Children’s Media in the Digital Age
Storytellers Must Now Listen & Respond To Their Audience
Erika Bachis, a student at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, and founder of children’s media startup Marabhale Pictures, recently asked me a number of interesting questions about developing multiplatform content for kids in the digital age. Since the talk offers a rare glimpse of how my company, Starlight Runner Entertainment, works with major studios like the Walt Disney Company, I thought I’d share the answers with you.
I really admire your work at Starlight Runner, I saw that you worked on transmedia projects for great names like Disney, Sony and James Cameron’s Avatar. You’ve said that good transmedia celebrates the expression and participation of the audience. What are the best ways to encourage young people to do this?
At Starlight Runner we work with our clients to build what we call an “architecture for dialog” into their projects, whether they are brand executions, movies, video games, or socio-political causes. What we mean by this is that the storyteller (the studio or organization or brand owner) must no longer think of itself as a broadcaster. We must think of the participation of the audience as a natural aspect of the narrative, which means there must be two-way communication.
When storytellers came to town in ancient times, they sometimes engaged with the community for days before the story was told to them. They picked up on the natural cadences of communication within the community, and primed their audiences for the narrative to come, setting the stage so to speak. People grew excited, and the turnout was great. That personal touch is once again possible through social media.
You can see it in the way that Disney and J.J. Abrams have engaged fans around the world with the newest iterations of Star Wars. You can see it in Jo Rowling’s intimate relationship with tens of millions of Harry Potter fans. You can see it in the way that Apple makes itself accessible to customers across an array of media, including its own products. In all three cases, the brand leverages multiple media platforms, venues such as stores and theme parks, and through humor and accessibility, to present itself as human and caring. These storytellers are expressing enthusiasm, encouraging creative expression, and acknowledging mistakes.
In its simplest form, the answer is for contemporary storytellers to do the same thing. Best practice is to provide a forum for feedback from the audience. They must show the audience that they are listening and responding, even if some of those expressions are negative. There is nothing more powerful for a person than to be heard and acknowledged. This immediately creates a feeling of familiarity and intimacy. Maintain this (and tell a good story, of course), and you will build a lasting bond of loyalty.
I know that you worked on several Disney projects, one being a popular children’s franchise, Disney Fairies. Were there any challenges or specific decisions involved in creating multiplatform content for children?
In the case of Fairies there was a fascinating initial challenge. The property was created in 2005, conceived as a unique spin-off from the world of Peter Pan by the publishing division of the company. Bob Iger had just taken control of Disney as CEO, and was encouraging the movie studio to search for new material and new franchises from other divisions of the company. This was a unique idea at the time, because under Michael Eisner, feature films were by far the main source and drivers of business. Under this directive, Disney Animation went to Disney Publishing and chose to adapt the very popular and critically praised book series by Gail Carson Levine to become a computer animated feature. But during pre-production some at Disney noted that the changes being made by the animators to the Fairies world seemed rather significant.
Starlight Runner has always promoted the idea of keeping your story worlds under a single canon. This means that each time you see or interact with Tinker Bell and the fairies of Pixie Hollow, the characters need to be consistent, and what happens to them needs to take place in the same continuity. For example, if the movie took place after the events of the book, then Tinker Bell would remember the events of the book. Young audiences care about this kind of thing, because they are often savvier than we think, and want everything to make some kind of sense. They want their favorite characters to behave in ways they’ve come to expect. They want the universe to work the same way, whether its extended into a movie, app, or console game.
Starlight Runner ran into this conundrum while developing a series of motion animated stories for the DVDs to be packaged in the toy sets. Do we follow the continuity and characterizations in the novels (which we loved), or the animated feature that had just gone into production (which we felt was straying a bit far from the books). So, one of the most important things we did on Fairies was advocate for Disney to reduce the differences between the film and the books, to have them take place in the same world. This was a very new concept for them. Story continuity from one medium to the next had not really mattered to them before. Not everyone was comfortable with the idea. It takes some extra work to coordinate a canonical story world across multiple divisions of a large company, as well as its licensees and merchandisers. For a moment there, I thought we would be vetoed.
