“If you can’t describe a transmedia property in two sentences, you don’t have a successful transmedia property.”

Or so says Anthony Lilley, chief creative officer and CEO of London-based Magic Lantern, a cross-platform media company specializing in transmedia and gamification.

Lilley was presenting on Wednesday as part of NextMedia at the Banff World Media Festival. The event was billed as an in-depth interview with Lilley, hosted by the CFC Lab’s Ana Serrano.

Enjoyably informal after three days of media-centric presentations, Lilley focused his discussion on Genie in a Bottle, a kids-focused transmedia property his company is currently developing for use in schools.

Based on a book and film of the same name, first developed in 2008, Genie seeks to teach kids about climate change through media-based education and action. An animated film sets the stage for the educational process, showing how the world began and how it started to decline with climate change.

Then, a variety of in-school activities build on the film and take the concept down different avenues. One execution in development involves a “spy” app in which a kid can track their parent’s car usage, another helps them track energy usage at school.

“It was written to solve the engagement problem: how do you get kids to engage with this topic?” Lilley said. “It didn’t begin with any transmedia pieces, but it exists in the real world as well, as kids are expected to participate in school and at home. There is a very active element to it that’s built into the core creative.”

Gamification is key to engaging kids with this type of transmedia project, he said, and the concept sits at the core of most of Genie’s transmedia elements.

He emphasized, however, that overcomplication of transmedia is common enemy to success in the field, and urged the audience to think of each element from the user’s point of view, not just a technological or creative challenge.

“Stay in the head of the target consumer, and put yourself in their space as much as possible,” he said. “They don’t think of the boundaries between media in the way that we do. You can’t force interactivity on to people.”

“I always start user centric in terms of my thinking,” he continued, “and I’m constantly suppressing my own ego.”

His second case study focused on preschool property Alpha Blocks, carried by CBeebies in the UK. Alpha Blocks uses animated characters bearing letters of the alphabet to engage kids online and off and has been so successful, he says, “kids around England now run around playgrounds pretending to be the letter X.”

Unlike Genie, Alpha Blocks was transmedia from the word go.

“It was conceived as a solution to the problem of that fact that kids find reading hard,” he explains. ‘You start with that core notion, focus on the specific strengths of the media — and the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts.”