What's Viral? Storytelling

After reading through earlier today the 2013 Viral Video Awards from Advertising Age, I discovered what they all have in common: what the article calls "great brand storytelling."

It's not enough to put any random thing on YouTube and cross your fingers.

Despite all the things that digital technologies can do, really new media depends on compelling stories that fit the brand and the audience.

New media without a home (yet)

Really new media means not just new gizmos, but new ways of thinking about and using gizmos. However, it's always good to consider new gizmos that have yet to come into their own.

Cases in point:

One is the multimedia work of artist Toni Dove. I ran into an account of her work on NPR, and soon after tracked down her website, etc. It's not mobile media in the sense of "take it anywhere in your pocket," but it certainly is mobile in the sense of exploring new forms of expression and engagement.

Two is a much more pedestrian, but that tries to make something new with mobile. From our geek friends at Google, this distributed game called "Chrome Super Sync Sports" hooks up your smartphone and computer to play the game against four remote contestants. The point is not the game as much as it is exploring the way to hook together these often discrete devices.

As I mentioned, these are gizmos and uses as yet without a clear home. But that's where innovation lives, right?

What's new?

It's been a bit quiet on the new media front. But, what I find almost as useful as tracking down projects that count in my book as "really new media" is reading claims of innovative digital which, on second look, aren't in my book very innovative.

Case in point is fashion retailer Burberry's. It's touted in the latest edition of the Creativity online newsletter as "where marketing, dreaming and digital meet."

But what's the result of this meeting? Streaming catwalks to people outside the show. Curating images people take of themselves wearing a trenchcoat. And so on.

Although portrayed in this piece as leaving the 156-year-old heritage of the company behind in this digital work, to my mind its age is displayed in both.

Old Time Media are New Again

Remember flip books, where a slightly different picture on each page, when each is flipped through in fast sequence, create the illusion of an animated scene? Honda used this a few years ago to good effect for its Fit model, which was small. It made a little flip book that created a 360-degree view of the car.

This goes one step further, making a flip book for the digital age. As Creative Review notes, scenes from the Nippon motor-car rally in Japan were animated via a flipbook of images on a Facebook page. Sure, you need to click fast--and on a fast connection--to get the illusion of motion.

But it's an inventive way to make old media new again.

Virtual is Real

How many times have we heard about differences between virtual and real space, the irrelevance of one or the other, and difficulties in connections between virtual and real?

The forefront of thinking seems increasingly to be that the very distinction virtual/real itself is irrelevant.

What's replacing it? Ways of mapping the real in the virtual, and the virtual in the real to the degree that the distinction just plain doesn't matter.

A case in point: CNNCTD+ and its Sound Graffiti project, most recently used in conjunction with the promotion of Bob Dylan's new album "Tempest."

As DJ Manero, the the head of the creative agency notes in a recent blog interview, the system maps and releases specific music only when located at specific geographic points--such as in the case of Dylan key places from his past. 

Wearable devices

So much for portable handheld devices. What if you could wear your screen?

That's the thinking behind the tshirtOS, a cotton shirt outfitted with an LED screen, camera, and tiny processors to let it talk to your smartphone and to the internet.

Okay, so the screen is not quite retina quality.

But it opens up new ways of thinking about mobility and interconnectedness. What if anything might it mean for advertising and promotion? Stay tuned.

Creative Top 50

Want to see an industry run-down of the top-50 "techies" of the advertising world? 

Check out a nice feature appears in the latest issue of "Creativity," the email newsletter from Crain Communications.

It not only lists lots of folks. It also provides links to a more detailed description of recent work, plus in many cases some of their own thoughts on what they do.

Great source for seeing the thinking behind new media.