Deep Media

. . . And the Final Lesson from Game of Thrones Is, "Always Support the Bottom"

When Campfire's Steve Coulson set out to create an immersive experience around the HBO production of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, he faced a now-familiar problem: How to simultaneously generate buzz for the show, introduce the story to a new audience, and provide a deeper level of engagement for fans of the book. In this case, the task was complicated by the fact that HBO audiences weren't expecting a fantasy series and that Martin fans were fiercely protective of his work. At a stellar presentation at last week's Transmedia NYC Meetup, he explained how he went about it. 

Campfire's Game of Thrones case study

An elfin figure with a shaved head and suspiciously pointy ears, Coulson worked at McCann Erickson, JWT, and crayon before being named creative director of the New York marketing agency Campfire in 2009. At Campfire he's led projects for such clients as A&E, the Discovery Channel, and Snapple in addition to HBO. He began planning the Game of Thrones experience in summer 2010, months before the February 2011 premiere of the series. At last week's meetup, he focused on what he and his team did and—just as importantly—didn't do, while tossing out the occasional lesson to be gleaned from their experience. I'm going to emphasize the lessons. 

The first task was to try to reduce the story to its essence—no small task for a series with 19 main characters and dozens of supporting characters from seven royal and noble families and a half-dozen other groups. He managed to get it down to "the power struggles and secret liaisons of dynastic families vying for control of a mythical kingdom"—not quite as pithy as "The Sopranos in Middle Earth," which is how one of the screenwriters described it, but still not bad. 

Unfortunately, this formulation led to some not-so-great solutions. Maybe they should create a social game in which players have to decide which friends to keep and which to betray? Or a game that would pit real families against other real families? Okay, maybe not. What if they explored the themes of the saga by re-imagining the seven families as luxury fashion brands? Well, not unless they wanted to do something that only made sense to serious fans of the books—and probably not even to them. 

Eventually they decided to focus not on the families but on the mythical kingdom the families were vying to control—a decision Coulson described as moving them from storytelling to world-building. To evoke this world, they hit upon the idea of appealing to the five senses—smell, sound, sight, touch, and taste. Using the senses, they could conjure up a memory of a place people had never actually been to.

So they decided to introduce a new sense each week. But this led to other problems, starting with how to convey scent on the Internet. The couldn't, of course. Instead, they turned to a real-world experience: They would make up scent boxes promising, as HBO put it in an accompanying letter, "an immersive experience of the land of Westeros," where Game of Thrones is set. The boxes would go to a small number of influencers—bloggers, reporters, George Martin fans, and the like. "Open the boxes and there's a whole world inside," Coulson told us—parchments, glass vials, and six different scents with instructions on how to combine them. "Mix them together and you'd get the smells of Westeros." As one reader commented somewhat irreverently on a Game of Thrones site, "Awesome! I bet that’ll go for a lot on eBay." Which brings us to the first lesson of the Game of Thrones experience: 

Lesson #1: In an increasingly digital world, physical objects surprise and delight. 

The Game of Thrones Scent Box

But what should the box look like? The first iteration was a beautifully designed and built of wood and brass. It was gorgeous. It was also far too bright and shiny to be believable. So they blackened it and roughed it up and ended with something that looked almost as if it might actually be an artifact of a vanished civilization. In fact, of course, it was just a cleverly designed fake. But that's the point: Making things seem like what they aren't. Coulson likened it to art forgery. I'd just call it showbiz. 

Lesson #2: Think like a forger. 

For sound, the Campfire team went back to the Web, creating a binaural soundscape—essentially, a 3-D sound effect in your head—of the Inn at the Crossroads, a popular gathering spot for the common folk of Westeros. You reached it through The Maester's Path, a site set up to engage hardcore fans by introducing a puzzle element to each of the five sensory experiences. Listening to the soundscape in the inn, for example, you could overhear various conversations. Embedded within them were clues that would enable you to solve the sound puzzle. 

The sight element was challenging not because it's hard to do online but because it's done all the time. How to make this one different? By creating a digital version of the Wall,  the 700-foot-high wall of ice that shields the seven kingdoms from the wildings that inhabit the far north. Walking the Wall on your computer screen, you encountered soldiers who would tell you how it was built and why.  

And then there was touch. The touch element, Coulson said, "started to unlock for us when we thought of 'feel' rather than 'touch.' How do things feel to you?" That led to the idea of creating a mobile app that would describe the weather where you are in terms of the weather on some part of Westeros. "A climate-driven storytelling experience," Coulson called it. "We had fun with that phrase. But it started to unlock something in our head"—because once they started thinking about of the weather app as a way to tell a story about life on Westeros, that helped them define what the app should be. Fans loved it. 

Lesson #3: If you define an experience as a story, you will find the story in the experience. 

