We’re Multi-Platform Beings

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From Publishing Perspectives:

Saying that the book is no longer a business model in itself, Roger Casas-Alatriste insists on a transmedial approach for publishers.

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In a keynote address at Tuesday’s (February 18) annual CONTEC México conference in Mexico city, issues of transmedia have been described as “the capacity to think how our stories can be transmitted through different platforms.”

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Casas-Alatriste told his audience at Centro Cultural de España, “We’re multi-platform beings, and our multiple devices are our platforms. We’re full of stories, and we’re what we tell and how we tell it.

“Technology empowers our narrative potential.”

El Cañonazo–as a phrase, it translates to a cannon blast–is a digital content strategy agency with clients that include airlines, insurance companies, media outlets, telecommunications companies and retail chains. As the pitch has it, the company helps them “make a bang.”

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“We have a diversified business model with audiovisual production, an agency for branded content, and a creative studio for transmedia. That allows us to focus on different sectors.”

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“The media have now realized that they can use creativity from other sources,” Casas-Alatriste says. “We can contribute with our content to all kinds of businesses and departments, because all companies need stories to connect to their customers, and those companies don’t always have the team to attend to their narrative needs.

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“Advertising is based on repetition that interrupts the content you’re trying to consume,” Casas-Alatriste says, “and that interruption is increasingly less effective because we’re using media such as Spotify and Netflix–impervious to such ads.

“We believe that branded content should be complementary to publicity. In order to sell you a product I have to make friends with you. As consumers, we need to like a brand in order to consume its products.”

Thanks to the Internet and smartphones, Casas-Alatriste says, we’re all compulsive consumers of content–as well as content creators.

“But we can no longer think of ourselves as just being creators of content,” he says, “we have to see content as liquid for use on multiple platforms. And if we don’t think like that, then our days are numbered.”

Casas-Alatriste says the book by itself should no longer be seen as a business model. And that, he says, is a “pain point” for publishing. New models–modes, formats, and iterations–must be found for publishing’s content, and adaptations to film, television, audiobooks, and more are part of that.

To illustrate his point, Casas-Alatriste highlights how many films and television series are adapted from books, rather than arriving as original content. This, he says, is definitional to transmedia.

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“It’s a question,” he says, “of producing more stories from the same story.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives