PD James, the crime writer, is 90 years old this month. Interviewed on the BBC she commented that society had changed so much in her lifetime that she sometimes thought that reality today was something she’d invented in her fiction. (www.news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8879000/8879894.stm)

I know what she means. Technology moves so quickly now that nearly all of us have experienced the reality of gadgets first glimpsed in sci-fi movies now sitting on our desktop or in our pockets or handbags. My Android phone certainly has a very cool way of searching for things I (vocally) tell it to – although it is a bit like speaking to a somewhat dim and hard of hearing helper who barely speaks English a bit like Basil Fawlty trying to explain something to Manuel.

We are going to have to get used to this blurring of boundaries between imagination and reality. This month’s edition of Wired magazine ( http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine) celebrates what it dubs “The age of transmedia” where story tellers escape the limits of their primary medium in order to take the stories to a place where you can experience them “live”. Transmedia ignores the division between TV and online and cinemas and live events in order not just to promote the core product but to deliver a better story telling experience for the consumer.

Wired cites the recent Doctor Who role playing games launched earlier this summer. Viewers can interact with the new Doctor in two hour games online. And soon the TARDIS comes live to a venue near you with Doctor Who Live in October.

Multi platform fiction is nothing new – it’s really a long tradition. When Universal made a movie of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1931 you could have called it a transmedia production.

But Wired suggests that there is a coming revolution in creativity that means that consumers will expect to participate in the story outside of the traditional boundaries, and that great creators of fiction will work across platforms. And where movies go, there will follow the world of advertising. Media planning across platforms will be vital to convey the transmedia creative idea fully, not just a way of reaching the consumer.

MediaCom Career’s conference earlier this month took this as its key topic.. not a small one obviously.

The speakers throughout the afternoon ranged from the futuristic (Rhys from MediaCom is still buzzing from the CES in Vegas earlier this year and sees the world in 3d) to the philosophical (Alain de Botton took a sweeping look at the development of our attitudes to work based on his latest book “The pleasures and sorrows of work”

MediaCom Career’s managing director Aki Mandhar highlighted the biggest issue that I think faces employers these days. Living as we do in the Age of Dialogue we’re all faced with the very real fact that our brand is not our own anyway – but truly belongs to our customers. But not just to our customers but also to our employees. Marketing directors can try and deliver as complete a brand experience as they like, but as well as the very easy access consumers now have to customer reviews and twitter feeds about the brand, they can also easily access how employees inside the company really feel about it.

The website Glassdoor.com gives a free insight into 84,000 companies with anonymous comments from employees about interviews, salaries and working conditions. And yes MediaCom Worldwide is on there and our global CEO Steve gets 100% approval. But looking through the comments and scores generally it is very hard obviously to get a brilliant review overall. Especially in the current economic climate. Even Google who have an excellent corporate reputation only manage 3.9 out of 5.

This would not be everyone’s first port of call when looking at a brand’s reputation, but just as few of us go anywhere on holiday now without checking out tripadvisor.com or similar sites, we can expect sites that report back on how employees feel – including of course those with an axe to grind – to increase in their importance for all levels of staff.

Your employees are your brand more than ever before. Not just, as in the past, in the sense that your customer’s experience you through them. But in the sense that your potential future employees will check with your current and past employees on what it is like to work for you. For your brand to have a future, this had better be a proper reflection of your marketing.

Fatigue of the familiar – or you can just flog a dead horse so much

There was a recent cartoon in Private Eye that in the first panel said “Big Brother is watching you” and in the second panel said “You is not watching Big Brother ” (sic). Actually Big Brother’s audience is up so far year on year but it is certainly a franchise that seems to have had its time. I overheard one teenager saying to another recently – “why would I stay in and watch people sitting and doing nothing when I can go out and do something myself?” . What a good question – how come we’ve never asked ourselves that before?.

At a recent presentation of his new film Despicable Me (in cinemas this autumn people and not to be missed (http://www.despicable.me/)<http://www.despicable.me/)>) Chris Meledandri suggested that sequels and repeats were pretty much a golden goose at the end of their life cycle. He referred to a new trend he’d observed amongst the young as “Fatigue of the Familiar”. The successful producer of the Ice Age franchise and also Alvin and the Chipmunks has now got a number of new new projects in production. Personally I can’t wait, especially if they’re in 3D!

However there is a more serious point underlying the drive for newness which, if it is real, would undo much of what we currently understand about entertaining the young. Traditionally there is a strong streak of comfort in repetition. Story telling usually picks up on a dozen or so themes. Franchises are built in entertainment on the business of making as much as possible out of continuity. The mass market likes the fact the Coronation Street and Eastenders keep going strong year after year.

But maybe newness is more important than it used to be. The unlimited access that the world has now to every kind of entertainment that there is via the internet, may mean that new stuff is more important than ever.

The Daily Mail tells us the Coronation Street cast is heading for a culling. Is the familiar over for the mass market too ? (spare Betty for goodness sake!) (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1292864/Coronation-Street-bosses-planning-mass-character-cull-fatal-tram-crash-storyline-shows-50th-anniversary.html<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1292864/Coronation-Street-bosses-planning-mass-character-cull-fatal-tram-crash-storyline-shows-50th-anniversary.html>).

I’ve heard teenagers talking about how Facebook’s got nothing new to give them too. If the new isn’t new enough – what is ?

Sue Unerman

Chief Strategy Officer