Poetry and cinematics : new marketing tools for the 21st century?
by Alain Bezancon, published on 4.07.2012
In a general context of gloom and recession, the global luxury industry continues its insolent growth fueled largely by the accession of BRIC citizens (Brazil, Russia, India, China) to millionaire statuds. The members of this growing club of affluent people do not just acquire designer objects symbolic of their class as they are now more interested in unique or even transformational experiences.
According to the Boston Consulting Group, trips, vacations, expeditions, cruises, this year represent the fastest growing segment in front of handbags, watches, clothing, jewelry and other turbo charged cars.
Like the influence of haute couture on prêt-à-porter, the luxury sector is certainly at the forefront of a trend that is interesting to decipher in terms of communication and marketing .
LIVE VS. OWN.
Nowadays it seems that possessing the exterior signs of wealth is no longer sufficient. The acquisition of exclusive and high-end goods is within reach of an ever growing number of individuals. These objects are manufactured and even counterfeited in large numbers thus diminishing the perceived value. The ability to take advantage of tangible goods is limited by our physical abilities while our ability to experience emotions is infinite. That may be what drives this search for non-reproducible and exclusive in the intangible, in the intimacy of the experience. Space tourism is probably the most extreme example of this trend, but the number of applicants crowding the waiting lists is a good indicator of its relevance.
A stratospheric flight or a stay aboard a space station are bigger than life experiences that sell for themselves. For players offering more earthly packages, differentiation in a highly competitive market is a strategic issue. Relevant concepts being implemented at the speed of the Internet, everyone now offers “experiences”. As the premium for the novelty of the concept is no longer a competitive advantage, the challenge, especially for resorts, is to attract demanding customers wishing to live a unique moment.
As it is no longer sufficient to communicate on the register of hedonism or on the exotic character of the place with a glossy or virtual brochure other means must be invented.
DIFFERENTIATE TROUGH EMOTION
A spectacular view, a sophisticated cuisine, a sumptuous room, a refined spa, enchanting gardens, attentive staff, are clichés literally and figuratively, which present a level of reality, but that does not reflect the emotion, the singular identity of the place. This is perhaps the greatest challenge in terms of communication, to convey an emotion, to translate the essence of a space or a concept allowing customers to project themselves and begin to feel what they could live there. The idea is not to sell a package, but to offer a “decor” with which the client “will come into resonance” to experience the unique story that he will write there. The communication becomes the creation of storytelling anchored in reality. To materialize this scripted reality, the full range of narrative tools can be used.
A communication experience of this kind was conducted in September 2011 by Portraitgraphy with « Les Terres M’Barka » which is a resort near Marrakech. In order to translate the spirit of the place, a cinematic video portrait was produced. The portrait shows the property developer who plays his own role and expresses the vision that preceded the genesis of the project. The character evolves in its creation and invites the viewer to discover his universe through his eyes. The border between reality and fiction disappears to make room for emotion. The video is presented on a dedicated website and is accompanied by a poetic text that offers an alternative approach to the vision. Video capsules offer sensory samples of the place and making-of photos highlight the cinematic flavor of the project. The hotel and surrounding landscape are only suggested and used as the setting in which the character evolves.
This original communication approach has been very well received by customers and professionals gathered at an international conference in Marrakech in October 2011 and whose theme was appropriately “The importance of storytelling.”
Poetry and cinematics techniques are perfectly coherent for this type of project because they are original creations adding value to another creation. The “client / actor” is exposed to several works which he is invited to contribute by its presence. This approach seems to satisfy the desire of unique, intimate and therefore non-reproducible experiences on the part of ” luxury consumers”. The experience of the place can become the contribution to a creative process and not a simple act of consumption.
Taking this concept to the next level, “Les Terres M’Barka” plans to offer the cinematic portrait experience to its customers. The “client / actor” becomes the subject of his own movie in the “decor” he chose because of the emotion it inspires. The loop is closed.
