QR Code Usage up 4,549% in 1st QTR 2011 – TLP integrates QR Codes in TransMedia Strategies

Mobile bar code scanning has increased by 4,549 percent in the first quarter of 2011 on a year-over-year basis, according to a Mobio Identity Systems study.

Report May 2011:  “The Naked Facts: Whiplash Edition QR Barcode Scanning in Q1-2011“  READ FULL REPORT HERE.

With the increase in smartphone purchases for both iPhone and Android devices, which have a pre-installed QR reader, there is growing awareness among consumers of QR codes compared to a year ago.

QR barcodes go mainstream
Women also show a higher interest in using QR codes, accounting for 68 percent of users.

These numbers have big implications for advertisers.

“QR barcodes are no longer just a way to speak to early adopters, or the geek crowd,” Mr. Binns said. “QR codes have gone mainstream and are being used heavily by women who are head decision makers and purchasers in households.”

Mobio offers target rich environments where advertisers use multiple barcodes tied to different outcomes or campaigns to engage their consumers multiple times.

The vast majority of mobile bar code scans are centered on providing more information about a product or service, with 89 percent of scans falling into this category.

In terms of the type of media scanned, social media accounts for 70 percent of scans, TV 22 percent, the physical world four percent, online three percent and print one percent.  The iPhone is the most popular scanning device, followed by the iPod Touch and then, Android.  The report also shows that consumers are not just trying QR codes once and forgetting about them, but are becoming repeat users of the technology.

In fact, repeat scanners account for 62 percent of the market.

For marketers, this means QR codes can provide a way to have an ongoing conversation with consumers.

“QR isn’t a one-off medium anymore,” Mr. Binns said. “Marketers can change their QR codes in ads each day, week or month, and have an ongoing dialogue with their consumer.”

The State of TransMedia According to JWT – In 2011 Brands Buy In …

JWT recently released a significant report for 2011 entitled:  “TransMedia Rising.”  In it the giant advertising firms quotes:  “What we need to do is figure out the story behind the brand, the place it wants to occupy in the consumer’s mind, deconstruct it, make it relevant and reassemble it for the relevant audiences, on the appropriate channels. Then, through social media, let the experience and associations grow organically.”  —DEAN BAKER, managing director, JWT Entertainment.

Enter the Age of the QR Code.  It is a technology that is a dream for brand integrations if their content can incorporate it to engage their audience/viewer/customer … because now they are one and the same.

This QR Code can be read by online readers and by cell phones with any number of free apps that can be downloaded from the Internet.  This particular QR Code will take you to The Legacy Productions’ main website.  To see how easy this is online, right click the QR Code … and click view image.  Then copy the URL.  Then  go here and insert it in the first line and click SUBMIT QUERY.   With cell phones it is much easier.  You simply snap a picture of the QR Code and then hit submit.  Done.

As this video clearly demonstrates, brands are using QR codes in many unique ways to engage their audience/viewer/customer.

18% Click Through Rates?  Consider the possibilities QR Codes present to TransMedia Campaigns using it.

Augmented Reality Applications with QR Codes

The Threshold – A Successful CISCO TransMedia Multi-Layer ARG Project

2011 Update:

CISCO, No Mimes and JUXT Team up again in an amazing TransMedia Project spanning 5 Continents and 2 weeks of Alternate Reality Game Immersion.  It’s called “The Hunt.”

Here is a Webisode segment provided as a featurette to the participants to help solve a mystery and engage them in activities.  You will notice the male character takes out an iPhone in real time and indicates feedback from people watching the story unfold.  CISCO branding and products are seamlessly integrated into the storyline of this segment.

In this follow-up segment it ends with a call to action from the viewer audience to help solve the dilemma in the storyline.

IN 2009 CISCO, Juxt and No Mimes collaborated and produced “The Threshold.”  It has set a new bar for TransMedia excellence.

The Threshold An Alternate Reality Game

In 2009, Cisco turned to JUXT Interactive and George P. Johnson to help make their annual Global Sales Meeting a virtual event. The Global Sales Experience was created to help inform and motivate 19,000 Cisco sales people from around the globe.

