Your phone knows everything about you: whom you're calling, wooing, dating, what you're celebrating and where it's being celebrated, what movie you're going to, what videos you play. The cell phone is a central tool of modern communication, particularly among the tech-savvy youth market. So for a new campaign introducing the Nokia 7610, Wieden + Kennedy, London, decided to produce a story that spans the lives of three young, stylish urbanites -- Jade, Luca and Anna -- and the phone that ties them together.

The global campaign, created by a team of writers -- some of whom had experience scripting TV shows -- launched in October with introductory TV spots. The ad gave viewers a glimpse of the transcontinental friends who keep in touch via cell phone, e-mail, Facebook and the occasional face-to-face encounter. The campaign itself offers consumers the opportunity to become Facebook friends with the characters, and to receive text messages, voicemails and invitations to live Webcasts. At its conclusion, users will help the characters make a series of decisions and some will be invited to attend a live event at Parisian boutique Colette, where they can meet the cast.

"It's been a massive challenge," says Ben Walker, cd at Wieden, who, with partner Matt Gooden, served as co-cd on the Web-driven effort. All told, he notes, they created 3,700 pieces of online content. "This is the first time I've told a story not only through film, but all aspects of media," including voicemail and text messages, he says.

Engagement, always the Holy Grail of advertising, has never been so complicated. As platforms proliferate, the ways in which consumers engage with brands is going through a seismic shift, one that demands much more of the creative process than ever before. Along the way, it's changing how stories are told, the skill sets needed by creatives, and how advertising's effectiveness is measured.

"We're not in the advertising business, we're in the media arts business," says Lee Clow, global director of media arts and CCO of TBWA Worldwide. "We're using all forms of media to tell a brand story-and the media is everything a brand does."

Evolution of the sell

Back in the '60s, Bill Bernbach transformed advertising from a straight selling proposition into a conversation with consumers. "Bernbach initiated storytelling," says Clow. "He created messages that were intelligent and humorous, and allowed the audience to participate emotionally as well as logically. Brands today ... have become the relationship people have with the companies they do business with. They've taken on a bigger role."

The digital revolution, of course, changed everything. Marketers, to capture eyeballs, need to create brand narratives in all available media, from TV and blogs to cell phones, social-networking sites and YouTube. And the interactive nature of these detailed experiences has, for several years now, consistently flowed two ways: Brands talk to consumers-and consumers talk back.

"[Storytelling was mostly] narrative for a long time. And probably the biggest shift I've seen is that it has evolved to more of a dialog," says Alex Bogusky, co-chairman of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, widely credited as a vanguard of modern, media-agnostic storytelling. "And dialog comes in a lot of different forms."

Agencies like Crispin are now turning this dialog into game play. Videogame culture in general, Bogusky contends, has had a tremendous impact on pop culture and on the way brands communicate. The agency has even brought in game theorists to educate the staff about videogame narratives. "It isn't that everything is now a videogame," he says, "but that the notion of playing with a brand [is a lot more appealing to people] than just sitting and listening to a brand."



Crispin's variations on the genre include Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" interactive video-based site, which allows consumers to manipulate the actions of a guy in a chicken suit. And its BK Xbox games continued story lines begun in TV spots and online viral videos.

Even Crispin's recent Microsoft "Life Without Walls" campaign, says Bogusky, which launched with the Gates-Seinfeld teaser spots, involves game play. The campaign most recently asked people to upload their own stories with the prompt, "What type of PC are you?"

"'I'm a PC' is classic advertising in terms of its form," says Bogusky. "But in terms of the thinking behind it, it's much less about 'Let me tell you a story' than it is, 'Let's begin this dialog and let's start to play."

Alternative-reality games -- interactive narratives that use the real world as a platform == have also become a popular way to build consumer bases for everything from cars to music releases.

"We write the story, throw it away, create the evidence [that can piece it back together], and invite people in to [reconstruct] it," explains Susan Bonds, president and CEO of 42 Entertainment. "It makes for a collective investigation that can be fun for everyone." As an example, she points to an award-winning effort for Nine Inch Nails that included strategically hiding thumb drives with the band's new single in concert venues.

Appetite for content

Like TV networks that have extended the storylines of shows such as Lost and Heroes into multimedia extravaganzas, advertising creatives are required to stretch their skills to feed an increasing consumer appetite for content.

"Even in episodic TV series there are 50 things going on at once now. It's the way culture consumes entertainment," says Scott Duchon, partner and cd at T.A.G. "[Stories] need to be more dimensionalized. ... TV is being used as a gateway into a deeper experience."

Two of the most-awarded campaigns this year were dense, multilayered videogame-like experiences that challenged historic category conventions. For Xbox's Halo 3 "Believe" campaign, T.A.G. used TV spots to tease the story of the game's central character, the Master Chief, and then dove deeper online with emotionally driven back stories.

