Transmedia Storytelling and Marketing Funnels on Social Awareness Campaign — Psychological Child Abuse in Family

Abstract

There are potentials and a great room to experiment in media productions, especially when it comes to combining different media approaches and innovative storytelling. However, strategies also play an important role to narrate a compelling storyline. In other words, in order to touch the audience and communicate with them dearly, it is crucial to speak with the right audience at the right timing through the right medium. Therefore, marketing strategies and studies are necessary for planing a well-rounded and attracting narrative. Apart from the utilisation of marketing strategies, new forms of media, particularly social media and works of transmedia storytelling has been become a major part in everyone’s day to day life. To experiment different ways of media approaches and storytelling, the thesis focuses on exploring and diving deep into the aspects of marketing strategies and transmedia storytelling, as well as discovering multiple references and inspirations, in order to land a project on creating social awareness of a highly unaware issue

in modern society, psychological child abuse in family. Due to the invisibility of psychological child abuse in family, especially among teenagers between 15 and 17 years old, the project is designed to speak with the teenagers and raise the awareness among them by combining social media such as TikTok and Instagram, as well as YouTube short videos and interactive videos to convey the concept. The project starts with a teenager protagonist and her life on social media, and then gradually unveiling the layers of the story through YouTube short videos, to differentiate her real traumatised characters and her polished on-screen personalities through the coping mechanisms due to her situations of psychological family abuse. Following is the website, as the next layer, where the audience can interact with the videos and discover the real issues, which is psychological child abuse in family. At the end, the audience can be ideally convinced to the core idea and create more awareness by sharing.

For prototyping, the first episode of Elly’s video on YouTube is produced. There are some differences between the script and the produced prototyped video. For example, Elly mentions the name, Jeff Bezos, as a reference of sugar daddy who can adopt her, while in the shooting, the performer adds line of saying the name, Jeffery Epstein, by mistake. Also, the performer adds lines spontaneously describing the black eyeliner as “something black”, to land an unexpected punchline. In the prototype, the part Elly practices awful German is as well cut off due to the length of video being too long.