Get the message across :

Get the message across :Taking content across multiple media-whether it’s print, the Web, mobile devices or iTV-is one of the biggest challenges currently facing the design community.

By :
Ahmad Anis b. Mohd Fauzi
Faculty of Creative Multimedia,
Multimedia University
63100, Cyberjaya.
anis.fauzi@mmu.edu.my

So what the main issue to wrestle with, and what works?
On the face of it, 2004 was the year that cross-media finally made the transition from full-on buzzword compliance to prosaic reality. Any brand strategist worth their salt now knows that their company logos are their most valuable asset bar none, and therefore have to work effectively across multiple media.

Design companies, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly swift at emphasizing their multi-platform competencies when pitching for jobs. Let’s face it, in times of almost permanent budget squeeze, any technology that enables people to save money by using the same content across print, the Web, mobile devices, iTV and beyond is liable to achieve Next Big Thing status fairly quickly.

The question as desirable aside, the key issue here lies in implementation, as even the well-understood boundaries between print and Web can cause difficulties when it comes to repurposing content. That cross-media is an idea whose time has well and truly come is not in any serious dispute.

Long suspected of adding some vague, fuzzy synergy to any marketing strategy, more and more data is coming out of the States in particular suggestion that skimming the TV and print budgets and giving more to online, for example, can significantly boots results.

One survey claimed that increasing online reach from 10 to 60 per cent and frequency from 1.7 to.3.1 impressions gave an impressive eight percent boost in overall branding metrics, at all comparatively little cost compared to raping up a traditional campaign.

Marketers tend to get very excited about this sort of stuff, so it’s little wonder that a MassCom Faculty, Uitm, Shah Alam survey came out in December for forecasting that they would collectively increase interactive marketing spend from 6.1 per cent last year to 7 per cent in 2003. Percentage points perhaps, but given a company with a RM1m marketing budget, that’s RM9000 extra work floating around waiting to nabbed.

And, of course, where the agencies lead, creatives follow. According to data compiled over the summer of 2003 by TrendWatch Graphics Arts, a hefty 61 per cent of publishers say that they now work on cross-media communications campaigns have become the top sales opportunity for publishing firms.

So, it’s a vibrantly cross-media future to come, is it?
Well, perhaps. Beyond these headline figures, what’s interesting is that only 53 per cent of traditional design and production firms are involved in cross-media (with ad agencies surprisingly leading the way), and mere 37 percent of Internet design and production firms. There are several different interpretations of those figures, the first-and the one favoured by TWGA-being that, while the pressure is on to move print projects into other media, the reverse doesn’t necessarily hold true, given the historic heavy level of investment made by publishers in online formats, that’s perhaps not too surprising.


DESPITE ALL THE HYPE AND ATTENTION, CROSS-MEDIA WORK IS STILL BEDEVILLED BY A HOST OF PROBLEMS.

However, another equally valid interpretation of the same figures is that firms still have a tendency to specialize as soon as you move away from the core print/Web axis. Hot, hip web firms tend to design hot, hip Websites, not DVDs or ads for print. Partly this situation is perpetuated by client attitudes, but in the main it’s because, despite all the hype and attention at Seybold Seminars and elsewhere, cross-media work is still bedeviled by a host of problems.

Technically, even how the well-understood RGB/CMYK conversions can give designers a nasty turn when their work comes back from the printers. Create Once, Publish Many is a sound concept; it’s just not a particularly practical one as yet given the range of colour palettes, resolutions and specific design sensibilities encounters as you move across platforms.

So, while cross-media work is undoubtedly being undertaken in creasing volumes throughout the industry, the workflow remains less about cross-media publishing pre se( defined as the more or less simultaneously publishing of content in more than one medium) and rather more about simply serially-and often laboriously-repurposing content from platform to plat form.


