Say what you will about Faris:  He has quite a lot of hair.  He wears bathrobes in public with only a Speedo underneath.  He has a strange fondness for bacon-chocolate.

This industry has no shortage of people full of rhetoric and strong advice.  And Faris is no innocent in that world:  His blog is fantastic.  He comes up with lots of bright ideas that other people like so much that they’ve been known to take credit for it themselves.  And Noah even included him on his list of people who influence him (high praise indeed).

(He works here at Naked, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  I’m clearly biased.)

But beyond all the talk, Faris is one of few people I’ve met who bothers to walk the talk every now and again.

Here, this is what I mean:

Faris was asked recently to give a talk on the subject of “transmedia planning” at a WARC conference in London.  His talk was itself a demonstration of the principle, not just an academic recitation — “an experiment in distributed presentations.”

That he was asked to do so isn’t a surprise; Faris is generally credited with birthing the idea of transmedia planning:

It requires a lot from people – it attempts to distribute identity and knowledge, to drive the formation of brand communities who piece the brand back together, together…  A non-linear brand world, accessed via multiple accretive touchpoints: adverts, building towards a feature length film, an online virtual world, and from here comics, games, mobile applications and so on.

True to the conceit of transmedia planning, there were multiple touchpoints to the talk — you could enter the story from multiple places, and the order in which you encountered them didn’t matter.  The touchpoints were:

1) The live presentation at the conference.

2) An article in Campaign Magazine that was published on the same day as the live presentation.  (I can’t find the link on their website, but Faris has an e copy of the article here.)

3) A simultaneous post on his site that included this presentation (similar to that from the conference, but including additional/alternative content):

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Let’s pretend for a minute that none of the actual content was any good.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Faris bothered to put some effort into the structure of the presentation and the context in which that content appeared, and did so in a manner consistent with his own philosophy and the content of his presentation.

In short, he practiced what he preaches, and that’s a refreshing thing.  Well done, Faris.  I’m proud to work with you.