Online Storytelling

It seems like a simple concept - provide your audience with content that they would like to engage with rather than content that you assume that they will digest…

Surprisingly though, so few are taking this approach. Here’s two examples of where audience engagement has worked recently:

The film Tropic Thunder, produced by Ben Stiller, revolves around a group of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film. Their writer and director, at the end of his tether, drops them in to a Vietnamese jungle which forces them to play out their roles without the creature comforts of a film set. To promote the film, an official website was launched. However, they went further by creating a series of sites based around each of the fictional characters - e.g. if you Google the name of Ben Stiller’s character “Tugg Speedman” you will find a whole site dedicated to him (which is clearly a pastiche of Tom Cruise’s website). Same applies for the other fictional characters such as Kirk Lazarus. in fact you find yourself searching for other related fictional topics such as Tugg Speedman’s official charity, the Panda Relocation Foundation - and guess what?

The journey of discovery concept can also be applied to VCCP’s Compare the Market campaign. You may have seen the ad. Crux of it is that a Meerkat is telling us not to get confused with his own website Compare the Meerkat. Of course, this website has been established as VCCP knew that it would create a buzz. The Meerkat character has created quite a stir too with his own Facebook page:

You may have noticed that the little fellow has 219′577 fans. There are even unofficial fan sites cropping up. To top it all off he has a catchphrase of “Simples…” which is also doing the rounds.

Engage with an audience by delivering content they will actually want to interrupt their lives with and you have a recipe for success. More memorable, more interactive, emotive cross-media marketing.