Of course, just because you're telling a story doesn't mean you're in control of it—especially if what you're really trying to do is set out building blocks and let the audience tell the story. This became apparent early on, when Winter Is Coming, a fan blog that sprang up around the time HBO green-lit the pilot episode for the series, received a scent box. Not content with mixing scents and reading scrolls, the Winter Is Coming blogger went searching for hidden clues. After hours of searching, he found what appeared to be some very faint lettering on the back of a map of Westeros that had come in the box. He couldn't make out what it said, so he posted it on the site—where it was seen by a reader who ran it through some Photoshop filters and reported that it read, ALWAYS SUPPORT THE BOTTOM.

Huh?

A flurry of speculation ensued. Hours of careful examination proved that the box had no secret compartment on the bottom, nor was there anything on the bottom of the vials. Meanwhile, the people at Campfire were as mystified as the fans. Finally Coulson tweeted that "Support the Bottom" was not a clue. "Bummer," the blog declared. It was just an error, apparently caused by putting the liquid used to artificially age the scrolls in a container that had that stamped on its bottom. "The common theory," Winter Is Coming reported later, "is that my map was on the bottom of the pile of maps placed into this container to soak, and because of that the raised lettering on the bottom of the pan lightly transferred onto the back of my map."

But the mystery did not stop with the revelation that it was actually a mistake. By this time, Winter Is Coming had kicked up so much speculation that fans were loathe to let it go. "Always Support the Bottom" became the blog's in-house motto, a symbol of fan fanaticism. Eventually Campfire incorporated the phrase into one of its puzzles. Like the four-toed statue on Lost, "Always Support the Bottom" was making the transition from bug to feature. Winter Is Coming even started selling T-shirts with the phrase emblazoned on the chest. 

Lesson #4: Always support the bottom. 

The Always Support the Bottom T-shirt

The great thing about "Always Support the Bottom," aside from its serendipitous discovery, is that it was subject to any number of different interpretations. "'Supporting the bottom,'" Winter Is Coming declared, "has come to denote anyone who does something to assist the fandom (getting set photos, asking Martin a burning question at a book signing, etc.). Our loyal readers may be called 'bottom supporters.'" Campfire viewed "Always Support the Bottom" from a different perspective. "No community is too small to take note of," Coulson declared at last week's meetup. "You want to make sure they know you're listening."

As for the Game of Thrones TV show, it returns to HBO on April 1 in the US, April 2 in the UK. Will The Maester's Path be coming back as well? Coulson was somewhat coy in his response. "I can't say," he said. "But the second season is always about getting new fans." 

Then and Now: The Legacy of Steve Jobs

2010 Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP

Earlier this week I was asked to appear on Bloomberg Rewind, the daily TV recap hosted by Matt Miller, to talk about the legacy of Steve Jobs. Having recently finished the Walter Isaacson biography, and having a few thoughts of my own on the subject, I took it as an opportunity to grapple with a question that's bothered me for some time: Not just what Jobs left behind, but what made him great—and why that was so hard for most people to see until his business success made it so blindingly obvious. 

Jobs's accomplishments are fairly easy to summarize. Let's see: he reinvented what a personal computer could be, what an animated movie could be, what a music player could be, what an online music store could be, what a real-world tech store could be, what a mobile phone could be, what a digital tablet could be—and by many accounts he was well on his way to reinventing what television could be when he died. In the process he not only reshaped the computer business, the music business, the mobile phone business, and the retail business; he also helped lay the groundwork for the kind of deep media experiences that are transforming the way we tell stories. Along the way he engineered a reverse takeover of not one enterprise but two—Apple, when it bought NeXT in 1997 and he ended up in control, and Disney Animation, when Disney bought Pixar in 2006 and the Pixar people took control. Not bad.

The key word here is "reinvent." Jobs didn't dream up any of the gadgets that made Apple so successful. He refined them. Time and again he took ideas that were in the air, or at least in the lab, and figured out what was missing from all previous iterations. Then he re-imagined and realized them as (to borrow a phrase from my colleague Steven Levy) the perfect thing. Or as close to perfect as he and his team could humanly get. 

It's easy to look back now and say the man was a genius. It's much harder to embrace the qualities that made him that way. Having covered the 29-year-old Jobs's ouster from Apple in West of Eden, I can report that the hagiography that accompanied his death this fall had its flip side in the near-exultation that accompanied his forced exile in 1985. John Sculley, the CEO who kicked him out, was greeted at the time as Apple's savior—a bit prematurely, as it turned out. Jobs was the bratty entrepreneur who had to be sacrificed so Sculley could assume the mantle of visionary even as he churned out widgets. 

As I read Isaacson's solid and insightful account, I jotted down a whole laundry list of qualities that contributed to Jobs's eventual success. Then, taking to heart Jobs's insistence on reducing everything to its essence, I stripped those down to three interlocking attributes. If somebody could teach these in business school, the world would be a lot better off. 