YOU’VE BEEN TWANGO-ED

For Graphico, successful branding is about global strategy and local solutions. Hence its viral-marketing game for Pepsi

When it comes to working with Pepsi UK’s online identity, Newbury-based Graphico is first given a giant lever arch file. “They give us style sheets and a CD with everything on it that you can use for that promotion,” explains Graphico’s Graham Darracott. “It ensures that the elements we use are the correct ones in the correct places.”

While the creative comes from the above the line elements, however, the company is allowed to go its own way. Looking to develop a Flash game themed around the World Cup, Graphico came up with the now infamous Twang!: “Instead of a boring penalty shoot-out, you’ve tot to give 11 sumo wrestlers a wedgie to get them in 4-2-2 formation-and it really went rival,” says Darracott. “120,000 registered and we had half-a-million plays on it. It’s bizarre. It doesn’t bear any resemblance to any piece of marketing that Pepsi did, but it runs from a site that is very point-specific.”

Even the downloaded version sits on the desktop, represented by a football-ised version of Pepsi icon, reinforcing a fairly subtle message.

“There’s no such thing as a global campaign: there is a global strategy and local execution,” says Darracott. “But we are building extranets for them, so they can share, creating an online asset library that other territories can use.”

Info www.graphico.co.uk


COMPATIBLITY ISSUES

Although, as anybody who’s even tinkered with a Website knows, even the Web itself isn’t a done deal yet, with compatibility issues still often requiring designers to sniff out a visiting browser and redirect them to a version-specific site, or insert both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator- specific tags in their code. And while according to November 2004 statistics from thecounter.com, Internet Explorer5.x and onwards is used by 97 per cent of all Web users, 3 per cent of a large site’s visitors is still a hefty number of people clients would rather not aggravate with browser compatibility problems.

Also in November, just under half of all surfers were still running at 800x600, while three per cent are still mired in 8-bit, meaning that Lynda Weinman’s Websafe 216 colour palette remains part of Web design almost seven years after its first appearance. It does have a nasty tendency to look horrible at 16-bit (45 per cent of users), too, so even using it there’s no substitute really for colour testing.

Problems simply multiply when you move cross-platform. Take anything that has to be displayed on a PAL or NTSC monitor. Luckily, whether developing for iTV applications or DVD, a range of plug-ins ship with many prosumer products that will ensure your colour palatte meets NTSC and PAL guidelines. In Photoshop, for instance, a video filter restricts the gamut to prevent oversaturated colours from bleeding across television scan lines. There are some important design issues to consider as well, though. Font selection is limited, and television’s ‘lean-back’ nature not only necessitates an uncultured screen but means that 18-point tend to be the minimum size for single words and short phrases. Overscan is typically around 30 pixels on TV screen, but as it varies it’s probably better to extend backgrounds right to the edge of the screen, ie full 720x576 resolution in PAL. Progress with HTML capability meanwhile remains slow, although the OpenTV API, for example, supports HTML 4.0.1, CSS 1.0 and absolute positioning from CSS 2.0, JavaScript 1.5, DOM level I and also features GIF, JPEG, PNG and XBM image support.

In other words, while there’s commonality, it’s hardly quick nor simple to take designs from print direct to Web and on to iTV, and the issues just gain added bite the further you move away from base computer spec. Fortunately, for those who won’t miss working in two colours and under 5000 pixels, interest in mobile work seems to have tailed off recently, as everyone realizes that the much hype WAP is a mass market as it’s ever going to get and waits for the next communication revolution to roll over the horizon.

EVEN BETWEEN TELEVISION AND FILM, THERE’S A HUGE DIFFERENCE IN THE SKILLSETS REQUIRED.

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), if sales of the phones have taken off over the Christmas period as the mobile industry has hoped, could be it. Driven by the XML-based SMIL, and supporting the Websafe palette at 160x120, it’s a far less restrictive platform for designers. A growth in interactive TV, however, is a definite, the success of projects such as the BBC’s cross-media Pyramid programme meaning that some TV channels are insisting on seeing interactive components-whether Web or iTV-at the pitch stage for pretty much everything.

