Watching Over Media and Brands, Part I

More than any game I’ve ever seen, Overwatch is a multi-media, total brand experience. The trailers for the game could compete with Pixar shorts in every respect. The game is supplemented with comics, toys, and a professional eSports scene. It sets new industry standards in showmanship, advertising, and storyline. This is a lot more than just a video game. This is the new model for integrating a concept across every medium and platform to reach every possible audience in every way. This isn’t just the new benchmark in video games. This is the blueprint for every successful future entertainment product. Blizzard understands “today’s media landscape” as more than a business-boardroom buzzword. Other industries also have successful examples of dominating multiple platforms, though none quite on this scale.

Today’s musicians can’t get away with merely releasing music. They need to tweet and vlog, and most crucially, they need to do live performances. Katy Perry recently set the record as the most followed person on Twitter, even though publishing 140-character quips was never in the job description of a musician or a pop star. Similarly, writers can’t just write books anymore- they need to write about their writing, and then talk about writing about their writing with other writers who want to talk about talking about writing. John Green aspired to be a writer when he took a job doing data entry at a publishing company. At the time, he didn’t hope to become a trans–media–platform–leader-we-don’t-have-a-word-for-this-thing. However, his understanding and use of YouTube and Twitter allowed him to promote his young adult fiction beyond what a traditional book publisher would imagine. His new media fed his career in the old media, and vice-versa. (And compared to Twitter and YouTube, video games are old media.*)

Movies won’t succeed just by creating more epic battle scenes in 3D to justify the expense of going to the theater. They need to change the experience in more fundamental ways- they probably need a smooth integration of social media, but they also need some interaction the viewers can’t get outside the theater. They need to learn what Prince knew: you can’t get the live-show experience sitting alone in your home. One way movies could adapt to the 21^st century is to turn an evening at the movies into a kind of social event, akin to a concert, sports game, or convention. Another way is to make it an even more technologically-driven experience, with augmented reality or virtual reality – a kind of entertainment-themed, futuristic, individualized experience like a museum or library. That is a lot more expensive, though, and all of the theaters near me just spent a lot of money upgrading their seats.

The media channels of the 21^st century aren’t just more avenues for information – they are layers of information interacting with the other layers. Television programs and movies also have to adapt to the way consumers use the newest technology. Adaptation looks like spreading out- growing to cover a larger area – but it’s also about moving to new places entirely. Entertainment has to infiltrate and flow through multiple channels. It also still relies heavily on sponsorship in many cases, which means advertising also has to be integrated across these media.**

There are other ways of adapting, such as just adding alcohol to a bookstore.  Don’t rule anything out, I guess. Especially if you don’t think anyone under 21 even knows about your store or your product, anyway.

 

 

*Not that video games are mainstream yet. My Facebook newsfeed recently informed me that Torbjorn was set to be “‘nerfed’ for consoles in future update.” The word “nerfed” was in quotations, which tells me that mainstream journalists don’t know what it means and don’t think it’s a word. (Or they’re very conscious about not genericizing Hasbro’s trademark, even though that trademark is, strictly speaking, in all-caps.)

**The alternative to advertising is some form of upfront pay-to-play, which is what Overwatch did.