Knowing that our audience was 89% male — most of them highly competitive and highly social — made our solution fairly obvious. We turned the whole event into a worldwide competition. And to anchor that competition, we built a deeply immersive Alternate Reality Game (ARG) titled The Threshold. Collaborating with the ARG visionary Steve Peters and his talented team at No Mimes Media, JUXT worked to create an experience that would blow the Cisco sales force away. Bringing these two talented teams together did not disappoint. The fruit of this unique marriage was hours of entertainment, challenge and collaboration for our audience, many of whom devoted most of their waking hours to the experience.

To help build anticipation for GSX, The Threshold was treated like a summer blockbuster film, with Cisco offices displaying digital posters resembling movie billboards. The highlight of a pre-launch email campaign featured a gripping trailer video that raised buzz in Cisco hallways around the world.

The Threshold officially launched three weeks prior to the event, and players quickly found themselves immersed in its story, and emotionally invested in its characters. Cisco Sales teams demonstrated both genius and tenacity as they worked day and night to follow the ever-evolving storyline and unlock the game’s mysteries.

As The Threshold unfolded over 4 intense weeks, players exchanged phone calls and emails with fictional characters, scoured every corner of the GSX platform for clues, and uncovered secret videos, including recorded Webex sessions. Cisco’s CEO John Chambers even made cameo appearances, while Executive Vice president Rob Lloyd released crucial clues in his live opening session.

In the end, The Threshold proved to be a runaway success, doubling our expected participation numbers. The revolutionary ARG captivated 13,000 of the event’s 19,000 attendees, and for many of them, playtime exceeded several hours a day. Numerous unsolicited forum threads championed The Threshold for promoting collaboration and learning, and for bringing the company one step closer to its vision of ONE Cisco.

What is TransMedia Syndication and Distribution? Fiction Without Limits …

TransMedia stories, at a most basic level, are stories told across multiple media platforms.  At the present time, the most significant stories tend to flow across multiple media platforms which give rise to new revenue models where broadcast and narrowcast models converge in a new integrated business plan.  Cross-platform integrations give rise to new Story Worlds.

TransMedia storytelling is not just a symbolic exercise:   Transmedia storytelling –> More $$$$$$

How does TransMedia connect with a shared story world environment?  What are the economic opportunities for content creators, producers, distributors, and syndicators in 2011?  For those with a creative mind, the answers are now seemingly limitless.  Can TV content libraries be re-purposed and inserted into a larger story or narrative which takes that broadcast serial content, dramatic or news content into the fabric of a much larger and new Story Narrative?  The answer is yes and we call it TransMedia, particularly when it involves multiple integrated screens from digital signage, mobile devices with ARG (augmented reality), web site embeds and Connected TVs .  An re-mixing which observes intellectual property rights is permitted … in fact it’s advisable in this brave new frontier of TransMedia:

It is sometimes called a shared “Story World”  approach where transmedia strategies explore new creative and economic opportunities for monetizing every new view of the shared and new content.   When audiences are invited to contribute to an entertainment experience in a variety of ways, multiple opportunities for Anchor Sponsor and advertiser engagement arise that cannot be found in a tradition Broadcast environment.

Such a new Story World often begins with a single story and a single property.  It could be a novel, a graphic novel, a movie, a TV serial, dramatic or news program.  And it may begin as a serialized narrative:  say, a TV show, a comic series, or a movie or documentary property.  It may also represent only art forms (i.e., images, photographs, etc.), role-playing or alternate reality gaming properties, or an animated cartoon series.  Irrespective of the mediums involved (i.e. and the medium is the message)  or the source content (new or re-purposed), a shared Story World narrative is not the same as a single work.  As its label describes, it is an entire is a world a new universe of story based economic opportunities diversified and strong enough to support multiple new monetized, creative works but flexible enough to encourage and support audience participation.

