Having covered the advertising industry during a time of enormous change, the change now happening in the publishing industry sometimes appears to me like a slow-motion car crash. I feel like I know what’s going to happen. (I could be wrong, of course, but we’ll see.) The book world’s delayed discovery of platform agnosticism is just one example. Here’s another.

Six or seven years ago, it became fashionable in advertising to say that “media is the new creative.” What this meant was that how a message is delivered had become such a part of the story (and the business problem) that it no longer made sense to separate the two. In, say, 1985 talking about them separately had made perfect sense, just as it had made sense to talk about art and copy separately in 1955. As late as 2000, the creative was the creative and the media was the media. It made sense for someone to hand you a reel with five commercials on it and ask if it was a good campaign. All the info you needed to answer was on the reel. By 2005, however, this had become increasingly difficult. To really understand campaigns—to even appreciate them—you had to know their media story. The classic example is BMW Films, a series of shorts by big-name directors that were distributed via the web in 2002. Famously, the campaign was denied a Media Lion at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes because all the media jurors thought it was a creative idea. Three years later, the festival introduced a whole new category, the Titanium Lions, to honor these sorts of cross-platform campaigns. The first honoree? BMW Films.

Meanwhile, media becoming the new creative led to all sorts of upheaval. Ted Sann, seeming creative-director-for-life at TV-centric warhorse BBDO, was replaced by David Lubars, the guy whose agency came up with BMW Films. Old line creative types grumbled that “creative is still the new creative” while traditional media companies complained that even though media was supposedly the new creative, they weren’t winning any damn awards because they kept shoveling ads into magazines and onto TV while really interesting modes of delivery were being cooked up in, you guessed it, creative departments. But the long and the short if it is that in 2000, I covered ad campaigns by just showing people “the work,” as they say, but by 2005, the work had to be put into its media context for anyone to be able to judge if it was innovative or interesting. Where did the work appear? How was it discovered? How did users interact with it? It was like advertising went from 2D to 3D overnight.

I believe some percentage of narrative literature is about to go 3D as well. (I say some percentage, because I agree with Richard Nash that immersive reading will stick around.) What does this mean? It means that there will be innovation in ways to deliver and tell stories—not just in the way these stories are written—and that this will be an annoyance to some and an opportunity for others. Media will become the new narrative. Old line publishing types will grumble that “writing is the old and new narrative” even as they are bypassed by insurgents who see that how a story is delivered is as much a part of storytelling as writing. There will be a strong urge to dismiss all non-traditional delivery systems as gimmicks that somehow distract from the “pure” story—even by the innovators themselves. Electric Literature’s Andy Hunter wrote of the Moody Twitter experiment, “We regret that less attention was paid to the content of Rick’s story than its mode of delivery—although that may have been inevitable.” But he can’t mean that. Or he shouldn’t mean it. This is just, I suspect, transitional insecurity. Misplaced apologia. In five years—or less—book awards will have categories for innovations like this, and one day media might be accepted as being as essential to story as plot, character, and point of view.

Posted via web from The Hanex