1. Passion

Jobs took everything to extremes, from his vegan diet to his insistence on good design to the brutal honesty he dealt out to employees (and occasionally to journalists: the dressing-down he gave me when I stepped over the line he'd drawn for our interviews at NeXT was one of the most frightening moments I've ever experienced). But the point was, he cared. No, he wasn't a nice guy. Yes, he could be kind of crazy. But if you challenged him and could persuade him you were right, he would respect you for it. 

Much has been made of Jobs's "reality distortion field." Let's just say it was a very useful device, not just for casting a spell on his audience but for pushing people to do what everyone else considered impossible. Isaacson describes an exchange between Jobs and Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, over "gorilla glass," the super-strong material Jobs wanted for the iPhone. Corning had invented it in the 1960s but quickly abandoned it for lack of a market. Now Jobs wanted as much as they could manufacture in six months. Weeks said it couldn't be done. "Don't be afraid," Jobs responded. "Get your mind around it. You can do it." He did. 

I saw the same quality at work when I interviewed members of the original Mac team and the people who left Apple with him to start NeXT. They weren't there because Jobs was a great manager. In fact, he was a horrible manager. But he was a born leader. He didn't manage people, he challenged them. And though they'd lived through his tirades more than once, those who met the challenge were ready to follow him anywhere—even to NeXT, which at the start was little more than an idea in search of a business plan. 

2. Integrity

One of Isaacson's signature anecdotes involves a childhood lesson Jobs learned from his father, Paul Jobs. When Steve was a kid, the elder Jobs built a fence around the house, and he took just as much care with the parts no one would ever see as he did with the parts that would be visible to the world. This was a lesson Jobs sometimes took to extremes, as when he insisted on painting first the Macintosh factory and then the NeXT factory a pure, pristine white. The same impulse drove him to reject Steve Wozniak's initial design for the circuit board for the Apple II because the lines weren't straight enough. But it also meant that the products he approved had an honesty and integrity you could appreciate, even if you couldn't actually see them. 

There are countless stories about Jobs's drive for perfection, many of them involving his passion for good design. Most CEOs in the tech world—make that most CEOs, period—view design as a frill, not as an integral product feature. To Jobs, it trumped even engineering. The essence of good design, by his definition, was simplicity, because simplicity makes for elegance and ease of use. Which leads us to his third key quality: 

3. Focus

To me, one of the most fascinating periods of Jobs's hugely eventful life is his return to Apple in 1997. After selling NeXT to a desperately diminished Apple for its operating system, he more or less walked in and assumed power. And with no one around to tell him what not to do, he did much of what he'd wanted to do in 1985, when Sculley, the board, and the company's vice presidents forced him out. One of the first things he did was to focus the product line, which had grown bloated and incoherent, on four core offerings. There would be a laptop and a desktop for the consumer market, and a laptop and a desktop for the professional market. And that was it. 

The same focus Jobs brought to the product line, he brought to the products themselves. He pushed his team to strip away anything extraneous and concentrate on the essence of whatever they were working on. What was its overarching purpose? Toy Story, the breakthrough picture that established Pixar as a force in animation, proceeded from the realization that a toy's purpose is to make kids happy. The iPhone owed its success in large part to Jobs's realization, very late in the design process, that it was all about the display—the part that showed you what you could do. Everything else was superfluous. 

Similarly, Jobs insisted on identifying and eliminating the shortcomings of previous iterations of whatever product he was developing. What's missing? What sucks? There were lots of digital music players on the market when the iPod came out. The iPod blew them all away (not to mention those that followed, like Microsoft's ill-fated Zune) because it was designed for one simple purpose—to make it easy to listen to your music. And because he was so passionate, Jobs wouldn't rest until it really was easy—until you could get to any song on the device in no more than three clicks. 

With focus comes a certain clear-headedness about what you want to achieve. This is a big part of what makes Apple worth more than $376 billion on the market today, compared to $1.6 billion when he took over in 1997. Yes, he was a master marketer—anyone who's ever watched an Apple product introduction can tell you that. But what mattered more, what kept his reality distortion field from degenerating into mere hype, was that his products were so good they marketed themselves. This idea is so important it's become the subject of an entire book—Baked In, by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor. But getting there requires passion, integrity, and focus. Anything else is just extraneous. 

The Art of Immersion on YouTube: IPG's Chad Stoller on Viral Video and Twitter as Branded Entertainment

 

Several months ago, as I was finishing a video on the making of The Art of Immersion, Paul Woolmington of Naked Communications suggested I use the book's YouTube channel to create a conversation about the issues the book raises—for example, how the Internet blurs the distinction between author and audience, story and game, entertainment and marketing, fiction and reality. It's taken awhile, what with my travel schedule and a bit of consulting work I've taken on, but the idea is finally being realized. First up: Chad Stoller, managing director of the newly opened IPG Media Lab in New York, on the blurring of entertainment and marketing—otherwise known as branded entertainment. 

One thing Chad talks about is how hard it is as an ad guy to compete with the average 14-year-old on YouTube. Don Draper never had to worry about this, but it's an issue I'm well aware of. Suffice it to say that I'll be studying a lot of 14-year-olds' videos over the next few weeks and may even start taking lessons from one. 

