by Marc Guidoni , published on 10.09.2009

Producers, rejoice! It seems to me one of the raisons d’être of our – otherwise so trying – profession is the sheer pleasure of interfacing with a whole gamut of talents, personalities, skills, cultures…

Above all, being a producer means serving as a jack of all trades who knows how to keep creative energy flowing between denizens of very different worlds: artists, financiers, jurists, technicians, communicators, and plenty of others. To take this complex machinery at the very core of the content industry and make it work, a producer has to connect up wires that were not initially made to meet.

To borrow a term coined by a producer/distributor friend of mine (who will know who I mean), ultimately a producer has to be a brilliant “mayonnaise mixer”. Transmedia is opening up a whole new window and forging new professional links: with web 2.0 specialists, web designers, web masters, experts in digital technologies, draughtsmen, scenographers, video game designers, specialists in creating and running online communities. But also with advertisers, sponsors and patrons who will want to inject, from the outset, a visibility and intelligent presence into the programmes they want to support.

We should point out in passing that the main ambition of the French pôles de compétitivité (“business and research clusters”) that have been forming up for three years now in Lyon at Imaginove (www.imaginove.fr) and in Paris at Cap Digital (www.capdigital.com) is to align various technical, economic and artistic spheres using producers/entrepreneurs in particular as a sort of fulcrum.

So for producers, transmedia is perfectly natural. It is simply a matter of expanding their usual work spectrum a little – and making it even more interesting in the process.

That being said, we mustn’t underestimate the quantum leap involved even for talented producers who are by nature accustomed to working in a network with multiple skills. This is why the Orange Vallée Transmedia Lab wants to undergird expanded production teams, pinpointing the right questions (narrative, technological, economic), applying ad hoc tools and expertise, and ultimately facilitating this content innovation leap.

Beyond the pleasure of an increasingly fascinating profession, transmedia is, for producers, a real strategic investment in the future. In fact, a programme director at a major radio station recently told me she thinks that, with transmedia, it’s the producers who are going to come out holding more cards in their hands and with a better grasp of their projects. Essentially, they’re turning from “simple”