The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories

Which means that perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created,” in the words of Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School, by marketers and consumers together.

Lucas may have created Star Wars, but even he had to admit to Roffman that the fans own it now. He meant this figuratively, of course. In a literal sense, ownership is something else entirely. But it’s all bound up with a much larger issue, which is control. Who controls a story—its creator or its fans?

A small shop based in midtown Manhattan, Deep Focus works with clients like Samsung, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts to develop online promotional campaigns that seek to involve fans with the product.

But with the arrival of the Internet, fan fiction could no longer be ignored. After an initial period of hesitation, Lucasfilm adopted an embrace-and-encircle strategy.

Crucially, Why So Serious? was nonlinear. Like hypertext—text that has embedded within it links to other texts, an essential feature of the Web—it could lead you along different paths. Links can carry you deeper and deeper into a story, revealing levels of detail that would be impossible to convey in a single, two-hour movie.

We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own.

The bigger lesson is, don’t attack the audience for trying to connect with a story you hold the rights to.

Ian Schafer, the agency’s CEO, told AMC execs they shouldn’t attempt to shut down something that was generating so much free publicity. “Sometimes the best thing to do in a situation like this is nothing,” Schafer told me later. “But that takes a lot of self-control.” Within 24 hours the accounts were back up, with AMC’s tacit blessing but little i

Cameron, Landau maintained, had a better idea of how movies and games could work together. By creating the movie and the game in tandem, he hoped to have a game that would explore elements of the story the movie could not. He also wanted a home for some of those extra creatures he was coming up with.