Documentary + Game = Independent TransMedia Project called “The Great Work” — a project consulted on by Lance Weiler

“The Greak Work” is a documentary by two Swedish filmmakers, Oskar Östergren & Fredrik Oskarsson (details at the end) about 30-year-old Christer Böke from Malmö, Sweden. He has taken one year off from his well-paid job as an IT-salesman to become a full-time Alchemist.  The film concerns mankind’s eternal ambition of wealth and immortality and one mans dedicated struggle to solve “The secret of all secrets”. This struggle is known at The Great Work.

What’s particularly interesting about this project is that the filmmakers have teamed up with an independent game designer, Niflas, to create a game to complement the movie.

The Great Work was screened on SVT (Swedish Television) as a 58 minute version, winter 2011.

Lance Weiler is considered to an early adopter and cutting edge developer in the world of TransMedia.

THE EVOLUTION OF STORYTELLING.  Technology is impacting the art and craft of storytelling. As the industry shifts and audiences move from passive to active collaborators, how does the art of storytelling change? How does one develop stories and characters that can travel across screens and devices? What will emerge as new formats and how will they be funded and distributed? Lance Weiler, director of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma, details the story architecture that he employs to build story worlds around his film, TV and gaming projects.

Early this year production company Vectorform says it went down the transmedia rabbit-hole with award winning writer/director Lance Weiler.  They popped up at the Sundance Film Festival–where they helped unleash Pandemic 1.0, a fictional story of a viral outbreak that took the festival by storm.  Spanning film, mobile, online, real world and more, Pandemic 1.0 was a digital virus that spread— or receded–based on player interaction. Vectorform created a mobile experience featuring Near Field Communication (NFC) integration for 50 Nexus S devices, and a Microsoft Surface dashboard for Mission Control.

The Witness – The first movie in the outernet

In Augmented Reality Film, Your Smartphone Solves the Crime.  In “The Witness,” viewers become participants in a clever fusion of filmmaking and augmented reality.  Why does Europe get all the cool stuff?  Here in America, all we get from SyFy are bad monster-movie mashups; but in Germany, SyFy (or rather, its parentborg, NBC Universal) mounts innovative original fare like “The Witness,” which blends gritty drama with immersive augmented reality. Forget the internet — they’re dubbing this “the first movie in the outernet.”  “The Witness” works like a smartphone-centered fusion of a traditional thriller and an interactive ARG:  German viewers applied to participate online, and the “winners” got to enter a real-life version of the movie in which they play a role, using their phones to watch snippets of the film that play out like a virtual layer over the physical scene they’re standing in. For example, when the “film” begins in a Berlin hotel at the scene of a kidnapping, the player/viewer is literally standing in the same room where the scene took place, holding their phone up over it like a window to watch how it plays out — and then interact with it like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, as The Visual News explains…. You can either choose to solve the crime and save the day, or (intentionally or not) end up a red stain on the concrete.

The Truth About Marika as a Cross-Media Production – Extraordinary Results

The Truth About Marika (Swedish title: Sanningen om Marika), is a cross-media production by Sveriges Television (SVT) and The company P. It is an alternate reality game and a TV-series first aired in Sweden during the autumn of 2007. The Truth About Marika was marketed as a “participation drama” and had a high amount of viewer participation.  The viewers of the TV-series were invited by a young woman to participate in the search for her lost friend and the search took place online and all over Sweden.  The Truth About Marika took place on television, national radio, the internet, mobile phones and in the streets. Each week the theories of the search for Marika were discussed in a live TV-debate.  The events depicted on the television show was partially altered by the actions of participating viewers.

Collapsus is the future of storytelling – It is the Definition of TransMedia

Collapsus is a project that combines animation, interactive fiction, and documentary film.  This story follows how the impending energy crisis affects ten young people, while international powers battle with political dissension and a fearful population during transition from Fossil fuel to alternative fuels.  Set in the near future, Collapsus was initialized to raise awareness of the global issue of peak oil.  Collapsus was developed by SubmarineChannel, with the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, who produced the associated Energy Transition documentary the project is based on. Collapsus is directed by Tommy Pallotta, who produced A Scanner Darkly (film) and Waking Life.