Integrated Digital Media: Product vs Experience

In our fast moving century it is not enough to have only a book, or only a movie or tv-show. After creation of such online experiences as Second Life, company now really try to create their own little worlds, rather than just producing a piece of media in it self. It is simply not enough. You have to engage the audience further, take every possibility to keep their attention on a product. Create ‘an experience’, rather than just ‘a product’ and to sell the whole thing not just a part of it. And that’s when first ideas about integrated digital media started coming into play.

We are in the digital age, age of interaction between customer and an ‘intelligent product’. Every film now has a story to it integrating featured DVD and website with experience. Take for example Pirates of Caribbean and scroll down the google search page. All you see is a part of so called Integrated Digital Experience. The movie in it self is not enough, what really sells product is the branding around it, and branding is an old term for Integrated Digital Experience in media industry. A common sense. So lets look closer at the components of it.

Pirates of Caribbean integrated experience contain

1. Official website with embedded flash site to each of 3 movies, DVD overviews, PoC video games overviews, shop with everything from DVDs it self to teeshirts, mobile games, wallpapers, trailers, icons, interviews, news.. It is huge.
2. As mentioned, each of 3 parts has its own website, for instance Pirates of Caribbean: The Curse of a Black Pearl
3. Big online strategy game
4. Video games (not online) for PC, PS2, PSP, Nintendo, Game Boy etc
5. Huge following of other flash games made by other people
6. DVD’s with the whole new movie about the movie, interviews, sneak peeks, trailers, etc..

It doesn’t cover the whole ‘experience’, however. That would be only the ‘interactive part’ of it. Yet the industry uses it hugely in any way possible. Take another example: we all seen these silly ad billboards with “i hate sarah marshall” slogans. To spoil a surprise for you, it is a campaign for the new movie called “Forgetting Sarah Marshall“. The movie itself doesn’t seem to be anything special, yet their interactive strategy is, in fact, quite interesting. They created the series of campaign promoting “http://www.ihatesarahmarshall.com/“, which will lead you to the blog of the main character in the movie, Peter Bretter, who is writing about his life, his ex, his journal, etc.

Not to mention that almost every teenage group oriented movie will have their characters on myspace, posting comments, pictures, blog posts, etc. They all are no longer just characters, they are the real people, only living in the virtual space.

Breaking the borders between reality and show is not new to the media industry, take for instance Blair Which Project. They sold experience, not the movie or website. And that’s what I believe the biggest idea behind the Integrated Digital Media component. It is about experience that user gains from collective media tools and features. User doesn’t like to be a passive consumer of the product, they want to be in the crux of it, be the hero in the story, change it along the way, make a decisions along the way, to participate at least.

You never sell a product in it self, you sell the integrated experience formed in one story. And interactive tools are only tools, the idea/concept of how making it real, feasible and engaging is what giving it value. And that’s the bottom line.