Fourth Story Media

A great collection of Coraline ads and marketing efforts on the Wieden and Kennedy blog.

This caught my eye this morning:

Women’s publisher and advertising network Glam is seeking to make money by editing streams from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook’s status updates.

During the Oscars (it’s second run with the idea – first tested over Fashion Week), Glam’s entertainment editors edited down the standard #Oscars Twitter feed into a widget on their homepage. The result was Glam approved commentary that advertisers felt comfortable with, leading Aveeno to sign on as a sponsor of the branded widget.

The micro-blogging widgets are significant because they’re one of the first ways a company has tried to monetize microblogging through editing. Glam is calling its edited news wire “gWire.” Until now, microblogging has largely been either one-to-one or open to all. Glam lets both its own publishers and other third-party publishers embed the widgets on their websites…

Publishers in Glam’s network using the widget get a share of the revenue generated by the advertising. Within “a few weeks,” even publishers outside the network will be able to receive payments, via micro-payments from PayPal.

It will be really interesting to see if more magazines and news outlets go this monetized curating route in upcoming months. Venture Beat has Glam’s chief executive Samir Arora as saying that the feature is best used when anchored to an offline event such as the Oscars since there’s not only a steady stream of commentary, but a sponsor can buy branding on everything from the widget box to the physical event itself to display ads on Glam’s sites, as well as ads on video modules.

(via Venture Beat)

MySpace recently launched a new “pilot advertising initiative” that allows users to click through a small overlay on the bottom of music videos to buy the song they are listening to, or jump straight to the artist’s page. The initiative (stemming from a partnership with content detection company Auditude) has debuted on two videos so far – My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row, and U2’s Get On Your Boots.

Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran [on the Chemical Romance video] it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos.

The ads are great – the overlay is slick and non-intrusive, and shrinks into a small tab mid-way through. Even better, the overlay replaces the previous ad attempt – a much more annoying (and disconnected) 15-20 second pre-roll.

YouTube launched a similar initiative a few weeks ago, and confirmed that their clickthrough rates have seen significant increases as well.

(via b-side)

Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture.

So begins Scott Brown’s satiric eulogy to the classic Freytag Pyramid model of storytelling in this month’s issue of Wired. With Freytag buried, Brown steps in with a model of his own making – Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D!)^tm. To “stress-test” the Ziggurat, Brown runs the “classic hero’s journey,” (Die Hard, natch), through both story machines and parses the chunks. While the Freytag view is bor-ing, the Ziggurat’s breakdown includes a pre-movie ARG, Tumblr blog, XBox game, Sprite commercial, and real time tweets. And, to top it all off, the whole thing ends with the Mymax^tm, “a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience.”

(via Wired)

Warner Bros. recently released this great viral video of a faux 1970’s newscast for their highly anticipated film Watchmen. The movie hits theaters on March 4th.

UPDATE: There is now a New Frontiersman newspaper site, and Flickr set as well.

(via BuzzFeed)

Cowrite is a new, open-source screenwriting competition that is encouraging participants to develop a community created movie script. Every other week the best ten-page script entry selected by the Cowrite judges will be added to the developing story until the screenplay is completed and ready to be sold.

Each submission costs $10, with “packages” available ($40/5 submissions, and $75/11 submissions). Every submission that is chosen and posted will win $2,000, and one winner will receive $5,000 at the end of the process to help rewrite the script and attend the 2009 LA Film Festival.

The premise?

Determined to be a high-level Jason Bourne type operative, an awkward teenager enlists the help of a mysterious, supposed ex-CIA agent in his hometown and finds himself entangled in a dangerous plot that is way over his head.

Hmmmn. The first ten pages will be posted on January 26th.

(via Springwise)

Penguin UK is sponsoring Bookcamp, a user-generated conference centering around the future of books and “book-like technology” that will examine the role of books as delivery mechanisms for stories, information, and entertainment.

Our plan is for this to be a day of talking and doing – examining the role of the book as an object and as a delivery mechanism for content. We’re inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers, technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book. Will print on demand mean the end of the bookshop? Will ebook technology allow everyone to be their own publisher? Will printed books go the way of vinyl and become collectors objects? Are games the new novels? And does format matter or, to paraphrase Berry Gordy, is it what in the groove that counts?

Participants and guests will choose the agenda for the day, breaking into groups to discuss and create. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Director of Digital at Penguin & a listed participant, was behind last year’s We Tell Stories – a storytelling experiment that sought to create stories designed specifically for the internet.

From Jeremy’s post on the Penguin blog today:

It’s quite hard to know what to expect from Bookcamp which is now only a few days away… we’re hoping to see lots of things people have made or hear them discuss what they might like to make in the future. I’m looking forward to following discussions about how we get children hooked on reading, hearing about authors’ fear of the internet and learning why everything on the internet is the opposite of how it is in print! And I’m excited to meet some new people who share an interest in and passion for books and stories and, yes, technology.

(via PSFK)

It’s official. According to a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the majority of American adults now play video games of some kind (e.g. console, computer, mobile, online, etc.). Age is still a large determining factor -  although more than four out of five US adults ages 18-29 said they were video gamers, only 23% of respondents 65 + identified the same way. The study also showed that men are slightly more likely to define themselves as gamers than women, and urbanites are more likely to game than those in rural areas. Income is a non-factor, but respondents with at least some college education are significantly more likely to game than their less-educated counterparts.

In a similar vein, The LA Times is reporting that video game sales are continuing at a “blistering” pace, with the video game industry recording a 10% sales increase last month to $2.91 billion, up from $2.64 billion in November 2007.

(via eMarketer, LA Times)

In 2006, The MacArthur Foundation launched a five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

Over three years, [the research team] interviewed over 800 young people and their parents, both one-on-one and in focus groups; spent over 5000 hours observing teens on sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and other networked communities; and conducted diary studies to document how, and to what end, young people engage with digital media.

Their website is filled with a metric ton of research on gaming, identity, civic engagement, race & ethinicity and more. The most recent study explores how time spent online is crucial in a teen’s development. From 901AM’s excellent run down:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Some other findings:

There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.

Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.

The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.

“Geeked-out” learning opportunities are abundant – subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

(via 901AM)

Remember your childhood love of Choose Your Own Adventure books? Where you were the star of the story and could decide whether to stay and fight the ninja/dinosaur/spy, or run away screaming/fall in love/jump off a cliff?

Well now the format has been updated YouTube style.

Chad Villella, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Rob Polonsky (collectively known as CMR) have produced a series called The Timemachine about three 30-something office dudes (Chad, Matt & Rob) who are trying to make it to a 12:00 pm meeting. The trouble is that Rob has stumbled across a timemachine, and the three are now bouncing between multiple eras. Each webisode is a few minutes long with a choice at the end (”Do Chad and Matt get in the garbage can?” – “Get In” / “Not a Chance”). Clicking your answer propels you to the next mini episode in the series (which is surprisingly addictive).

According to BuzzFeed half a million viewers have started the journey, but only 100,000 have made it to the end.

Watch the first episode here!

(via Buzzfeed)