In the meantime, I expect to produce one of these videos every few weeks, talking not just with people in the advertising business but those in entertainment and journalism as well. The first few, however, will most likely be from the ad world. Look for interviews with Scott Donaton, CEO of the branded entertainment unit Ensemble (and Chad's colleague at IPG), and Graham Hodge, director of branded content and creative services at LBi London. This spring I'll be speaking at South by Southwest and ad:tech Sydney, so look for some interviews from there as well. Who else would you like to see? Suggestions welcome. 

Engagement: Is TV Finally Ready for a New Metric?

Late last month I got an advance look at the new IPG Media Lab, recently relocated from LA to New York and sporting all manner of flashy tech displays. Where the LA lab was essentially a connected-home display designed to show marketers how people are actually consuming media today, as opposed to five or ten years ago, the New York lab is all about future possibilities and the technologies that enable them. There's GazeHawk, which uses Webcams to do eye-tracking studies. There's TruMedia's iCapture, an "audience measurement solution" that computes the age, sex, and interest level of people looking at in-store displays. Affectiva, whose "Affdex expression tracker" watches shoppers through a tiny camera tucked under the shelf and measures their emotional response to the products thereon. And then there's Trendrr—"a company we love," says Chad Stoller, the lab's managing partner.

Trendrr sifts through social media commentary to gauge the engagement level of people watching TV. This is a potentially revolutionary development—for advertisers, for viewers, for television itself. 

For all the attention paid to the attention economy—the idea that in a world with a super-abundance of information, attention is what's scarce and therefore valuable—it has had remarkably little impact on the television business. For decades, network programmers have sacrificed shows with a passionate following because their numbers didn't cut it. The most notorious example is the original Star Trek, which ran for three seasons between 1966 and 1969: After ending its first season as the #52 show on prime time, it was shunted off to a dismal time slot and eventually killed, despite an unparalleled fan campaign to keep it on the air.  

Forty years later, not much had changed. As Time’s James Poniewozik patiently explained in a 2009 blog post about fans' efforts to persuade NBC to renew Chuck despite its Nielsen deficit, “Four million people who watch a show really hard are still just four million people to an ad buyer.” 

Except, of course, that in the case of Chuck, they actually added up to more. Faced with a media-savvy fan campaign that leveraged a major sponsor (Subway) and attracted more than 20,000 members on Facebook, the network relented. The question now is whether, with the rise of social TV and the ability of companies like Trendrr to measure online commentary, network executives will consider viewer engagement a barometer of success as a matter of course—without the viewers having to campaign on Facebook to make themselves heard. 

Mark Ghuneim, the CEO of Wiredset, the New York company behind Trendrr, sees that day coming. Trendrr is one of several outfits—including Nielsen's Buzzmetrics unit, which focuses on social-media conversations about brands—that uses data-mining techniques to parse what people are saying on Twitter and Facebook, in blog posts, and the like. This is still a somewhat iffy proposition when it comes to "sentiment analysis"—determining what people think about the thing they're commenting on, which is after all the crux of the issue. Algorithms are notoriously bad at identifying irony. Nonetheless, says Ghuneim, "Social is number one on every network executive's desktop now. Three years ago I was getting, What are you talking about? Now it's all incoming." 

To understand the idea's appeal to advertisers, consider how Mediabrands, the IPG unit that runs the Media Lab, is using it. As the umbrella media-buying agency for the Interpublic Group, Mediabrands directs $34 billion in ad spending annually. "We want to buy low and get the most impressions," says Stoller. So MagnaGlobal, Mediabrands' intelligence arm, has started using engagement ratings to find undervalued television properties. "Nielsen ratings are apples," Stoller continues. "What this brings into the conversation is oranges." 

From "20 TV Shows with the Most Social Buzz This Week," Mashable, 11/28/11

So what does engagement TV look like? There's considerable overlap with ratings-driven TV, but there are also some marked differences. Cable wallops broadcast, as we can see from Trendrr's most recent Social TV chart for Mashable (above): Except for The X Factor, people just don't seem to care as much about the stuff they watch on the traditional networks. And yet, on a CPM basis, it costs at least three times more to buy air time on a popular broadcast show than it does on cable. So you can see how Magna might spot some bargains.

The networks view social engagement from an entirely different perspective—as a way to identify shows that ought to be worth a premium. "Icing on the cake of solid ratings," as Simon Dumenco recently put it in Ad Age. But it's the audience that really stands to benefit.

The hope is that engagement can keep good shows on the air—that it can prevent another debacle on the order of Star Trek. Conversely, it would also be nice if falling engagement levels prompted producers to rethink a faltering series, or encouraged network programmers to kill off a show that was living past its prime. But I suspect that as more and more viewers engage with shows through social media, what we'll see is a gradual convergence of ratings and engagement—that the most popular shows will also be the most talked-about, and that as shows lose popularity they'll also generate less chatter. That's certainly what's suggested by Glee, which has one of the most engaged audiences on TV—and whose ratings have dropped this season in tandem with the amount of online chatter it has generated. The truly interesting programs, whether you're an ad buyer or a television viewer, will be the ones that buck this trend. 

