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Monday, April 10, 2006

Advertising In A Non-Linear Space

ClickZ has a brief-but-interesting opinion on fitting traditional concepts of advertising into media where the user/viewer/player (Usviewlayer?) has more control:

A colleague recently saw "War of the Worlds." He didn't like it. It felt like a video game, he said. It didn't feature the same tension as the original. I was reminded the first "Star Wars" prequel, "The Phantom Menace," was perhaps the first time I heard the suggestion a scene in a major Hollywood blockbuster was written specifically to be a video game. There was a lot of discussion at the time around how the pod racing felt forced in the movie. It was just barely believable; it felt out of place.

Sure enough, the racing turned into a game version featuring the same construct. I, and many others, felt Lucas was trying too hard to market the movie. He was forcing it to have legs, to extend into other channels, rather than just writing a good story. The second prequel was more of the same, though a better balance was struck in this last film.

A few years back, I hypothesized that if you take interactive TV to the extreme, where the viewer is somehow empowered to control the storyline, you'd need a completely different skill set to tell a compelling story.

Making storytelling's linear nature interactive requires a different kind of creativity. It's at least partially why some offline agencies have trouble with online. So many have built their business around the :30 spot. It's a very linear (and short) format, whereas online is mostly nonlinear and consumer-empowered.
-- Making Linear Storytelling Interactive




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