message and/or content is worth passing on.

The other definition of earned media appears to be related to PR activity, or more specifically to media relations. Forrester recognised this when they say 'Earned media is an old PR term that essentially meant getting your brand into free media rather than having to pay for it through advertising. However the term has evolved into the transparent and permanent word-of-mouth that is being created through social media.'

Unfortunately, some are including media relations and blogger relations within the earned media definition e.g. Wikipedia, Ketchum, Halogen Media Group and Dave Fleet 

From a communications perspective people are now closer to each other and organisations are now closer to their markets. These new realities mean we need to challenge received wisdom when it comes to marcoms strategies because these strategies were designed for a different communications landscape. 

We need to reboot marcoms to ensure we have relevant, balanced strategies. Here are three strategic objectives that we should be introducing and actively planning how we're going to work towards achieving them.

Increase value based activity

We need to dial down the use of messages in campaigns and dial up the use of value. Conventional thinking was about broadcasting a message and if you look at advertising campaigns those messages often have entertainment value wrappers. Today we need to make sure we are doing stuff that has value at its core as more and more people are either saying 'What's in it for me?' or 'stop saying and start doing'. This could still be entertainment value but could also be another type such as utility, monetary, information or emotive.

For more on value based marcoms and social currency see - http://blog.stevesponder.com/how-valuable-is-your-social-currency

Reduce reliance on paid media

With the rise of owned, borrowed and network media options, we need to aim for a more balanced media mix. This means investing in these alternative media platforms so they are viable options that can be called upon as required and therefore a calculated reduction in paid media expenditure. It is also worth thinking about paid, owned, network and borrowed media as a means to an end, with the end being earned media, aka word of mouth, aka buzz, aka viral effect.

Join more conversations 

The opportunity to join conversations is a completely new dimension of communications which should be front and central of any marcoms strategy. This communication channel which is not only up close and personal but also public, is alien for most organisations but it is here and here to stay. We need to dial up the amount of investment that enables brands to join conversations and therefore dial down the amount of conversation starting (campaigns).

If we reboot marcoms strategies and in doing so introduce these three strategic intents we will be going some way to helping build valuable, sustainable brands.

Conversations about Transmedia have been very healthy recently, with both Brain Clark's (@gmdclark) 'Reclaiming Transmedia Storytelling' post and Brooke Thompson's (@imbri) 'Transmedia is killing Hollywood will kill Transmedia' post generating thought provoking discussion in the form of hundreds of comments. Most of the transmediarati (did I just coin that? :) were present including @imbri @gmdclark @mikemonello @vipsteve @lanceweiler @robpratten @goonth @garyphayes and @4dfiction 

These guys really know their stuff with many of them behind some of the most progressive entertainment and digital marketing projects over the last decade. However, there doesn't appear to be a general agreement on what is and isn't transmedia between them and I suppose that's partly down to

• storytelling as an activity is used by different vertical and horizontal market sectors, although mainly in entertainment and marketing
• the term is fairly new and therefore open to interpretation and manipulation
• people are using the following terms interchangeably; media, media channel, media platform, media properties (I've produced a diagram that outlines the differences, which I'll post if people would find it useful)

Remember Web 2.0? Maybe it would of been easier if Henry Jenkins had used the term Entertainment 2.0 instead :P

So, one of the aspects of the discussion appears to be about should the definition for transmedia be nailed down, be more specific and maybe closer to what Henry Jenkins first outlined or can it be broader and through some criteria or classification could it include various types of output.

Working with leading film studios and game publishers to launch their titles across UK and Europe it's maybe not surprising that I would like to see the later, as the transmedia party looks pretty good and I'd like in on it. I also see the huge benefits of baking the marketing into the product (I'll leave that for another post). So, I thought I'd have a stab at creating something which would provide this criteria and I ended up using 3 lenses. My thinking has been shaped in no small part by the transmediarati (most of them mentioned above) plus @christydena

As you can see below I'm suggesting there are three lenses, Origination, Purpose and Architectural. My thinking is that any output would meet one criteria from each lens. So for example 'Star Wars' would be Brownfield, Franchise and Storyworld. Why So Serious? would be Greenfield, Marcoms and Story.

I've been hearing a fair bit about news-jacking recently, both in terms of the descriptor and the actual activity of brands contributing to something which has captured people’s attention.

Now don't get me wrong I'm right behind the activity in fact I blogged about it in my 2009 post about social currency. However, I've been using a different term, meme riding. Which brings me to the point of this post, I don't like the term news jacking, let me explain why.

First off it has connotations of hijacking which is not the right mind-set to be in at all. This is about joining a conversation not hijacking it, would you attempt to hijack a conversation in a pub, no of course you wouldn't.

Secondly, I don't think ‘news’ is broad enough. A meme is an idea, activity or information that is gaining attention, they are conversations which are growing and getting louder. Can the news media be the springboard or the platform that helps them grow? Sure but that doesn’t mean we should call it news-jacking, because these memes don't have to come via the news media. 

T-Mobile’s Flashmob in Liverpool Street Tube station is a great example of how a brand joined a meme that was a growing trend not a news item and a number of brands jump on-board the Chatroulette meme to the benefit of their marketing efforts.

I think the reason this label is being used is partly because this activity is related to a PR tactic, but this meme riding opportunity is quite different and a new label is useful in order to make this point.

Meme riding case studies v1.0

This is the third and last in a series of posts looking at the new tools available in the creative toolkit. Previously I looked at Data and Location.

Looking at 11 case studies in the presentation below you can see how 'time' can be used to great effect whether it be a live or real-time element like Old Spice did in their 'The man your man could smell like' or joining a conversation about a subject that's getting alot of attention.

As always please comment and if you like what you see please tweet about it.

This is the second in a series of posts looking at the new tools available in the creative toolkit. Last post I looked at Data and how it was now an extremley powerful creative tool.

This post looks at how location is providing creatives with huge opportutunies. I've tried to keep clear of the obvious experiential and PR stunt case studies and instead show how geo-location can be used as well as looking at the pop-up trend and how it's mutating.

As always please comment and if you like what you see please tweet about it.

This is the first in a series of posts that explore the new creative toolkit.

It is clear that brands now exist in a world with a growing number of communication and media channels. Each mutation of channels presenting new creative communication opportunities for creative teams that are skilled in the use of the toolkit.

Words and pictures were the original tools in the toolkit, working well for the broadcast media of the time. These were enhanced by William Bernbach in the '60s who had the insight to join these two skills together therefore creating the copywriter/art director teams which became the de facto model.

We fast forward to the late '90s with the introduction of the Web when we gained a new tool, interactivity, a tool that the majority of traditional agencies found difficult to get their creative teams to learn or to collaborate with interactive specialists, whilst the young digital agencies adopted it as their own and showed brands how powerful it could be.

Today, things have got a whole lot more interesting, we have three new tools that enable us to craft creative concepts; data, location and time. And agencies are again finding it difficult to get their creative teams to learn or collaborate with specialists who are skilled in these new tools.

To illustrate the use of these new tools I've looked at various case studies over the last few years. Some are well known others are not, some had large budgets others did not. Most case studies have used multiple tools however they have a dominant one.

The data tool is alien to most traditional creatives as it can be seen as cold, sterile and intangible. However it is a very powerful tool and increasingly so, as more and more of our daily activities take place via digital platforms leaving a data imprint, the sea of data that can be mined and used to craft creative concepts is mind-blowing.

Have you noticed that there appears to be a growing number of weird and wonderful campaigns coming out of various agencies across the world?