2007 Post from Brian Seth Hurst (Still Worth Reading!) Adventures in Storytelling | Grazie! @GaryPHayes
This year's crop of Emmy� finalists for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Television are pioneers, masters of cross-media production pushing the frontiers and drawing audiences into the worlds they have created by extending environments, characters and plot onto platforms that are part of their viewer's everyday lives: broadband, mobile, gaming, social networking and more. This trend has given rise to a new term, "distributed storytelling" and new titles: executive producer, cross-media, and producer, cross-media.
NBC's Heroes 360 Experience knew that its audience of science fiction fans would be an active online community and introduced the character of Hana Gitelman exclusively online. As the bridge between what was on television and what was online, Hana represented an opportunity for viewers to become more deeply involved and therefore have a greater emotional stake in the show. Through e-mails and text messages to registered users (providing a valuable fan database) Hana interacted with them on a daily basis, urged them to build profiles, do research, and explore. She began by encouraging them to hack into the fictitious Primatech Paper website where they could find hidden messages, clues and voice mails that extended the show's plot lines. Later, when Hana's character appeared in the television show, the online community already knew who she was and why she was there, while those who only watched the television show had no feeling of being left out. When Heroes was off the air, the experience kept fans engaged in the show's universe. Between January 22 and March 22 of 2007, the Heroes 360 Experience had more than 48 million page views and 27 million video downloads testifying to the power of great storytelling and the ability to move an audience back and forth between platforms. Calling this season a dry run, coexecutive producer and writer Jess Alexander has promised that this season the 360 Experience will be even bigger. This is a great example of not only knowing your audience but anticipating their needs and desires by giving them content and interactivity that is deeply and richly engaging. It is satisfying a true hunger for content.
CBS Interactive's The Jericho Experience at http://www.whodroppedthebomb.com also had a deeply interactive audience that lived across platforms. Rich with features that grew over time, the experience included an original prequel "webumentary" called Countdown which took viewers through the expected real-world consequences of a nuclear bomb detonation. Executive producers Stephen Chbosky, Carol Barbee and Jon Turtletaub were intimately involved in the process, with Turtletaub writing scripts for the online community experience. As in the case of Heroes, a character was introduced on the Web with a storyline and videos, and was eventually integrated into the TV series. Though the site launched as promotion, it quickly morphed into a Web 2.0 social community, sustaining the audience s involvement during a nine-week winter hiatus. The power of the interactive community was particularly evident when fans sent 50,000 pounds of nuts to CBS executives to protest the cancellation of the show. CBS responded, ordering seven additional episodes, but warning fans that ratings on TV must increase.