Transmedia and generating buzz...

An article at CNET about "Transmedia" makes for an interesting follow-on to Raymond De Felitta's latest "Blogging City Island" piece, which detailed how to generate interest from both distributors, and then audiences.

Except that was mainly the old way through movie festivals. Transmedia takes generating "buzz" to the next level:

...when you are taking a single story and distributing components of that single story through a wide array of media. When you collect those pieces of the media, it tells the [whole] story...When [you have] a text message and a video clip on YouTube, and a toy, or even a movie, when those things add up to a larger single story, that's a transmedia experience.

Or is it? Do I really want to get involved in something that requires seeing a movie AND doing a bunch of other things to get the larger story? I'm sure people will experiment with it; the idea of a story being told through separate and different media elements is certainly intriguing. But I don't think that's what most people want.

The question is; are they trying to create a new paradigm of storytelling, or are they just trying to more tightly integrate merchandising and promotion? Is Transmedia really some new way of telling stories, or is it just lipstick on a pig?

CNET: Hollywood scripting getting a multimedia rewrite