Pushing this even further, we may see appearing in the near future the concept of “Designer Life”: your life “designed” as a succession of personal and exclusive experiences in a scripted reality 24/7/365.
BEYOND EMOTION, MEANING
Will emerging communication techniques used by the luxury industry spread to other sectors?
Can poetry and cinematic portraits apply to other markets?
It is surely too early to tell, but beyond the tools, the emergence of a consumer trend oriented toward being more than having is an indicator, probably revealing, of the troubled period of transition we are going through. The hierarchy of needs seems to be evolving from the material to the intangible, from the object to the experience, and beyond the experience the search for meaning.
project, which was presented at the 2010 Ateliers Orange de la creation (Orange creation workshops). Detective Avenue began by winning over the Games selection board (the Orange “transmedia” workshop was multi-themed: fiction, music, games, etc.) and then the executive board of the Ateliers Orange. One of 120 entrants, Murmures Productions took the prize at this first event dedicated to creative transmedia formats.
the digital storytelling, were both innovations that helped win over the panel of judges,” remarks , Director of the Transmedia lab and panel member.
For Jean-François Rodriguez, Director of Games and Transmedia at Orange: “We are proud of our partnership with Lexis Numérique, a pioneer in transmedia fiction, on a project which combines gaming, series and social networks. For Orange, this is an opportunity to show that the tools we offer artists can be used to bring the public something new.”
PHOTOGRAPHS
In the context of new projects and international perspectives, 
For its part, Transmedia categorie focus on confluence of video storytelling with gaming, live events, mobile applications, integrated marketing, dual screen content, or any additional techniques for enriching the story and the user experience. In the same spirit as for the viral video category, competitors must present their ideas up to 20 images in order to state one’s business by developing the concept, the target, the story, the characters, platforms and budget.
The group recently made two big announcements. First, it is incorporating as a NY-based not-for-profit organization called StoryCode. On the other hand, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is a new sponsor, offering the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater for the group’s meetings. Wonderful, dramatic changes and another proof if needed that the group is now all grown up: 2012 shall be a pretty busy one for NY transmedia professionals!
Cindy Gallop is the first confirmed speaker at MIPCube. She is the former US President of creative agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty and the CEO of 
Jean-François Rodriguez
Morgan Bouchet
Altaïr’s Chronicles focuses solely on the young Altaïr and events that take place in 1190, in the midst of the Third Crusade. It does not reproduce the story of the first game for portable consoles, choosing instead to explore the protagonist’s youth. However, by ignoring the SF meta-mystery aspect, and not contributing to the central narrative, this version failed to be adopted as a core part the world of the game
Adrian Hon is co-founder and CEO at 
Created by the team that wrote 
What exactly do you mean by « interactive with the website »? What kind of quest or tasks would the users perform? 
A special section of DIY DAYS will be highlighting some new innovative work. DIY Days teamed up with Cinema Speakeasy to create an innovative exhibition, in other words a space to show to creators of film, games, music, design projects, immersive experiences and anything else that deals with storytelling. Evidently the exhibition’s space is limited so the organizers told us to make sure to contact them early if you want to expose your work. For more details, check out this website.
Jeff Gomez, the co-founder of Starlight Runner was describing in 
The Stream offers an opportunity to break from the traditional pattern of bringing television into people’s houses: here, people are easily allowed to bring their contribution to television with the tools that they use on a daily basis. At the same time, the editorial policy of the channel and its reputation are embodied by the journalists and the choices they make during the live program.
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The producers submitting their projects must have a strong cinema, or audiovisual, or interactive media experience. Only 25 proposals will be selected and only 8 finalists will be eligible for the Arte Pixel Pitch prize.
You might be surprised by the fact that the producer didn’t choose to create an iPhone app, especially with this king of target. The mobile media was ignored because the celphones are forbidden in Dutch schools: a nice proof that the transmedia mechanism was well adapted to its audience.
In 2007, Telefilm Canada created a new media fund, the CMF-FMC, destined for non-television content (multimedia, games, etc). This fund has a good track record since the organism has acquired a real know-how in the field of non-linear production.
