Nitmesh

Walker Web Video - Moveon.org

Found this web video on my trawl through the net. It's for moveon.org - the US organisation attempting to end the war in Iraq.

DJ Sara & DJ Ryusei Scratch Vinyl Session

Half a million hits and counting on youtube. A couple of kids aged 5 and 8 scratching vinyl together.  Maybe this gives us a clue of the age of the demo who like to watch and wonder at this short web video and there's more here. They make it look so easy.

Marc Ecko - Genius marketing with one baseball

This is marketing genius. Fashion designer/entrepreneur/pop culture maven Marc Ecko, the man who brought us the tagging viral of air force one, has surpassed himself with his latest marketing venture.

'He bid and won Barry Bond's 756th (it's a new record) home run baseball in an online auction costing him $752,467 and now Ecko is giving the American public the chance to decide what to do with it. He has given them three choices and is now at the centre of the biggest sports debate ever.

"I bought this baseball to democratize the debate over what to do with it," Ecko said. "The idea that some of the best athletes in the country are forced to decide between being competitive and staying natural is troubling."

Visitors to Vote756.com can choose between three options:

1. "BESTOW IT" (as is into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown)

2. "BRAND IT" (with an asterisk before delivering it to the Hall)

3. "BANISH IT" (by sending it into outer space on a rocketship, never to be seen or heard from again)

Every major sports media outlet in the States is reporting this story and will continue to do so. Whatever the public chooses, Ecko will again make news by honouring the results of the vote.

He has successfully written himself into sports history using his bank account and his brain.'

I have to admit to quoting and plagarizing much of the great Fallon Planning blog for this piece but also Joe Jaffe who makes the point that Ecko 'is democratizing the conversation'. 'He talks about the "collective consciousness" (I think I call it the connected consciousness) and the alignment between his brand and what he stands for with this pop culture moment.'

The crucial point, as Crackunit and Fallon point out, is that 750K could have been spent on a conventional marketing campaign but what Ekco has done is priceless in terms of marketing his brand. This is what we should all be doing with all these new forms of marketing. Finding opportunities to seminally reach your core demo audience in a way that they actually care, join a form of communal storytelling, causing a mass debate across all platforms, spilling out into offline (WOM), compelling the public to interact in the final outcome.

or as Ed Cotton of Influx Insights puts it another way when discussing life beyond Consumer Generated Content  'The killer application is finding a way to tap into consumer thinking and creativity through the social network, but to do it in a way that doesn't involve classical advertising.'

Sinister facts of Facebook - web video

Is your privacy at risk? Watch this web video and be very weary of what you post on facebook in the future. nathdud blog post and bbc illuminates us further on it's plan to open our profiles to search engines.

Word of Mouth, Rick Rubin and Crisis in the Music Industry

There’s fascinating quick blog post from PSFK summing up the state of the music industry and the way it's marketed and it leads on (I'm still in the middle of reading it) to this long NY Times article about Rick Rubin, the new the boss of Columbia Records but it’s the underlined last paragraph in PSFK post that's interesting.

All the old ad models aren’t working and as I've written in the past, WOM (word of mouth) is coming to the fore. The consumer has to be converted, persuaded or made to enthuse a brand, product or artist, so naturally becoming an evangelist. Putting Rick Rubin in control of a huge record company is an inspired choice but could be quite very dangerous too. Sony have put a true creative in control, and perfectionist by the sound of things, to cause that evangelism for music. Although, as I have said before I don't think it will bring music back to the power it once was. Today there are just too many different forms of (interlinking and meshing) entertainment and technologies for music to compete or blend with. Disposable income is spent on and more spread around than ever before; mobiles, computers, games, DVDs etc.

We need to look at the online business success stories and analyse the different ways those businesses have exploited novel marketing techniques and succeeded online. Take Apple and the secretive way the company goes about marketing, generating so much gossip blog noise and having the arch creative evangelist in Steve Jobs spreading the sermon of the Apple brand twice a year. Then there’s Google's different approach to online marketing to keep it's search engine dominant, giving away all it's other services for free, all linked through an email address, all easy to use, making us use the brand online and offline, now trumping Microsoft. This leads me to say that all content should be given away free and earn its revenue back through ancillary means. The big question is how?

