How the Gossip Girl Reboot Is Transforming Marketing
Three words: Multiexperience Transmedia Storytelling.
As marketers, we consistently hear the impact of omnichannel marketing — which enables the creation of a consistent brand image across various audience touch points (whether IRL or online).
But have you heard of transmedia marketing? I haven’t until recently. According to Dr. Chester Elijah Branch, transmedia marketing “means to transport a story-world or message into a customer’s everyday life through the use of multiple media platforms.”
Transmedia is effective because it isn’t passively disseminating information, but actively involving the audience.
Being a form of omnichannel marketing, transmedia is not just a brand authoring a story shared across various channels to its audience, but the audience coauthoring with the brand and being involved in piecing together elements of the brand’s story.
The Reboot
If you haven’t watched the first episode of Gossip Girl (2021) yet I won’t spoil it here. However, the reboot continues to surround a group of New York private school teenagers who under the social surveillance of a persona named ‘Gossip Girl’, but this time through the modernized context of Instagram.
Transposing Fiction to Reality
It is fitting — and obvious — that the social media channels for the Gossip Girl Reboot would take on the Gossip Girl persona. The tone of voice used to promote the series on social media is exactly Gossip Girl’s tone of voice when she narrates the series on screen.
However, what is most innovative, is the creation of individual Instagram accounts for each of the series’ new characters. When ‘Gossip Girl’ posts, she tags not the actor, but the characters’ account.
Through Instagram, all the characters follow each other. Taking it even further, each of the characters follow people and interests — as if they were real. The audience is able to gather information on the characters’ personalities they may not have gained from strictly watching the series. Thus, giving the brand story more believability and depth.
This series blurs the lines of fiction and reality by taking what would otherwise be a strictly on-screen experience and expanded the brand story to the everyday life experience of the audience. The audience’s ability to coauthor their own brand story experience is limitless and the brand’s potential to create a strong community of loyal fans is even higher.
Even as of this week, Gossip Girl (2021) drew record viewership, now becoming the biggest HBO “Max Original” launch to date.
Application to Marketing
Marty Resnick at Gartner shares, transmedia:
- Uses multiple experiences (i.e media and emerging technologies) to not just adapt the story to the audience, but to provide new and deeper insights unique to each experience.
- Each experience must be unified in telling one singular larger story (as a unified digital strategy)
Both attributes which Gossip Girl (2021) has executed beautifully and only makes me more excited to continue watching the rest of the season.
As marketers, there is limitless potential in how we choose to share our brand story. Marketing is no longer passive, if anything it is more active than it ever has been thanks to the depth of social media. The Gossip Girl reboot shows that creating layers of experiences for our audience to discover and actively participate in our story is the future of marketing.