Creative Commons : Adam Crowe
Published by 
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In August, Space Trotters, a strange company directed by Leonard Astruk, opened with a strange and surrealist offer: travelling to space for less than 5000 euros !
For its latest operation, Uniqlo has launched an international competition to find the next designers of its Mickey and Minnie Mouse collection. The winner will see his or her creation distributed in the whole world and receive a 10 000$ reward! More information on 
The concept of Heroes was initiated by its creator Tim Kring, who knew and succeeded in freely developing his ideas without any constraint on NBC’s behalf. The network gave into his enthusiasm, which was shared by his whole team. Heroes is written by a team of about 12 scriptwriters, it’s a real collective creation, each story, each episode, is written collaboratively. However, each character is developed by a defined author for several episodes and finalized in an iterative way. According to Heroes’ executive producers, this way of working is much more efficient for a series, than having one author for each episode, where each one would follow the bible of the series’ creator. This also allows for a lot of reactivity, which is very practical to avoid pitfalls that a “traditional” team often takes very long to overcome.
Another originality of series such as Heroes, but also Lost and Alias, is in its authors’ personality, Tim Kring or JJ Abrams. They never write for the largest possible audience. They never think of the “wide audience”, they are series fans and simply write for other fans!
Everyone agreed it was a total success, an important moment for our development thanks to the quality of the projects and of the interventions, the freedom of the tone, the creative spirit and the desire to build something together that came out. With regards to that, Bénédicte Lesage de Mascaret wrote us this note which is worth all the rewards in the world: “Thank you again for the quality of yesterday’s event, it brought together creativity, competence and the desire to create transmedia projects. A great opportunity for us to reinvent new ways of telling stories, other stories.”
We are convinced that within 5 years, the majority of audiovisual production will be conceived for plurimedia: a TV series, a film, a documentary, an echo on the Internet or on mobiles. Get ready for the transmedia wave to roll onto all your screens!
medium to another by working specifically towards the transition from linear to delinear (VOD). Today’s users want to consume their images wherever and whenever they feel like it. So it is of the essence in transmedia creation that each content be accessible separately and at any time whatsoever on each platform, and that each cross-reference with the other contents on other platforms.
“When applied to storytelling, negative capability is the art of building strategic gaps into a narrative to evoke a delicious sens of “uncertainty, mystery, or doubt” in the audience. This empowers audiences to fill in the gaps in their own imaginations while leaving them curious to find out more. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins quotes media scholar Mary Beth Haralovich and mathematician Michale W. Trosset: narrative pleasure stems from the desire to know what will happen next, to have that gap opened and closed, again and again, until the resolution of the story.”
“What Ruppel calls migratory cues are “ signal towards another medium – the means through which various narrative paths are marked by an author and located by a user through activation patterns”. Negative capability clears a space in the narrative for those cues to be planted. The letter in the Matrix franchise are a sample of a migratory cue, used as a hint for viewers to look for more information on the letter in The Animatrix and Enter the Matrix.
And transmedia?
Good stories are, for the most part, made up of a bundle of plots in which the various characters straddle different time periods. This abundance speaks to the multiple facets of our personalities, to the diversity of others. Everyone can identify with a character, make a plot his own and intertwine his thread with those of others. This multiplicity, interwoven with seriality, produces a robust multicoloured fabric. The multiple intersections of different times, spaces and characters echo the increasing fragmentation of our lives in today’s digital world.
By letting us ramble in and out of multiple stories, transmedia should try to transcend the notions of past, present and future. The viewer will then be able to dive into the transmedia universe and lose himself there, forgetting the passage of time.
Question is that all this is very interesting, but is the film good. Apparently there’s a lot people can learn from the making, but according to the reviews it might not be that good =/
Very interesting concept though.
Here’s some reviews
http://www.reddit.com/r/FilmReview/comments/qn8xf/iron_sky_reviews/