B-Positive? Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan Have Something Special in Mind for You

Department of Human Management: "Meet B Positive Singles"

If the term Department of Human Management gives you a bit of a chill, check out the Web site. At departmentofhumanmanagement.org, you will find information on such topics as How To Live ("your guide to living, connecting, and interacting with our new environmental factors") and an About Us page that talks about creating "a support system for citizens to uphold our new status quo." A hint as to what that status quo involves comes from the bright red badge at the bottom of the page: "Give Blood Every 5 Days." Another hint comes from the crawl at the top: "Ignore the lies and propaganda of The Strain Trilogy." 

The Strain Trilogy, of course, is the horror series written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the final volume of which was published last week. It's all about vampires, but not of the Robert Pattinson variety. The Strain vampires are about as hunky as the "prawns" in Neill Blomkamp's  District 9. They are sexless creatures with no hair, atrophied facial features, and a stinger under the tongue that has a range of six feet. The stinger feeds them, and the stinger infects you. Capillary worms enter the bloodstream, and in 24 hours a perfectly normal human becomes an undead vampire drone. 

The runaway epidemic introduced in The Strain (volume one of the trilogy) led to total disaster in last year's The Fall. By the time we get to The Night Eternal, which completes the trilogy, Earth has been consumed by a nuclear holocaust that blots out the sun. A vampire overlord rules the darkened planet. Life for the surviving humans has turned, well, grim. The Department of Human Management is there to ease the way. Its motto: "Health. Cooperation. Acceptance."

Created by Mirada, the studio del Toro opened last year with Mathew Cullen and Javier Jiminez of the LA ad shop Motion Theory and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, the DHS site takes the fiction a bit farther than the books do. If humans were essentially reduced to cattle for the vampires to feed on, how would that work? The concept was developed by Andrew Merkin, who joined Mirada earlier this year after getting a master's from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. "I was pushing hard to focus on the world-building aspect," he says. "You can imagine what this means, but you're not quite sure." 

It turns out to mean a lot of blood donation—too much, in fact. The average adult has about 10 pints of blood. The human body requires approximately 30 to 40 days to fully replace a lost pint. A person begins to go into shock at the loss of three pints or so and cardiac arrest at the loss of more than four. A pint every five days? You do the math. 

But DHS is not all doom and gloom. The site likes to focus on the bright side of human management, with cheery posters and useful guides like "6 Tips for a Healthy Body" and "What To Do During Your 2 Hours of Daylight." Personally, I like the video testimonials—like "Meet B Positive Singles," which introduces us to a healthy young couple with an extra-tasty blood type. 

"B-positive is the Kobe beef of blood types," Merkin explains. "The one that vampires love the most." 

So the young couple are breeders. But hey—that's all right. They have lots of sex, and they get better food rations to boot. "I'm proud to look forward to a healthy, reproductive future," Matthew declares. Katie looks at him adoringly, even as she's fighting back tears. Yes, it really is too bad the babies will be vampire food. 

From the moment H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, much of the best science fiction has been about humans being overpowered by a pitiless, alien force—a force that ends up treating us more or less the way we treat animals. This provides dependable fodder for dramatic action and is subject to endless variations. But it's also an intriguing thought experiment, propelled I suppose by equal parts guilt and fear. (Wells said The War of the Worlds—in which invading Martians overwhelm the mighty British military and terrorize Victorian London—was sparked by a conversation he had with his brother about the subjugation of Tasmania by colonialist forces.) An important subtheme in many such stories is what use the humans are put to after their inevitable subjugation. In The Matrix, their bodies provide an energy source. In The Strain Trilogy, it's nourishment. 

The DHM site is one of the first projects to emerge from Mirada, following Chris Milk's RO.ME—an experimental music video produced by @Radical Media, with Mirada providing 3-D animation and conceptual design—and IBM's THINK exhibit, an interactive experience in New York's Lincoln Center. As for del Toro, he's shooting Pacific Rim, his robots-v.-monsters film, which is set to open next May 10. Last summer at Comic-Con, he promised "to film the finest fucking monsters ever committed to film"—and also "to create the greatest fucking robots ever committed to film.” Best not to donate too much blood if you want to see it.  

The Art of Immersion: Now in Korean

W. W. Norton is publishing The Art of Immersion worldwide in English, but the first foreign-language edition is being published by the Korea Price Information Company. As the book's translator, Wankyu Choi, just posted on his blog, the Korean edition is now going on sale in online bookstores there.

