Week Three: 'LOST' & Transmedia Storytelling

        

  This week, I have chosen to do my blog post on Lost, a series on ABC network that tells the story of a group of individuals who experience a plane crash and are marooned on a mysterious tropical island. I, myself, have always been a huge fan, so knowing the story-lines fully understand the search and speculation around the mystery behind the programme.

               Lost is described as ‘interactive television’ as it encourages discussion, rewinding to look for hidden cues and use of the internet. Blattberg and Deighton (1991) defined interactivity as “the facility for individuals and organisations to communicate directly with one another without regard to distance or time”.  Lost uses ‘gradual world progression’ (Smith, 2009) which is the slow addition of more storylines to create more possibilities, to stimulate viewers imagination and encourage interactivity. The key to the success of the interactivity of ‘Losties’ is that ambiguity and mystery in the programme has brought about the ‘power of the question’ that has been slowly eroded due to the internet and its readily available information. The fans have developed a large number of websites, including ‘Lostpedia’ (a spinoff of Wikipedia dedicated to Lost) and forums dedicated to the programme speculating and theorising over the mysteries. There is, of course, Facebook and Twitter accounts as well. In this digital age, consumers now “own the customer and internet would give power to the people” to consume media how they choose to (Deighton and Kornfeld, 2007).

            Transmedia storytelling is "storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a fan's understanding of the story world. By using different media formats, transmedia creates "entrypoints" through which consumers can become immersed in a story world" (Jenkins).

ABC used cross-media activities, often new media for Lost including:

·         ‘Mobisodes’ called the ‘Lost: Missing Pieces’(mini episodes made for mobile devices)

·          An official magazine online and print

·         An alternate reality game called ‘Lost Experience’ with parallel storylines

·         Official forums sponsored by the creative team (‘The Fuselage’)

·         A weekly video ‘The Lost Initiative’ and Podcasts

·         Tie-in websites as well as the official one

Lost has been used in various popular culture showing its popularity and how it has achieved Word of Mouth, the most powerful of all marketing tools - Will and Grace, Bo Selecta, My Wife and Kids, Chuck, Little Britain, Scrubs, Cougar Town, How I Met Your Mother, Family Guy, South Park, The Simpsons, some of the most popular shows ever known – and the list goes on. As well as in comics, songs and video games. Lost has used the internet to extensively expand the background of the story. This is through tie in websites such as the ‘Oceanic Airlines’(where the web address was embedded in the season finale) and interactive stories of the characters in the UK through ‘Lost Untold’ which was a section of Channel 4’s Lost website.

           An article on Business Week online magazine, ‘Network Finds Marketing Paradise with Lost’, discusses that using Lost’s network ABC “is creating a blueprint that other networks are using to think way beyond just TV”. The digital franchise was created before the TV show even aired, with the first fan base www.lost-tv.com being set up. After the first airing, the producers started up the other media platforms commenting that they have ”the perfect demographics – tech-savvy kids, mostly male, 16 to 34” to use transmedia storytelling. Michael Benson, senior vice-president for marketing at ABC Entertainment, says “Lost is like a candy store of marketing” (see article here).

           “Lost has been the poster child of entertainment in the “convergence era” embracing new technologies as tools of discovery rather than threats to intellectual property” (Smith, 2009). By creating an environment that encourages exploration I feel that there are many opportunities in the future for transmedia storytelling and that TV shows will have to adapt to this shift to cross-media platforms to stay popular.