At RedMagmaMedia, we have been investigating the new forms of storytelling for a long time. We have also tested many different methods and we have even developed proprietary technologies to recruit and engage large communities of participants around different types of content. We have reached the conclusion, that we have to be able to produce “4D Commercials” and we set in place a structure to achieve the goal.
What does “4D Commercials” means in practical terms? We believe that TV Commercials need to have 4 dimensions to be effective and to play a meaningful role in the present media landscape.
1. Excellence
Commercials have to be not only good but “unbelievably good”. It means that they mast tell a story in a surprisingly, astonishingly and memorably innovative way. They don’t have to look just as commercials but as pieces of a bigger and engaging narrative. To achieve the goal several resources have to be put in place: directors with a special sense of storytelling, capable producers with an understanding of the behavior of today’s consumers and high end technologies
2. Cultural Attraction
Commercials have to be powerful community builders and be able to congregate like-minded participants.
3. Cultural Activation
Commercials have to incorporate some form of call to action to energize the participants (the formerly known as “consumers”) and give them a mission. For this reason commercials have to be conceived and produced to be sharable, spreadable, vloggable, facebookable, twittable, bookmarkable, etc.
4. Narrative Expansion
While the cultural activation dimension makes that the commercials are re-purposed of dozens of different platforms in the original 30″ format, the 4th dimension calls for a much broader mission: expanding the narrative into other mediums and platforms creating a transmedia universe where the stories told by the brand can live together with the fantasies of the participants. In this way the commercial become the embryos for a wide transmedia narrative and eventually a participatory fiction. If the storyworld was an iceberg, the commercial would be the 10% visible portion of it while the rest of the narrative would expand in all directions attracting large communities of participants.
Director Massimo Martinotti is founder and president of transmedia company RedMagmaMedia