“We’re doing a science programme for Channel 4 at this very moment.” Says Dave Throssell, Head of MillTV, “and part of the deliverables cover interactive content, all our scene files and all our render files, so people take them and modify them for future use. The TV programme will go on for six episodes but the Website could go on for years and, especially as it’s an education website, they’ll want to keep on developing it. None of it is difficult. It’s just a case of packaging them up in a format that people will under stand.”

Whether such a collaborative workflow has a long-term future, or whether more and more cross-media work still in-house in departments with expanding capabilities, is open to a degree of question. Certainly a fair few ‘traditional’ media companies closed their nascent interactive departments with the bursting of the dotcom bubble- Mill Interactive being one of many that bit the dust-and don’t show much of an inclination to start them up again, preferring to concentrate on their own areas of expertise (“We all use the same bits of equipment but we all do very different jobs,” says Dave Throssell. “Even between television and film, there’s a huge difference in the skillsets required.”)

This means inevitably that workflow and project management issues are becoming fairly significant for many firms. Hemisphere produced a range of material: from billboards at Euston Station to a filmed presentation, to a Website, and then on to print for the recent Liverpool/Manchester cultural campaign. “What we found was that the creative side was about 50 per cent of it; the other 50 per cent was managing the project,” says the company’s Sue Vanden. As a result, a dedicated project manager started work with Hemisphere in early January-an approach that other companies look set to follow.


LEMON JELLY
From tube posters to DVD, Airside has well and truly mastered the art of cross-media design

Airside’s work on Lemon Jelly’s Lost Horizon album is massively cross-media, covering everything from CD-ROM and DVD interfaces, animations and music video to CD covers, single covers, vinyl cover, tube posters, the Website, online game, illustrations for press article and so on.

“The temptation is to regurgitate something in different forms. What we’ve tried to do, though, is generate different approaches in different media,” says the company’s Alex Maclean.

The album cover was the first element to be completed- a triple gatefold which reveals a panoramic landscape and a transition across it from neon-lit-city to quiet countryside as it opens out.

“Those visuals have appeared in abstract form in the club visuals we’ve done for live performances. You see parts of the landscape in some of the tube ads and in some of the press illustrations as well,” says Maclean. “There are various visual rules that are used across the media to make it all fit; repeating patterns, colour palettes and gradients which have then informed the artwork elsewhere.”

Info: www.airside.co.uk


CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

The question, though, is whether you should expect just to press a button and it will all happen for you automatically. Take your content back though a timewarp to WAP and handhelds, up the res for billboards, design clothing.. Every time you move material-even if you can keep the discrete elements like colour and shape intact-it changes. Thus in much more the same way as content has to be localized as it’s moved around the world spatially, it has to be contextualized when it’s moved between media.

“There’s often an opportunity to reuse content, and a successful campaign often touches on more than one medium simultaneously, but to do it well you need to really re-visit a project and re-articulate what you’re doing,” comments Vivian Rosenthal at New York’s Tronic Studio. “So much of what you do depends on how it’s viewed and what the context is. It’s not just about pushing a button and having it used in different mediums. Everything is moving together-but we’re not there yet.”
XML was meant to be the building block that linked the cross-media world together, but to date it’s only had a really strong showing with the print/Web firms, and even the only 20 per cent of companies use it. Design houses tend to avoid it like the plague, partly because it’s still at a raw enough state to require programming and significant IT support to get to the best out of it.

No, the lingua that increasingly seems to link modem media together is Macromedia’s ever more ubiquitous Flash, partly because of the way it scales to different resolutions. “The way we look at it is that we could spends loads of time in R&D and learning different software packages,” explains Jim McNiven form Brighton-based Kerb. “But then Flash is incorporated into everything from interactive TV to mobile telephones. If it’s a decent platform then Macromedia will eventually get Flash working on it and we’ll start developing on it.”

