Nitmesh

iPhone has landed

I have an iPhone and I'll like it until it goes wrong. I received it at the end of last week and it's in many ways a great improvement on my trusty old Palm Treo but... it also has it's flaws. It works perfectly as a phone but once I'd loaded all my contacts into it's address book it doesn't recognize names and numbers with incoming callers. Slightly annoying. I love the fact that it joins any free wifi networks it passes and automatically downloads your emails at no expense to me from my mobile operator. This is going to kill email and browser connection through SIM/3G line. Safari works seamlessly too. Easy to download videos and music through itunes. It's all easy. Even my mother could work it out. It's completely intuitive and looks stylish too. Everyone wants to touch and feel it. Text messages take ages to load though. Still love it until it breaks.

King Corn Web Video

Everything you eat in America has corn in it. Whether the meat, as all animals are fed cheap corn, the sweets, the drinks, all processed foods. Corn is everywhere and do you think it has some correlation with obesity? This great article in NYT reveals all. I love the net for these types of disruptive web videos although this is a trailer the movie. Where else could someone make and distribute a film like this before? Maybe it would have been made for a traditional TV channel and shown twice but this form of marketing means it will hit it's target demo and be seen by influencers spreading it's message by WOM. via PSFK

Making of Get the Glass campaign

Here's the 'making of' the exquisite 'Get the Glass' milk campaign from Goodby Silverstein and produced by Northern Kingdom. It's only fault being it's slow buffeting - patience is a virtue - LINK

Samsung's new wafer thin (1 centimetre thick) 40in (TV) screen coming to the shops soon. Electronic scroll paper is only around the corner to kill off newspapers. - LINK

Lucid Touch - a multi-touch screen technology where you touch the back of the screen but see your finger movements on the screen without obscuring your view of it. - web video LINK

 

Homogenisation of city boroughs - great blog piece from Zeus Jones about the troubling trend of rich white population taking over NYC neighbourhoods primarily because of rising housing costs. Look at Notting Hill in London as one example. It's becoming an exclusively enclave for young rich white Eurotrash city bankers where the original mix of rich, poor with ethnic minorities is slowly drifting away. Only the council estates are left. How soon until even their inhabitants are bought out to complete the rich enclave. - LINK

Here's Patrick Wilson's lovely song illustrated to animation found by Iain Tait on crackunit.com

Sidaction French AIDS advertising commercial

Beautifully shot French AIDS awareness commercial from Leo Burnett France. Clearly influenced by Chris Cunningham's Flex - LINK TO WATCH 'Sidaction' HERE and better version HERE

George Lucas please help change the world

Dear George,
You might have noticed that the English band Radiohead has used it's powerful brand and music to help speed the change we access music, they earn their monies directly and hopefully begin the move to the free revenue model removing the 'middlemen' record companies. Now you, have a great opportunity to change the way we all access and watch content going beyond the digital native population. You're producing Clone Wars and also a Star War TV type series and have the perfect opportunity to use your powerful brand to speed social change in the way we watch and distribute content removing the mass media middlemen and definitely earning more through branding, traditional pre-rolls and new forms of advertising. Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has started this open plea to you and I'm joining the snowballing chorus.

With the emerging online channels like youtube, brightcove, veoh, p2p sites like bitorrent, itunes, the most powerful statement you can make to the traditional networks is to give us embed codes so we, the viewers would be your free media distributors.  So we can host, comment (advertise and link) and spread the content amongst our readers at virtually no cost to you. The huge (wasteful) monies that brands have to pay on a traditional TV media spend. Media is usually 90% of marketing budget when on average only 10% is spent on a creative (but that's another story). Those media monies could instead directly pay you much bigger fees and also, hopefully drive and collaborate with brands to invest in much more entertaining, better adjoining or related advertising content (use some of that media budget on better more imaginative creative) to go with either of the two new series. They could create associated offline brand advertising, to promote your series experientially, driving new audiences to these new channels. But it won't be necessary, we, the consumer would do it through WOM.

Then once it's been distributed widely throughout the net, the icing on the cake is you do a traditional TV, DVD and other old ancillary market deals worldwide. Mass media TV channels will slowly become the second division in the league of media channels. Instead of them controlling what we watch and when. We can decide for ourselves. Remember there's approximately 300 million and counting broadband connections worldwide (one billion online or 18% of the world) but of course there's billions of traditional TV viewers.

Please use the net to premiere your new content and we'll spread the message and help educate the way the world accesses, watches where they want, when they want your compelling content. As this blog post clearly articulates Content is now king. Brands have to now follow the content. We, the public are now  empowered to watch whatever we like and most of the world likes Star Wars. As NeeTeeVee points out you have already changed the world, why stop now?
Please go and talk to Chris Anderson at Wired and author of The Long Tail. His new book is called FREE. I'm sure he could advise you.
Regards
Damiano Vukotic

Disclosure - I work for RSA Films developing new forms of content sometimes branded for digital and traditional channels.

Toilet on the blog - Brand engagement site

I-needtogo.com - Brand engagement which lost me once the Dutch cleaning lady started talking to me and I nearly missed the brand interruption. Smart of the creators to provide embed code, another nail chipping away at the coffin of mass media spending as me, the consumer is self publicizing the brand or should I say content for them.

David Droga animation interview web video

David Droga is interviewed and animated.

Commissioned by D & AD

Learning Web Video

'A 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of US students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.' paragraph from the great Interactive marketing Trends blog via mediadcultures.net

Information R/evolution Web Video

Kansas State University anthopology professor Michael Wesch has made another web video called "Information R/evolution" exploring changes in the ways we find, store, create, critique, and share information. Wesch made "The machine is Us/ing" at the beginning of the year. I have embedded both below to watch.

Information R/evolution

The Machine is Us/ing

Thoughts that hopefully generate reactions and comments

Goodby Silverstein web video talk switch from traditional to digital - LINK

Guide through new Apple OS Leopard software - LINK

Future of all forms of media articulated in this great post from Joshua Green from the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Hollis Towns the Executive Editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Bill Stewart of IBM Digital Media at Kent Sate Media Mindsets Conference. - IMPORTANT LINK

Film industry blaming games industry for it's woes when there's a fundamental content consumption shift going on. From MMM - LINK

David Slade's new film - 30 Days of Night Variety film review - LINK

So you want to go viral?  - Matt Dickman's blog - LINK

More people playing online games than watching TV
This is a dynamite stat for the traditional forms of media like TV commercial production and worrying for traditional content production but will people just watch TV, play games, IM, email etc all at the sametime? Read a stat recently that said more technology in the home, the more TV was watched or is it just left on in the background? When the (appropriate demo) brands realise this amazing fact, as Toyota is beginning to, it's going to be fascinating to witness how it's going effect my industry - traditional commercial production. Why in the UK are we making traditional commercials more than ever? Will all these different fragmented channels survive? Visiting a commercial TV channel who are top of the long tail of digital TV in UK they claim the fragmented audiences are coming back to the established branded trusted channels and deserting the new niche digital channels. I don't know who to believe but the meshing of games, branding and some form of usefulness or entertainment is clearly the way forward. Interactive and not passive anymore. from the great wonderland blog.

Simon Andrews has a good take too how all online games will be free - LINK