• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, January 2, 2015

Cross-platform is not just a media buying imperative; it is also one of the complex realities of modern life. While most marketers are still struggling just to make “seamless” customer experiences across retail, TV advertising, Web, mobile and CRM interactions with customers, there is also a lot of room for new kinds of creativity across the screens.

Allstate stood out among advertisers during yesterday’s Sugar Bowl for a wildly imaginative set of spots that built a fictional conceit that really came to life on the Web and via social channels all in faux real time. A sequential set of ads during the game set up the premise that the sleazeball villain (“Mayhem”) now familiar in Allstate ads, was able to break into “Matt and Shannon’s” home because they overshared that they were attending the Sugar Bowl on social media. The burglar is now putting the home contents up for sale online at MayhemSale.com. There, users will see a series of videos putting items for sale in QVC style but hosted by our amoral and emotionally detached Mayhem.

The effort was spearheaded by Leo Burnett and included a very active Twitter handle and a ton of traffic. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the site was receiving up to 8,000 hits a minute during the game. Mayhem has his own Twitter account that increased by 24,000 followers during the game. Twitter impressions were estimated at over 40 million.

The campaign worked not just for its novelty but for its air of verisimilitude. This was a real life couple Allstate had recruited for their larger Aware Share Initiative. And the stuff was actually being sold at ridiculously low prices, culminating in a car going for $200.

The campaign demonstrates the ways in which multiple platforms of media can not only be exploited for impressions but used in self-referential ways by the creatives. In some ways this campaign resembles the alternative reality games crafted a number of years ago to promote film and game properties. Deft designers would send willing participants on virtual quests across faux web sites, email, phone calls and messages – as they built this alternate reality that usually bore some relationship to the promoted property. One of the things that ARGs helped show is how convergence culture works. The experience of living in a multi-screen world can add up to more than the sum of its parts (or screens). The ways in which different platforms reinforce and refer to one another help build a more convincing environment because we are being as platform agnostic in out pursuit of the promotion as we are pursuing most information in real life.

While Allstate’s campaign is only superficially like the obsessively elaborate ARGs, it underscores a similar point. Cross-platform is a creative opportunity for much more engaging and fun branded storytelling. Traditionally we have some at the challenge of crafting immersive worlds by having full control of a single medium: the rich Web site, the surround sound and 3D iMax movie, the densely plotted TV series. But immersion can also be the product of many shards. Piecing together bits and pieces and iterative messages makes even broadcast messaging more interactive because it requires the imaginative intelligence of the viewer to put together the pieces. The media fragmentation that seems to bedevil marketers can actually be an asset because it forces them to ally with the most powerful persuasive force of all, the viewer’s own imagination.