The Nature of Narrative in the Age of Networks

During Sundance, a buddy of mine (Lorne Lanning, creator of the Oddworld games franchise and a pretty astute thinker) and I were chatting about spark marketing vs. traditional marketing.

He likened the planned obsolescence of traditional marketing to “planting dead trees.” That is, most campaigns and marketing efforts are like Christmas trees– once cut, transported, set-up and decorated, it’s only a matter of days or weeks before it’s dead. It’s dead or dying from the moment the process starts.

It makes a whole lot more sense, said Lorne, to plant a real tree, or a grove of real trees that bear fruit for-ever… requiring only sustaining efforts to keep them going. And they don’t need much if you plant them in the right climate, with the right conditions. If you do, they truly become self-sustaining. You don’t even have to water them.

With networked media, it turns out that metaphor is truly veracious. You build the right animal– an engine of engagement designed to vector towards self-sustainability– and the cost to launch and manage to self-sustenance is nominal.

It is not a matter of money… in fact, it’s often cheaper to build an engine of engagement in web/wireless than most so-called micro-sites, or plain old fancy-schmancy websites. If you know what you’re doing.

My first iteration of the Addictionary cost me less than $5,000 to build. I got it out there, watched what people liked and didn’t like, and then evolved the engine. (More on the Addictionary in a separate post). To-date we’ve only spent in the low six-figures all-told. But it *much* better matches the demonstrated behavior of the folks who frequent the engine. More so that would likely have been if I’d spent *all* the money up-front to build what I perhaps *thought* would be the correct composition of whizbang features and cool functions.

Bottom line: part of the future of advertising is planting living media organisms– that is, self-sustaining, perpetual engines of engagement that survive and flourish beyond a 10-day promotional event or 13-week television buy.