Transmedia Narratives and Advertising: analysis of the most awarded campaigns (2011-2016)

Abstract

The objectives of this work can be summarized as follows:

1) To check if among the most awarded campaigns during the last six years in the main advertising festivals we can find campaigns that deserve to be considered transmedia examples.

2) to establish a scale to measure the degree of transmedia and the interaction with users in the campaigns analyzed.

Our hypothesis is that transmedia narratives are not yet present as a distinctive and significant feature in most of advertising campaigns.To go deeper on this subject we have applied a methodology that hybridizes the quantitative and the qualitative. The results were obtained through the content analysis with the identification of the basic parameters that must be present in a transmedia advertising campaign and measuring interaction with users. The corpus to analyze has been extracted from the awards of the main advertising festivals from 2011 to 2016 focusing on the Grand Prix and the Gold Awards in the categories of integrated and / or interactive campaigns. From the results of the analysis it has been confirmed that, although the campaigns are more and more integrated, the conditions that characterize a campaign conceptualized as transmedia occur in a minority of the winning campaigns. Concluding, therefore, that the transmedia parameters are not a value for the advertising creatives in the evolution of the last six years.