Kerb, which was involved in an experiment on the Isle of Man that involved streaming Flash animation to a PDA using 3G, has been using the software for music promo work, McNiven saying that they’re finding it progressively easier to output material for broadcast as time goes on. “The last music video we did we used Flash and just a bit of After Effects to spruce it up a bit,” he says.

THE MOVE TO THE INTERNET-BASED APPLICATIONS REQUIRES DESIGNERS TO PAY ATTENTION TO NEW GUIDELINES

It’s a sign of things to come… one of usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s latest missives from his ongoing battle to make Flash applications more accessible suggests that the Web is evolving beyond browsers into a network of functionality-oriented apps. “We no longer have to squeeze functionality and feature-oriented design into a frame optimized for navigating Hypertext and reading articles,” he writes. “The bad news is that the move to Net-based apps requires designers to pay attention to new guidelines.”

PYRAMID SELLING
From TV to book to Website to iTV.. We quiz MillTV on it’s latest cross-media project

“I don’t know who first decided that you can get a book as a natural by-product of a television programme, with hundreds of high resolution stills in just the format you want,” says MillTV Head, Dave Throssell. “Because it just doesn’t happen like that.”

MillTV was launched in 2001 to bring visual effects to long-format TV projects, and for the company’s first major project, Pyramid, which was screened on BBC1 in the autumn, MillTV employed a Photoshop artist to work up illustrations from the Softimage/XSI scene files for the programme’s accompanying book. “The difficulty is that in order to create stills for a book, you have to decide at what resolution your pictures will be created at,” says Throssell. “You can decide to render all the animation out at film resolution, but that wastes an enormous amount of time and effort, not to mention the client’s money. To do a decent-looking still, the best thing to do is pick your shots at a very stage.”

The interactive team at the BBC, meanwhile, was given very low-res versions of the 3D models so they could create elements such as navigation items for the Website and iTV applications for themselves.

“With certain things, it’s easier to just rebuild from scratch,” says Throssell. “One of the most difficult things from any of this documentary-based material is doing the original research. Even if you just supply people with an approximate rendering, that can be of immense help to someone who is trying to make a Website or a game based on the material. They’re probably better off creating their own low-poly model from that, because that’s not what we’re about.”

Info: www.mill.co.uk


MULTIPLE POSSIBLITIES
So, too, does the move to taking content across multiple media. However, whatever the technical difficulties and hurdles, the creative possibilities that unfold in line with all this progress are almost intoxicating. Create club visuals, write computer games, paint taxi-cabs churn out DVDs, even print up a few leaflets. The important thing is to reach your audience.

“In 21st century, we’re going to have such a busy, noisy information flow from band owners to consumers,” says TMB’s Planning and Development Director, Jon Hopwood. “You’re going to have to cut through all that crap and find ways of thinking cleverly and laterally about when the optimum the time to communicate with your customer is.”

SPY ACADEMY
How do you elevate the identity of a brand like HP, using only its stand at a technology show?

TMB’s work for the launch of a new range of Hewlett-Packard consumer electronics gear at October’s Stuff Live show illustrates just how far cross-media work can go if the client is flexible enough to allow it.

“We had products that we had to show-that was a prerequisite from HP-but the bottom line was we were trying to re-educate consumers about the company and what they were all about,” says TMB’s Jon Hopwood. “We looked at the audience that would come and tried to work out what they would be most receptive to, and in the end we ended up designing a game they could play on stand.”

Designed by Small Rockets, the game Spy Academy, was a first-person shooter in which players had to take pictures of Hewlett-Packard kit. It was supported by a dedicated microsite, a specially-built stand from Equinox, and various ads and print materials, all of which were creatively directed by TMB.

“HP response was that it was risky but they like it so they’d give it a go,” says Hopwood. “The beauty of being below the line is that the client feels they can take more risks, as it’s such a targeted market.”

Info: www.tmbmarcom.com