Today, the audience tells their story using parts of your story and you
must recognize that an ongoing part of your story will now be told through
their story.
Millennials: story
adepts
Millennials are the natives to today’s amazing connectedness,
having grown up swimming in its digital freedom.
Millennials are not only native to technology, they are true story
natives.
By this I mean they have grown up soaked in stories
24/7/365. From Movies and Television to every form of mobile device,
Millennials have had unrelenting access to every kind of story imaginable, long
and short, since the day they were born. Rather than creating story confusion,
burnout or numbness, Millennials treat the stories they encounter as a rapidly
evolving language to explore and express themselves, a narrative toolkit of
ideas and imagery.
Stories = Change
Stories have always been the primary means by which humans
create change in themselves, their families, communities, institutions,
countries and so on. In the hands of Millennials, stories are powerful and
remixable tools of human change.
There is a clear process hardwired into humans for adopting
stories in service of personal change. I’ve covered this at some length in
previous posts (inspire, experience, badge and gather).
Millennials do this process particularly well through participating
in, and often inventing, new ways to experience a story’s various ideas and
empowerments. They create fan-art, fan-fiction, costumes to cosplay (costume
play) with or LARP (live action role play) with. They adopt language from the
story and often quickly create their own that expands your story. They game
with it, wear it and generally remix it in thousands of ways with the other things
going on in their lives. In short, they find what they like and then they
really use it. In the process, your audience changes a little because of your
story and your story changes (sometimes a lot) to meet them where they want to
use it. Sometimes that use is short term. If you’re lucky and have created an
IP that really empowers your audience with authenticity, truth and life-tools,
your story will “stick” and become a profound part of your audience’s daily
life through their usage and remix.
Remix as a business
model
I believe strongly that story-driven audience remix is not
just a phenomenon we’re watching reach flash-over real time with today’s
audiences. I believe it should have a strong place in your plans for what
you’re going to do with your franchise(s) if you want to be broadly commercial.
As with any quickly emerging behavior and insight, I believe those IP holders
and companies who think very creatively about how to help audiences use and
change their stories in non-trivial ways, will be the early front runners. This
can be an uncomfortable thought and feel like brand heresy to IP owners.
Perhaps it makes it a little easier to accept by knowing the audience will do
it whether you help them or not. By really leaning into remix, you become an
authentic part of your audience’s community and in todays connected world, no
amount of advertising spend can achieve what truly inviting your audience into
the creators room will do.
To illustrate the point, I have an example of a new company
that is seeing these changes and rethinking how to support how the audience
wants to use today’s stories. I
have recently joined the board of a startup called Imagimod. They have
developed a striking new mobile app where the audience can quickly, visually
remix elements of their favorite IP to create and pose a custom sculpture of
their own design that can be saved in 2D, shared, played with online, and even
printed out in 3D using rapid prototype technology. You now have a one-off
figure to collect, play or game with! Voila, play in the world of your favorite
story but make it your own! It isn’t important whether or not this startup
becomes hugely successful (though I hope they do). What is important is that what
they are fundamentally embracing the narrative as a personal/changeable set of
tools enabling the audience to make their own new part of your story (and their
story) and get credit for doing so from their community.
Experience economy +
Remix = Creator-Consumer
It’s this enabling of the role the audience wants to play in
your story that is the kind of story thinking the audience will reward in IP
they want to adopt. I have written in the past on “the experience economy” and
wanted to connect the dots in this post that for today’s audience, the experiences
they are most passionate about, and return to over and over again, are the ones
they can truly make part of their story. It is important to respect that within
most human beings, there is creativity.
Much the same way that smart phone cameras unleashed the photographer
within everyone, the dawn of story remix is releasing the
creator-consumer within us all.
Accreditation: Kevin Bradshaw, CEO of Imagimod, actually first coined the phrase "Creator-Consumer"
