A lot of business books are so poorly written, you wish you could just jam a thumb-drive into them and download info into your brain without having to actually ingest the pages.Happily, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories is that rare business book you don’t want to put down, a riveting read for anyone whose business is impacted by how audiences are changing--which is to say, anyone reading this.
The author, Frank Rose, a Wired editor, is a terrific storyteller who imbues in the reader his own fascination with how “after centuries of linear storytelling, a new form of narrative is emerging by which stories are told through many media at once."
Deep Media, he calls this emerging form. Henry Jenkins (eminent thought pioneer in this territory) says transmedia. But whatever it’s named, it’s a growing phenomenon profoundly affecting our business:
It’s not officially released yet, but I got my pre-order early here.
The 20th Century approach to advertising…had it all wrong. For decades, ad people had assumed that consumers thought in a linear and essentially rational fashion. All a television spot had to do to arouse desire for the product was to get the viewer’s attention and make a strong case…Cognitive researchers…discovered that this isn’t what happens. People don’t passively ingest a message. Perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created” by marketers and consumers together.The book includes behind-the-scenes adventures in the creation of some of the most interesting experiments in crossplatform narrative for both entertainment and marketing--the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Lost Experience, Dunder Mifflen Infinity, I Love Bees and many more, including (disclosure) Mad Men on Twitter, a chapter in which @BettyDraper is honored to be profiled.
It’s not officially released yet, but I got my pre-order early here.
