Story should supersede platform

Christy Amador is the Global Interactive Marketing Strategist at Coca-Cola, and she spoke at JUMP about how there has to be one ‘north star’ idea that links a campaign together. At Coca-Cola, it has been building its brand around telling great stories that make people happy. By being able to tell a good story you can roll that into any type of campaign.

You have to be smart and know what is going on – watch TV, be online, be in social spaces but most of all you have to be able to tell a story and how to create beautiful content to engage people emotionally. These things are not about the digital platform but rather it’s about the big idea and if you can do that the rest will come.

Narrative is like software

Mike Knowlton, CTO at Storycode and founder of the interactive film studio Murmur, works on traditional video projects with interactivity and basic computer functionality in the middle of the narrative. We are still defining what the future of emerging creative projects looks like. Though story is important, Knowlton thinks that creating stories are increasing like creating software. If you’re shooting a TV series or creating marketing content like you did 20 years ago, you will probably fail. But if you see film and video content more like software, then you wireframe, you create functional specs in the narrative where different things can happening whether it’s branching narrative or non-linear, etc.

If you are a creator you have to understand how software is created and be much more comfortable in that space. From a consumption perspective, it’s still very early in the game but the bottom line is that engagement is becoming much more important than celebrity and you must increasingly build that engagement into your narrative.