The cover is very Inception, inspired by the spinning top that the Leonardo DiCaprio character uses to keep track of what state he's in. You know the drill: If he's in the real world, the top will sooner or later fall over, as tops do. But if he's in a dream state, it will keep spinning indefinitely. In the final scene of the movie [spoiler alert!], the top famously starts to wobble, but the picture ends before we can be sure. This top looks a little wobbly too, which I suppose could be taken as a question about my own mental state as I was writing the book. Did I dream the whole thing? No comment, I'm afraid. 

Apple after Jobs: Pray 2.

In the wake of Steve Jobs's unexpected resignation as CEO of Apple, Wired.com has reprinted the essay I wrote as the introduction to the updated edition of West of Eden in 2009—twenty years after its original publication. Here's an abridged version: 

Everyone loves Apple today. Apple sells us lustrous white laptops and impossibly slim music players and software that transforms bedrooms into recording studios and cell phones that function as fabulous electronic toys. Apple confronted first the music labels and then the mobile phone carriers, forcing change on two of the world’s most monopolistic and hidebound industries. Apple papers our cities with dancing silhouettes and exhorts us in banners to “think different.” Apple is not just a source of profits but a source of joy.

But spin the time machine back a quarter-century. In the mid-1980s, the man now credited with all this was ejected from his company in the power struggle that West of Eden recounts. Defrocked and disillusioned, the young Steve Jobs—he’d turned 30 just a few months earlier — had to watch in exile as his expulsion was celebrated on Wall Street and in the media.

Yes, people agreed, Jobs was brilliant, but he was far too reckless and impulsive to suit the Fortune 500 corporation Apple had become. He was an entrepreneur, and sooner or later the entrepreneurs had to go so their companies could settle down to business. John Sculley, the suave East Coast marketing executive Jobs had recruited from PepsiCo less than three years before, took for himself the mantle of Apple’s visionary leader. Nearly everyone pretended not to notice how badly it fit.

For awhile, all went well. Sales were up. The new regime got great press. Sculley penned a best-selling book and took on celebrity status. Meanwhile, however, the product line proliferated willy-nilly, confusing customers and blurring the image. And when Sculley’s much-heralded tablet device, the Newton, finally appeared in 1993, its wretched performance and dismal sales made it the Edsel of Silicon Valley. Sculley was soon out. By early 1997, two CEOs later, Apple appeared to have fallen into a death spiral. Wired published an issue with a one-word cover line: "Pray." 

But in the meantime Apple bought NeXT, the computer company Jobs had started after Sculley showed him the door. NeXT had never been terribly successful, but Apple desperately needed its software, and Jobs was part of the bargain. When the latest CEO was sacked, Jobs simply walked in and assumed power. He negotiated a truce with Microsoft, Apple’s one-time nemesis. He put Jonathan Ive in charge of design and brought in Tim Cook, Compaq’s self-styled “Attila the Hun of inventory,” to run manufacturing. [Cook has just been named CEO now that Jobs has stepped down.] He focused marketing around a single message—the “Think Different” campaign from Chiat/Day, the ad agency behind the unforgettable “1984” TV spot that had launched the Mac. He terminated the licensing deals that enabled other manufacturers to undercut Apple with Mac clones. He cut operating expenses nearly in half. Within months, Apple was back in the black.

It was a stunning performance. But how did Jobs go from the out-of-control kid who lost a boardroom showdown in 1985 to the leader who took command in 1997 and steered the company with uncanny precision ever since?

Why Transmedia Is like a Walk in Patagonia

A couple of years ago I found myself in a small town in Patagonia called San Martín de los Andes. The town lies in a fold in the mountains, but a short, steep hike through the woods gets you to an extraordinary vista point—the dry, scrubby buttes of the Patagonian steppes in one direction, the blue waters of Lake Lácar and the snowcapped peaks of the Andes in the other. But as with much of Patagonia, the journey is every bit as remarkable as the destination. In this case it meant following a seemingly random network of trails that wend their way up the ridge. About halfway up I encountered the trails' author—a half-dozen head of cattle. There was no "right" path, for the cattle any more than for the people. Instead, the paths all converged at a dusty spot near the summit where three old women sat on the porch of a cabin. As I approached, one of the women stood up and asked for a peso. I paid the toll and walked past a ramshackle house sporting a large satellite dish to the lookout, where I got to see a condor from above. Choose your own adventure indeed. 

I'm reminded of that walk whenever somebody mentions transmedia, the seemingly radical new approach to narrative that was mapped out several years ago by Henry Jenkins, then a professor of media studies at MIT and now Provost's Professor at USC Annenberg. Henry once defined transmedia in his blog as "integral elements of a fiction . . . dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience." (He didn't mention the satellite dish or the three old women and their pay wall, but they're part of nearly any entertainment experience these days.) Earlier this month, in a post called Transmedia 202, he attempted to explain how the trails work and, by the way, defend them against those who would try to pave and straighten them and/or get obsessed with signage. It's an important read. 