Fortunately, Disney had recently acquired Pixar, and John Lasseter was given a great deal of influence over Disney Animation. He believed same as we did that the animation ought to more closely reflect the world of the novels, and so the filmmakers changed course. The result, I believe, was a superior product that was appreciated by children. Since then, the characters and story world of Pixie Hollow as originally interpreted by Levine have proliferated across all kinds of media. There have been dozens of novels and chapter books, a sprawling web site, six animated features, a TV special, video games, theme park attractions, and even canonical appearances on other series like Jake and the Neverland Pirates, and Once Upon a Time. The franchise has been running successfully for ten years now.
How do you choose which social media you use for the different components of a transmedia marketing campaign for young people? Are certain social media more suitable for certain kinds of content or engagement?
Data analysis plays a key role in choice of platform for communicating to and dialoging with the audience. We must determine who exactly the target audience for the product is, and where they congregate in the digital world. Does the company have a history with fans of this nature? Is it providing a safe haven for children in accord with regulations? We would want to start there. Where do fans of this type of brand go to enjoy similar products? We need to go there. It boils down to what the story is, and where those who might most appreciate the story will be.
Often, the company has a fairly good track record for sending messages to its audience on the correct platform. So the change that we make is to get the company to encourage feedback: questions, speculation, user-generated content, memes, that sort of thing. Look at what we’re seeing with Lego. They’ve leveraged themselves into the world’s leading toy brand, not only by engendering good will and affiliating themselves with great pop culture properties, but also by promoting creative expression through YouTube and even through viral memes.
In the case of the Littlest Pet Shop toy line, thousands of kids were creating webisodic soap operas with the toys, and Hasbro was so weirded out, they didn’t know what to do with it. (Admittedly, some of those were kind of racy.) That was a few years back. Hasbro has become far more intuitive when it comes to promoting fan creativity today.
A good transmedia producer must also stay keenly aware of where certain types of audiences are migrating. Initially the notion of Snapchat, for example, was counterintuitive to advertisers. But savvy marketers have figured out how to leverage this increasingly popular platform.
Do you have any advice for a children’s content startup that endeavors to reach young people across multiple media?
In recent years I’ve been quite interested in the notion of communal and participative narrative: the concept that the storyteller is not providing a complete story and needs creative audience members to help fully realize the narrative. I think firing the imaginations of young audiences and encouraging their creative expression is the most powerful way to build a bond of loyalty between your brand and kids in the 21st century. But there are many practical challenges in executing such a project.
Good storytelling remains a rarified skill. Even to this day, if you survey any cluster of TV shows, films, and novels, you can see that a significant percentage boasts some pretty bad storytelling. So if you open your narrative to dozens, hundreds or thousands of potential contributors, you can guess that the vast majority will not be terribly good. There will even be a few trolls who actively attempt to “break” your story through various kinds of narrative sabotage. At the same time, you don’t want to offer your audience/participants mundane things to contribute, such as the color of the sky, or the name of the hero’s pet. I would recommend a type of compromise:
Imagine inviting strangers into your garage to make music with you. If anyone can come in and use any instrument, you will wind up with a lot of noise. But if you only offer people a triangle or even a cowbell, they will feel they are not contributing much and will be dissatisfied. (You can never have too much cowbell, though.) However, if you put a decent band in the garage, and you’ve composed the basics of a good tune for them, then you can offer a carefully selected set of instruments to your visitors and let them have a go. If our storytelling band leaders like the guest musician, then they stay. If not, they fade into the background and are not heard from as much. The band grows through collaborative curation between band and guests.
So if you design your narrative in such a way as your audience is given opportunities to color and expand certain aspects of the story, you’ll do well. We at Starlight Runner call this the Swiss cheese narrative model, because you are designing the overall framework of the narrative, but you’re also leaving aspects of it open to be filled by your participants — who will be rewarded in some way for doing so. There are already some legal curation models and terms of agreement that allow for this, and the space is evolving rapidly. With this approach, the right participant will either give you exactly what you hoped for, or just maybe, they’ll come up with something better than you could have dreamed…
