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

response,

Ad people (they’re not just men anymore) begin to realize they need to stop preaching to consumers and start listening to them. That’s what “sense and respond” means—a dialogue.

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.

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

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.

“a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.” We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur.

The author starts the story; the audience completes it. The author creates the characters and the situation they find themselves in; the audience responds and makes it their own.

“Now you get to live in that world from 10:00 to 11:00 on Sunday night,” Ross said. “But I see the potential for telling that story in a different dimension—for bringing more of that world to an audience that has expanded because the world has expanded.”

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.