The merging of storytelling and interactivity in advertising

guardian reporting:
It used to be that storytelling and interactivity were enemies, pretty much like the web was a potential threat to print and TV. Decades after the first choose-your-own-adventure books, console games such as Metal Gear Solid proved that you could put a lot of emotion into interactive storytelling. Online experiences such as Requiem for a Dream showed us how you could experience a loose narrative using your mouse, and interactive films such as Being Henry proposed an intuitive way to add interactivity to live action narrative. During the past few years, as TV loses advertising revenue to the web, there has been a surge of interactive live-action online content. Brands are embracing it wholeheartedly, but I can't help feeling we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Merging live action narrative with interactivity can be very entertaining indeed. You can compress all kinds of genres into a few minutes of intense experience, initiate unexpected twists and create the illusion that the content is endless. By putting the user in the driving seat, we have a vested interest in how the story turns out.
But is that all interactivity can do? By merely recounting of the possibilities of the media and devices around us, that answer is really obvious. For starters, you can measure, document, share and compare your experience with everyone else's. In addition, we are dealing with a totally different audience, one that has an increasingly shorter attention span and is constantly on the move. However brilliant our interactive story may be, if it is just about entertainment it might not be essential to a lot of people. With the first opportunity, our users drop out and are off to do something else – there is plenty of choice.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/oct/12/merging-storytelling-interactivity-advertising-less-rain?newsfeed=true