Live from XMediaLab: Susan Bonds, President and CEO, 42 Entertainment

Note: This post and the ones to follow today are from the keynote talks at the XMediaLab conference taking place in Auckland. XMediaLab is a creative industries event designed to assist companies and people get their own creative ideas successfully to market, through concept development, business matching, and direct access to world-class networks of creative professionals.

From the program: Susan Bonds is 42 Entertainment's President and CEO, responsible for leading the teams that design, create, and execute 42's unique immersive experiences. SUsan has more than 20 years of experience as a producer in the entertainment, gaming and technology industries.

42 Entertainment wanted to create entertaining experiences, and more traditional advertising was largely being ignored, so they put those things together to create content marketing.

As a result of bringing people into the story, they've seen that giant groups, hive minds, have formed on the Web with the power to do many many things.

42 Entertainment pioneered alternate reality games. They view the world as a platform for storytelling, where the audience is given a central role. There's a new type of storytelling -- a distributive narrative – where rather than write a linear story (Act I, II, III), you write the story, throw it away, and then figure out a way for the audience to make the story happen.

Key ingredients of an ARG:

• Hiding in Plain Sight (Look, Whisper, Discovery)
• Unique Storytelling (Distributive Narrative)
• Unusual Platforms (Cross-media)
• Evokes Collective Intelligence (Hive Mind and social networking)
• Inspires Participation and User Content Generation (Respects the Audience)

One interesting thing to note about that first item is that, when people stumble on something, there's a transfer of ownership, and you have to be ready to let them own it.

42 Entertainment did the I Love Bees project for the launch of Halo 2. Susan showed a brief video about it -- you can also read Jane McGonigal's case study here.

They also launched The Vanishing Point to celebrate the release of Windows Vista. The game lasted four weeks, as players worked to solve puzzles to win the ultimate vista: a trip to outer space. The Vanishing Point website had a countdown to the launch, pointing to GPS coordinates for a location in Vegas. At the launch, they issued a challenge – ‘to find the smartest minds on the planet’. Talk about red flags to a bull! Anybody in the tech market is going to want to prove him- or her-self as one of the smartest minds on the planet.

She also showed a campaign they did for The Dark Knight -- connecting online and offline and getting the collective community to help people, even if they can't be there geographically. People on the ground had to paint their faces like The Joker, while people online helped solve problems. Even though there were only a few hundred people on the ground for The Dark Knight promo, 650k people online turned out to help them.

Levels of Engagement
Level 0: Aware
Level 1: Casual
Level 2: Active
Level 3: Enthusiasts

If you imagine these levels as an inverse triangle, the size of the segment shows how many people are in that segment. Even though they’re your most passionate fans, don't spend all your time at the small end of the triangle! Make sure to find ways for people on the other levels to participate and interact.

Nine Inch Nails Year Zero
Imagine what it would look like if we freeze-framed the Internet. How can we represent the future? Take a snapshot of the Internet from 2022 and send it back in time for people to explore – after all, you can pretty much find out everything going in the world right now just by analyzing the Internet.

42 Entertainment started this campaign with a code on a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt that led to a website that appeared to be from the future; the fans quickly discovered there were more sites to be found and started tumbling down the rabbit hole.

A few days after the initial sites, a fan found a USB flash drive in the men's room at a concert in Portugal. He took it home, put it in the computer, and posted it online saying I think this is a new Nine Inch Nails song – and, of course, immediately got flamed for it. But passionate fans are passionate fans, and someone figured out that they should try spectrographic analysis – which in turn revealed more clues. More drives were found over the course of the campaign, each with a new song or clue.

A few weeks later, at a venue in Paris, they released flyers with the same degraded 'from the future' look. In the future people were fighting back and the way they were fighting back was through Art. A new site (Art Is Resistance) showed that you were in violation of the Federal Orderly Conduct Act (kerosene on the fire). They had sites showing how to remove your government implanted chip.

Once you set up this relationship with your audience, they will be looking for clues in everything, so you have to use everything. They sent out a CD with a sticker from the US Bureau of Morality, with a number to call to turn people in who are doing subversive activities. They integrated all the usual social media suspects, so then they started an open source resistance, where people got to be written into the movie. Ultimately the Art is Resistance movement took hold and spread like wildfire, and now there are Art Is Resistance groups in 40 states.

Obviously you don't always have a rock band that you can do a secret concert with, but you want to try to get people to feel like they're part of the story. 42 Entertainment has seen ARGs work in almost every genre. Whether it’s kids or women or older people, there's definitely the appeal for people to want to participate in their fiction.