Page 192 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet192are shared virally, guaranteeing a very wide dissemination: within a very short period it has come to have more than 30 million visitors per month – by republishing other people’s stories.This example leads us to reflect on another crucial aspect of stories in the Internet age: who is the owner, who holds the rights and how are those rights exercised? A few days before being dismissed, Jill Abramson, the powerful former director of the New York Times, had put the question to the editorial staff: on the Internet there are people who make money out of repub- lishing stories previously published by the NYT. Is this legal? How can the NYT take advantage of these revenues? All the answers probably lie in a vision of copyright that is very different to today’s.Whatever the case, in a context where platforms make us all potential authors and publishersand where self-publishing has become a very widespread practice, stories are also a perfect means of conveying emotions and values that identify a brand. Brands represent renowned and quality publishers.Content marketing precisely harnesses the emotional communication potential of stories and disseminates, shares and viralises it on the Net.Content marketing in brand communications, which is widespread and undergoing significant development, precisely harnesses the emotional communication potential of stories together with the Internet’s ability to disseminate, shareand viralise. The result, in a few successful cases, is millions of reproductions of videos that are often very well made.There are many examples, prominent among which are: Coca Cola,40 which has an internal division in charge of storytelling, has produced a video on the concept of sharing that hasbeen the brand’s main communication value for several years; KLM41 has produced a video showing how the brand is focused and how customer service is central to its business; some time ago Volkswagen42 devised a “fun theory”, that is, how fun and happiness can lead people to make more innovative and less common choices; Honda43 has made “The Other Side”, a video of outstanding quality that tells two parallel stories which convey the different spirit of two versions of the same model of car; and Airbnb44 has involved its own community by requesting contributions in the form of vines (the Twitter video format) that are put together to tell a highly moving story which represents the values of the voyage, discovery, meeting and freedom that define the brand.In all these cases the story is a fully predominant element and the brand appears almost out of the blue to reveal itself at the end to put its “signature” to the story; the first step must be to convey emotions, which represent the system of values associated with the brand.A widespread model is native advertising, magazines or editorials that speak of products. This model is by no means new or specific to the digital context, but it is enjoying a new lease of life for reasons similar to those mentioned above.The digital age is transforming storytelling