The Best of All Worlds: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Cross Media

In the late 1990s, when the term “cross media” first appeared as a buzzterm, it referred to the need and the ability to more or less simultaneously repurpose the same content in print, on the Internet, and on then-new “wireless” devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) like PalmPilots and the earliest generation smartphones. Processes, software, content management systems, and the like emerged to facilitate this dynamic repurposing of content. Some people may even remember that some of the earliest pre-Kindle e-books could be read on a PalmPilot. (Reading a Stephen King novel on a PDA was a whole different kind of horror, as this writer well recalls.)

As technology has changed, so has the definition of cross media. There is still the need to pipe content to multiple destinations, but more often that is from one social media site to another. So a blogpost will need to be tweeted, Facebooked, LinkedInned, and sent to all the other social destinations there are, without having to copy the same link a million times. But we don’t refer to that as cross media, per se.

Today, cross media has become increasingly synonymous with “Augmented Reality” (AR).

For those not up to speed yet, the principle behind AR is quite simple. You use your smartphone or tablet’s camera and display to show reality, and then an app “augments” it  by overlaying content on top of what you see. With the location app Yelp!’s Monocle feature, for example, you can hold up your smartphone camera in a particular direction, and the app will overlay nearby businesses—or even friends. That’s a pretty basic approach to AR, but others are taking it even further.

IKEA has made a big splash with its catalog that uses AR to answer the fundamental question posed by anyone buying furniture: how will this item look in my home? The printed catalog includes AR codes and if you hold your mobile device up to the page, you can virtually add a piece of furniture into your actual home. (You can see this in action here.)

Coastal Industries, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based manufacturer of high-end shower doors, published a printed catalog earlier this year—produced by Drummond Printing, also of Jacksonville—that used an AR platform developed by a company called Layar to, again, embed codes in the printed catalog that, when scanned with the Layar app on a smartphone, show different colors and variations of a particular shower door model, saving printed catalog space while still allowing the customer to see different versions of a basic model. There are also some links to videos, and the AR content can also be shared others, if you want to “show them the door,” as it were.

There is much about AR that is gimmicky, but applications like these, that enhance and in many ways simplify the experience of shopping for something, have tangible benefits for consumers, as well as marketers.

AR allows print to become a “launch pad” for other types of content, and this is the state at which the term cross media has arrived. Rather than referring to the more or less simultaneous deployment of content across different media channels, it has now become the ability use print as the means by which other types of content are accessed. When we think of AR we think of high-end applications like the IKEA or Coastal catalogs, and we can’t help but think how daunting—and expensive—developing that content would be. But AR and cross media can be as simple as launching a video from a printed page.

One application where this idea can gain traction is in publishing. And, indeed, one new magazine has made AR its MO. Published by the Visual Media Alliance (VMA), Storyboard launched earlier this year as a website, and the premiere print edition appeared in summer 2014.

“VMA approached us because what we do with PaperSpecs,” said Sabine Lenz, Storyboard’s editor-in-chief. “They realized as a printing industry organization, you can’t just focus on print. You have to broaden your horizon. They really wanted to create something that included designers as well.”

So they hashed—if not hashtagged—it out, and Storyboard was born.

“The whole concept is that as design studios are getting smaller—the days of the über-studio are waning—there are more small studios, but that doesn’t mean they are doing less complex and less creative work,” said Lenz. “So this is a magazine for them saying, ‘You are not alone. When a client comes to you, you are going to have take into consideration all the different aspects of it.’”

Those “different aspects,” of course, are all the various media channels that any single design project or campaign can involve. “Printing industry outlets have tried to convey this, but they are doing it more from a statistical, less creative point of view,” said Lenz. “Our key is to tell a great story.”

The key to telling that story is to use all those same media channels as part of the publishing process. The magazine’s subtitle is “Stories of Design Across All Media,” and, said Lenz, “we wanted to include as much cross media ourselves as the budget allowed.”

Using Metaio’s Creator software, images accompanying feature stories and other content are encoded such that when a user scans an image using the Junaio smartphone app, a video or a link to other online content is launched. Some of the video—such as an interview with Michael Osborne of Michael Osborne Design, and a segment about MINE studio’s work for San Francisco’s Roostertail restaurant­—was shot specifically for the magazine, while other video comprised pre-existing clips, as the budget and logistics allowed.

The production team was surprised at how easy it was to work with AR. On the output end—Storyboard is printed by Sacramento’s Commerce Printing— printing AR content requires no special treatment or processes, and there is little to it aside from ensuring that the ARed images are of sufficient resolution, which is not a foreign concern in print publishing. Still, said Lenz, “On the press check, we’re all standing there and scanning with our phones, because you never know!”

The goal is to expand the types of AR and cross-media content, but not just for the sake of adding bells and whistles. “The key is to make it meaningful,” said Lenz. “My objective as editor-in-chief is to make it worth people’s while. I’m always saying, ‘Make it more worth my while.’ You want me to get out my phone, open the app, and scan this? You had better make it worth my while.”

Cross media as it currently stands is a great way for each medium—print, electronic, etc.—to play to its unique strengths, and all in one package. What the future will hold for cross media remains to be seen, of course, but one key to it catching on further may be some kind of standardization, or the ability to access AR content at the operating system level of a mobile device without needing to download and launch a third-party app (or hold your camera perfectly still). Another key, as Lenz pointed out, is to make the content worth the effort, and that applies whether you are creating catalogs, direct mail, or other marketing materials—as well as publications.