(For the record, the term "deep media," which I borrowed from Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown and others, overlaps considerably with Henry's concept of transmedia, the main difference being that one places the emphasis on the goal—immersiveness—while the other focuses more on process. For a more long-winded explanation, see the interview Henry conducted with me earlier this year. As I said then, I wouldn't be surprised if both terms disappeared once this form of storytelling became ubiquitous and therefore taken for granted. Does anybody still say "talkies"?) 

An idea is a fragile thing. And at this point, the idea that we're on the cusp of a new form of storytelling seems to have reached that weird place where much of the world still hasn't accepted it but many of those who have are too busy squabbling over the details to actually focus on doing it. As Nick DeMartino, formerly of the American Film Institute, noted in a recent post at Tribeca Film's Future of Film blog, the discussion devolved into an all-out flame war in the wake of the "New Worlds" panel at this year's SXSW Interactive conference. It was against this backdrop that Henry weighed in.

The most basic distinction he makes is between adapting a story from one entertainment medium to another—something Hollywood has been doing routinely for decades—and extending a story into other media. Borrowing a line from ngmoco founder Neil Young, he calls the point of this kind of story-extension "additive comprehension." As an example he cites Falling Skies, the summer sci-fi series that Steven Spielberg produced for TNT—an alien-invasion story that echoes the H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds, which Spielberg adapted for the movies several years ago. Explaining the difference between extending and adapting, Henry notes: 

The Falling Skies graphic novel is a prequel which tells us about the disappearance of the middle brother [during the invasion] and thus helps to provide insights into the motives of the characters on the Turner television series. In this case, additive comprehension takes the form of back story, but the same graphic novel also helps us to better understand the organization of the resistance movement, which we can see as part of a world-building process. Most transmedia content serves one or more of the following functions:

• Offers backstory
• Maps the World
• Offers us other character's perspectives on the action
• Deepens audience engagement.

Another point Henry makes is that there's nothing all that new about this stuff. Falling Skies and its ilk were prefigured, he notes, by the works of Walt Disney, J.R.R. Tolkien, and L. Frank Baum, who extended his 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into various other media, including a stage musical (later adapted into the Judy Garland movie by MGM) and a slide show he presented on the lecture circuit. 

I'm as fascinated by early precedents as Henry is. But as significant as they are, I think the critical factor at work today is technology—both the influence of the Internet and the proliferation of screens (computer, television, smartphone, tablet, etc.) that access it. The historical precedent shows us that the impulse to tell stories across different media isn't new. But it's the proliferation of devices that deliver a variety of different media—audio, video, text—that makes it feel increasingly natural. 

It used to be that every medium was tied to a specific device. Television was something you watched on TV; radio was something you listened to on the radio; a movie was something you went to the movies to see. No longer. Transmedia is what happens when media become uncoupled from the devices that were invented to deliver them. It's an organic and inevitable response to the world we live in. Like, how else would you tell a story? 

Not that we're really there yet. That's the problem with the definition debate. To my mind, being free to walk different paths is key to the whole thing. To try to channel an emerging form of narrative into a single definition is not just a mistake; it's antithetical to the spirit of the time. "Many people are looking for simple formulas and a one-size-fits-all definition, trying to delimit what transmedia is," Henry writes. That's not what we need; what we need is to be open to experimentation and innovation: 

There is no transmedia formula. Transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers. The more we expand the definition, the richer the range of options available to us can be. 

What Richard Wagner Can Teach Us About Storytelling in the Internet Age

The games blogger at the Guardian, Keith Stuart, posted an essay recently that started out like a broadside against the whole idea of telling stories across multiple media platforms. "Most big video game releases now come with tie-in books, comics and even movies," the subhead declared provocatively. "But is this really about extending the story or is it just marketing?" Things seemed to go downhill from there: 

It has become routine now. A few weeks after the announcement of any big new game release, there will be another thrilling revelation: a tie-in comic book series, a novel, a made-for-TV movie. . . . Of course, much of the excitement revolves around the marketing potential of the linear tie-in: every new story platform is an advert.

This used to be called merchandising, but now we must use the term "transmedia storytelling". Nowadays, developers are aiming to produce narratives so compelling that they transcend platform limitations; a high-tech realisation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk concept.

To my mind, the idea of drawing a line between "extending the story" and "marketing" is antiquated at best. The Internet, which is ultimately what makes transmedia a compelling and contemporary phenomenon, is all about blurring lines, none more so perhaps than that one. As for Gesamtkunstwerk, which preceded all this by more than a century and a half, Wagner's idea of fusing multiple art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, whatever—into a "total art work" is an intriguing precursor, but the aptness of the comparison is not immediately apparent. If anything, the notion of a unified work of art seems almost at odds with the idea of a work of art that finds expression in multiple media. Not that that should necessarily be the case. 

