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Jason BangerterFounder and ChairmanStruckAxiom |
My high school had email. Not real email, but something similar to it. No one had real email in 1993. We called it computer mail. And, despite the limitations of that system, we knew one thing: we had stories to tell and our school had just given us a way to tell them. We exposed years-old crushes and recounted drunken tumbles from last weekend’s oil-field party. We told the truth. We made things up. We embraced the anonymity that semi-online storytelling provided. We figured out how to make it appear that a message had come from another computer. In short, we abused the hell out of that system. And three weeks later, the whole thing was shut down. The computers were wiped clean. Our accounts were deleted.
The stories we told on those Apple LC IIIs were a hint at where things were headed. In essence, it was Prehistoric Facebook and Medieval MySpace. We were onto something that wouldn’t be fully realized for almost two decades. Things would change. Things would get better. Things would stay the same.
Somewhere between deviant computer mail and Twitter, we learned that online storytelling was a good thing. We figured out new ways to accomplish old tricks. We built Geocities sites and then started plugging away at our own HTML masterpieces. At that point, every site delivered a strikingly similar experience: text, more text, a picture or two (if you were lucky, a blinking animated .gif), and then some more text. And suddenly, just as soon as we were comfortable with our words, we erased them. Flash minimized the place of writing in the big picture. It ignored search engines and exchanged 3,000 word articles for animations and deconstructed photographs. To call this step an aesthetic leap forward is inaccurate. In the lexicon of late-90s athletics, it was a Carl Lewis triple jump forward, a Jose Canseco home run forward, an Andre Agassi forehand-smash forward.
Flash Forward
Flash allowed designers and programmers to do some of the same things their filmmaker friends had been doing for decades. It leveled the experiential playing field. And, in the interest of full disclosure, Flash allowed studios like Struck to build immersive online stories for brands and companies around the world. It was a good gig. . .and we would’ve been foolish to think it’d last for long. It’d be easy to say that the rise of Google killed the experiential microsite, but it wouldn’t be true. Partially because it’s not dead and partially because Google isn’t to blame (not this time, anyway). So what happened? Three things:
1. We—digital agencies and our clients—built too many beautiful sites and the audience got fatigued
2. We forgot to give users a reason to stick around—building sites that only lived for two or three weeks certainly didn’t help
3. The audience wanted something else.
What’s most interesting about the recent shift in the behavior and tastes of online audiences is how similar they’ve become to what we experienced 10 or 15 years ago. We’ve moved back toward a Do-It-Yourself online culture. But it’s a better, infinitely more visual paradigm than that of that late ‘90s DIY scene. Instead of fiddling with a friend’s bootlegged copy of Dreamweaver, we now benefit from hundreds of online tools where the barriers to entry are minimal (if they exist at all). Spend 15 minutes on Blogger (FREE) and you’ve built one of the 100,000 new blogs created each day. A WordPress plug-in (FREE) will help create something a little more unique for your custom URL ($7.95/year plus $3.95/month for hosting). Find a friend with a little know-how and you can connect every stream of your online existence (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) in a single location.
So this is where we are. Social media and searchability rule the day. HTML is back. Flash plays a different, more refined role. Clients talk about consumer engagement and social stickiness. There’s never been a better time to tell a story. . .and there have never been more places to tell one. Blogs are turning into book deals. Bestselling authors are becoming bloggers. There’s money to be made creating fake Twitter profiles for characters from movies and TV shows. Digital agencies build robust and complex hubs, help manage communities and outline integrated social media strategies. Do we still build visually stunning works of art? Of course we do. . .but they’re different. They’re parts of larger, longer-lasting campaigns. They’re more likely to incorporate hybrid technologies that blend Flash and database-driven content management systems. Sites are updated daily with search-engine-optimized marketing messages. In short, things have never been more evolved—and they’ve never been more chaotic. We’re figuring it out as we go, just like we always have.
Augmenting The Future
What happens next? What will the audience demand? What role will a digital agency play in the next chapter? It’s no bold prediction to say that the pendulum will continue to swing. We’ll add new technologies to the best of the old stuff. We’ll tell stories using Flash. . .but this time it will be through Augmented Reality experiments that also incorporate level upon level of presorted content and online social connections. We’ll push online storytelling beyond Webisodes and podcasts and mommy bloggers. We’ll continue to create online relationships that mirror, enhance ,and expand the connections we make at the gym and the farmer’s market.
You want something more than that list of vaguely ambitious predictions? Okay, we’ll make three:
1. Location—The next level of online storytelling will take location-based tagging to a frightening level. Not only will you know everything that your friends and enemies are saying/doing/thinking/seeing/watching, you’ll know exactly where they’ve said/done/thought/saw/watched it. And, of course, you’ll know where they’re going to say/do/think/see/watch it tomorrow.
2. Speed—It seems we’ve already turned the corner on this one (and it hurts to think about it), but it’s only going to get crazier. Great digital agencies are going find ways to tell more stories and build more interactive experiences to reach larger audiences across increasingly fragmented channels. Let’s just hope that the second part to this equation includes bigger budgets, faster decisions and more creative freedom.
3. Emotion—Deep content is no substitute for deep feeling. And while it’s nice to be able to read what parents around the world think about the latest stuffed animal on BabyCenter, the truth is that parents want to know what it feels like to see their child love that teddy bear until it falls apart. In other words, the best stories have an emotional pull that we haven’t quite seen in the online environment. YouTube clips are nice. And cutesy/irreverent moms like Dooce are trying, but we’re looking for something more. Maybe it’s polished and cinematic, maybe it’s raw. Whatever it is, online storytelling is going to make an emotional leap. And it’s going to be fantastic.
This much we know for certain: Things will keep changing. People will find new ways to tell their stories online. Narrative Flickr sets and Vimeo channels will give way to something a little more exciting. Bloggers and online communities will engage wider audiences in their conversations. Online experiences will deliver more outrage, more laughter and more tears. We’ll huddle around our monitors like our great-grandparents huddled around the fireplace, like our parents huddled around the radio, like we once huddled around the television—and we’ll tell stories like they’ve never been told before.
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