The music, film and ad industry (and clients) are beginning to take note of some of these online marketing techniques like WOM (this is a great post from Forbes on critical 1% influencers) and make them more prominent or central to their future media and marketing plans. In reality most of us sit in front of a computer screen three or four times longer per day than any TV screen. More of us, especially the youth, are even watching television while we are on our laptops and actually on our laptops. Maybe it’s because music (and video) is so easy and cheap to produce now it has an inherently cheaper value. We’re witnessing, through technology, the democratization of music and now video. Anyone can produce music or film and distribute it on their own dot com for next to nothing causing an explosive fragmentation (the long tail) of the mass media models of the 20th century. There’s no scarcity of channels anymore only an abundance of choice so it's important to develop new (or very old) techniques online and it's trust, relationship and influence that make up the essential elements of successful word of mouth and ultimately whatever you’re promoting it has to be worth it, have value, be entertaining and you want to pass on (usually for free - that's the problem).  That’s why Rick Rubin is in control and why I think more creatives or evangelicals will be given control in other media industries but how will they pay for it and will we want to pay for it?

UPDATE Rubin intends to bring back the subscription model and post articulates the near free revenue model to access all Sony's music - theregister and this next PSFK post on Rubin, subscription and his plan to use his new WOM dept to turn Paul Potts into a star stateside.

The Net Effect - Rich Thought Provoking Links

Death of TV, End of Advertising and Television 2.0.

Here are some rich links I've aggregated over the last couple of months, all relevant and thought-provoking to our rapid technological changing TV and TV advertising landscape and revealing the net's overwhelming, crushing dominance over all traditional media.

Vint Cerf - The godfather of the net predicts the death of TV as we know it in the Guardian. Here's a quote.

"85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time," he said. "You're still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later."

TV viewing is declining. Here's newteevee post, here's Jeff Jarvis' buzzmachine post and Simon Andrew's great big picture blog post too.

Here's IBM's pdf download on the end of advertising. Simon Andrew's great blog take on IBM report.

Here's the latest ofcom report - The Communications Market Report 2007. Click to download chapters or whole report once you have read to the bottom of the foreword OR you can read Telegraph's concise synopsis of the whole report which pretty much sums it all up. As does paidcontent.org. noticing that 30% of people with DVRs specifically record TV to skip ads.

Here's a piece from businessweek on ad skipping stats. Read the illuminating comments at the bottom of the post.

Google sucks the life out of old media from Silicon Valley Insider. Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL ad revenues grew by 42% - $1.3Billion, while traditional TV, radio, magazine and newspaper ad revenues shrank by 3% - $280M. This might be the trickle which could very soon become a torrent.

Why do we skip Ads? There's too many of them. If we all made longform 'event' films/compelling branded content would we less inclined to skip? Toadstool blog with more rich links included.

Giles Rhys Jones on Interactive Marketing Trends gives us a top ten trends in digital advertising in 2008 but read number 4 & 6 with his ideas about TV advertising and the role of production companies.

Is the future of TV online? Not yet. Says Mediashift.

Here's a taste of the future of TV - Forbes piece on TV 2.0.

What will be the 'phoenix' of new ad revenue models, if any, that will stick and rise from the ashes of our slowly disappearing traditional streams of revenue in this, now, ruthless consumer controlled, new technological media environment. Anyone care to comment?

 

A Gorilla & Phil Collins = Branded Content?

The New Cadbury's Milk Chocolate Ad  from Fallon. Here's the ad for you to watch.

Scamp nicely sums up the creative culture of Fallon here.

Tenori-On Musical Instrument

This is a musical instrument. It is the Yamaha Tenori-On musical sequencer.

'It consists of a screen, held in the hands, of a sixteen by sixteen grid of LED switch buttons, any of which can be activated in a number of ways to create an evolving musical soundscape. The LED switches are held within an aluminium frame, which has two inbuilt speakers, as well as a number of buttons and a dial, which control the type of sound produced.'

It's been in development for several years, and is apparently going to be released in the UK in September. Watch and enjoy.

via crackunit and geekologie