It turns out, however, that Stuart isn't so much opposed to the concept of transmediagesamtkunstwerk (to coin a catchy new polylingual phrase) as he is appalled by the realization—by most of the realizations that have been done to date, anyway. And there I'm afraid he has a point: 

A key issue is that the linear content is rarely of a similar quality to the source material. Assassin's Creed the game is an astonishingly rich and detailed interactive universe, but the novelisation, Assassin's Creed: Renaissance, is lumbering, stilted and repetitive. . . . Why would I read the novelisation of Quantic Dreams' psychological thriller [Heavy Rain], when I could read Jim Thompson, John Connolly or Thomas Harris?

There's no end of other examples, and they're hardly restricted to properties that started out as video games. Avatar, for instance, was sadly underserved by Avatar: The Game, despite the fact that the game-production and movie-production teams collaborated intensively. And that's a case in which they were actually trying. Game publishers, as Stuart points out—and the same could just as well be said for movie studios, television networks, and any other outfit producing big entertainment properties—often seem all too happy producing spin-offs on the cheap in hopes of slurping up some additional fan coin or luring more bodies to the box office. We're already seeing what this kind of opportunistic approach can do to 3-D. 

Actually extending a story into other dimensions is a painstaking and expensive process. An alternate reality game on the order of Why So Serious?, the 42 Entertainment production that drew some 11 million people into the world of The Dark Knight before the movie's release, requires a highly creative team, a total mastery of logistics, and a multi-million-dollar budget. This is about as far from a novelization as you can get. 

The truth is that we're still lucky to get a story that's told well in one medium, much less in two or three others. And to move beyond this point is going to mean focusing less on the trans- and a lot more on the gesamt—not to mention the kunst. 

From PotterWar to Pottermore: The Extraordinary Ten-Year Evolution of Harry Potter's World

IT ALL ENDS JULY 15: Seldom has a marketing slogan offered such direct insight into the Hollywood psyche. July 15 was of course the day Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 opened, concluding a decade of Potter movies with, as it turned out, an enormous bang—$481 million in weekend ticket sales worldwide, eclipsing all box-office records and leaving studio executives gasping for adjectives. Clearly the slogan worked. But the end of a $7 billion movie franchise for Warner Bros. was hardly the end for fans. In fact, you could just as well say "It all begins July 31"—because that's the day fans can register for Pottermore, the aptly named participatory Web site that J.K. Rowling announced last month. 

When Rowling appeared at her press conference at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a Hogwartsian pile in West London, the big news was not, as generally reported, her decision to finally make the novels available as e-books. Yes, Rowling had long been the biggest holdout against electronic publishing, and yes, her decision to both publish and sell the books herself was a break with the way the industry does business. But a challenge to existing business models, however radical, is minor compared to a wholesale rethinking of the art of fiction. And in announcing Pottermore, that's what Rowling promised—an acknowledgment that the Internet makes possible an entirely new form of narrative, one that readers can not only consume but explore and build upon. 

What made Pottermore even more remarkable was its timing. Ten years ago, with the first of the Potter movies a few months from being released, the world of Potter fandom was riven by strife. The PotterWar—thus yclept by a London city councilman who leapt into the fray—pitted Warner Bros. against a citizen's army of Web-savvy kids. The movie studio was eager to protect the trademarks it had bought from Rowling; the kids were outraged that a giant corporation was threatening them with legal action for using the Potter name on Web sites they'd set up to celebrate the story. In the end, it was no contest: As Heather Lawver, the 16-year-old leader of the insurrection, told Henry Jenkins for his book Convergence Culture, "They underestimated how interconnected our fandom was." By the time the hapless company beat a retreat, it was being excoriated from British pulpits for placing children in its legal crosshairs.  

That was in 2001. This year, with the eighth and final movie about to open, Rowling threw open the doors, digitally speaking, and invited the fandom inside. It's not yet entirely clear what they'll find when they get there, since Pottermore won't open until the end of the month, and then only for a select 1 million fans; the rest of the world won't be let in until October, when the e-books go on sale. But Rowling's intent is clear. "It's the same story, with a few crucial additions," she says of Pottermore in an introductory video on the site. "The most important one is you. Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of the author and the reader work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader."

This isn't the first time Rowling has produced artifacts from the Harry Potter universe. In 2001 she published Quidditch Through the Ages, purportedly a book from the Hogwarts library, as well as a "textbook" called Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. More recently she came out with The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a children's book mentioned in the final novel. But for an author so tech-averse she wrote her novels out in longhand, Pottermore is still an extraordinary gesture. Especially given that Neil Blair, her literary agent, is the same Neil Blair who somewhat huffily represented Warner in Europe during the PotterWar. 

Despite its initially ham-handed response to the fans, Warner has done a remarkable job of shepherding the Potter saga over the years. The latest picture, with its extraordinary performances by Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort and Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, is no exception. As Rowling now takes the story into uncharted territory, I'm reminded of something the literary critic Robert McCrum wrote last spring in The Observer: When storytelling itself can evolve, "you know the medium in which you work is a living thing." What we're watching now is as revealing as anything we've seen onscreen—the storytellers themselves growing up in tandem with their characters.