Another winner, BBDO's "Voyeur" for HBO, was a multimedia branding campaign that offered intricately crafted story lines about the residents of a New York apartment building through interactive, TV spots, mobile, on-demand, print and outdoor.



But the platform, Duchon says, matters less than the creation of an emotional connection. "It doesn't matter [what form the work takes]," he says. "I don't think stories for the sake of telling stories has necessarily become the bigger point of communication. It's about getting people to emotionally invest."

Because stories are being told over longer stretches of time and in more places, many campaigns no longer have definitive beginnings, middles and ends. Instead, they're molded and shaped by multiple story arcs -- and then molded and shaped again by consumers.

"A story has a lot more parts and a lot more bits and pieces," says Chuck McBride, CCO at Cutwater. "You play games with it now, you try to slice and dice it and see how elastic it gets."

Equally pliant, not surprisingly, is the makeup of a modern creative team. Increasingly complicated campaigns require collaborative approaches from a variety of departments. Technologists and media types, for instance, are playing much larger roles in the process.

"It obviously involves more people than the traditional copywriter/art director team. We tend to work in bigger groups now," says Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and cd of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

He adds that it takes a different kind of creative skill to succeed in advertising these days-one that goes well beyond the ability to write a clever headline or spot. "The people who can cook up sustained fiction or fact that keep you in [a story] are the ones who will do well," he says.

"What is creativity?" asks David Droga, founder of Droga5. "Every agency has a creative department. It doesn't mean anything. It's about how smart the solutions are."

The big idea

As much as storytelling has changed, one constant has stayed the same: the need for the "big idea." Executions may become dated, but a successful campaign must always start with a strong concept.



David Lubars, CCO of BBDO North America, says the agency's current work for the Dodge Ram began with the central idea of a reality-like program that shows the truck as both nimble and sturdy. The "Ram Challenge," a competition between real-world firemen, construction workers, cowboys and men in the military puts the drivers on a rough-riding obstacle course. Filmed by Tony Scott, it's distributed through the Web and promoted with four one-minute sequences during Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

"The idea was the big obstacle course in the desert [where] we'd put this thing through its paces ... and then we decided where it would go, as opposed to 'Let's do a commercial about x,'" explains Lubars. "It's the upstream idea versus filling in [media] boxes."

But once the idea has been created, he notes, traditional concepts of advertising go out the window. "It's a new way for creatives to think," he says. "It's a new way do a script. [We think about what] can work in 11, 16 or five different distribution channels and can also be an event. It's a much bigger thing than an ad."

Does the new approach work?

For all the talk of engagement and time spent with a brand, the question for some is whether the new, involved story lines, spread across multiple platforms, are working. While the digital age has given agencies an unprecedented ability to test their creative choices by virtue of instant consumer feedback, the growing number of metrics used to measure an ad's success still give limited insights.

"It's harder than ever to show whether advertising is effective," says Goodby. "Just because you clicked on something doesn't mean you enjoyed the experience. Counting clicks is a little misleading. Even time spent on the site is a little bit misleading. People can get confused ... and suddenly you have a two-minute experience, but not necessarily a good one."

At the very least, however, consumer participation does give creatives unprecedented feedback. "A huge step in sorting out the effectiveness of advertising is to create content that people want to be drawn into rather than fast-forward and bypass," says Tony Granger, worldwide cd at Young & Rubicam. "Step two is to create the great content."

Gerry Graf, CCO at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, points to the Starburst Berries and Cream character crafted while he was at his previous agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day in New York, as an example of a campaign whose success was easy to determine. The character, a dandy of a lad, danced a jig for a piece of candy in the much-talked about TV commercial. The Web site gave consumers instructions on how to do the dance and users responded in droves, creating hundreds of reenactments that they uploaded to YouTube.

"They reached their sales goals," says Graf. "It's nice to do something that people think is good. It's nicer to see it work so your client comes back and says, 'Do it again.'"

For Wieden in London, Walker notes, participation in the Nokia campaign will demonstrate the strength of the creative product.



"In general, [such creative gives you] a far stronger relationship with your consumer," he says. "The more you can make fans and reward them, the more they get involved. [In the end], all it proves is that the consumer is seeking out your stuff.  ... That's got to be a better conversation."

Bottom line, most creatives believe that the increasing demands on storytelling have elevated the industry to new heights.

"Excellence in communications is more important than ever in terms of creativity," says Hal Curtis, cd at Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore. "You're seeing stories told more effectively as a whole. You don't have a captive audience so you want to create something that consumers seek out; it has to be something that's worth the trouble."

"We're on the cusp of a new creative revolution," adds Clow. "This is the next turning point. Right now is the moment in time when the artists, the storytellers in the business, the best of them, are going to take charge of this new media framework that we live in."