Does this illustrate the effective and spreading creative power of Improv everywhere or should I say, us, the consumer who are willing to join in with all our various forms of mobile tech (see any o2 iphones in there?), for us to be creative and spread the ad brand message for free? It is brand advertising content generating user generated content equalling lovely free media.
I love the concept, but when it's the spreading seminal, original compelling content. More the merrier, as we-(media), all separate the wheat from the vast torrent of trash. Hopefully we will rapidly diminish the vicegrip power of more traditional forms of (mass) media and the vast monies that are usually funnelled to them from brands will be invested directly into more compelling content from the truly talented. The trusted bankable filmmakers, the designers, the artists, the storytellers as opposed to going to all the few safe, stockholder or government controlled middle men in our mass media. I'm not ruling out ad or strategic agencies, they have a vital role to play in future brand/content models. It's those few that control and decide for us all what we supposedly want to watch. How many people do you meet these days that don't watch TV?
It's fair enough for Adliterate to say 'we're back' about Saatchi & Saatchi and I'm not doubting it's watchable, fun and engaging but it's not exactly original, is it? There again I'm blogging it, so Richard's strategy's worked, hasn't it?
Don't know how to put this in context but Clay Shirky, professor at NYU's interactive telecommunications program, has written this insightful book called Here comes Everybody. Shirky goal 'is to describe the intersection of social tools and social life, helping people to understand both what's happening around them and how tools could be designed that better support social activity' but just watch the web video of his 'Cognitive Surplus' speech at Web 2.0 conference where he compares television viewing attention hours with wikipedias. Twice in the last couple of weeks I have had people say to me, 'Where do you find the time to do all this?' I tell them that I don't watch TV and if I do have it on it's usually live TV and on in the background. UPDATE - Good post from Neil McIntosh here
Firstly I found the slideshare presentation on Youth Marketing (at bottom of this post) from the fast forward marketing trend blog. 'Youth is no longer a demographic, it's a mindset'. It's worth a quick view as well as the summary to the Global Habbo Youth Survey, especially on teens and their favourite mobilephones here. Quoting the summary 'Examines the interests, values, attitudes, online habits of a global audience, the survey reveals teens' current media usage, consumption behaviour and brand preferences in order to better understand what compels youth around the world'
Here's a great story about how text messaging is used for flirting in India. It's from New York Times so you might need to quickly sign up for it to access the story but NYT is always full of great stories.
Here's two great pieces on the meshing of TV and the net. First in the Atlantic Monthly and second in the Timesonline.
This is an amazing site full of futuristic skyscaper designs, fascinating what architects are wanting to build. It's a competition and you have to click on '08 Skyscaper competition'
Synchstep from Pokenyc (explanation here) - This is going to be a killer app for the iphone or itouch (and every other phone for sure) and want it now. An app that synchs your music with your walking pace. Greg Elliott, the designer of it, can safely retire.
Here's a great piece on littleminx.tv. It's a division of RSA Films (where I work). They produced five shorts films from their the directors and there's links here to watch all of them - enjoy - Exquisite Corpse
Lastly my tweetcloud - I love twitter apps. Damiano via punkplanning
Creative Social Blog is hosting a five part interview with David Puttnam, all of which are embedded below, all worth watching. Puttnam is the chairman of the digital ad agency Profero.
Part 1 - Why rejoin the advertising industry and what has changed the most? Nice story about working for CDP about thinking for oneself.
Part 2 - What are the biggest challenges for the major broadcasters?
Part 3 - New Writers Playground, what's on my iPod and well being of children.
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.
Film director Hugh Hudson (Oscar winning Chariots of Fire) has remade his epic British Airways spot ‘Face’ for the UK business class airline Silverjet. They are the airline that recently made that cheeky girl on girl mile high viral too.
The original BA ads were on TV for five years in the old mass media world and watched by approximately 600 million people in 70 countries. The original spot featured a cast of thousands making up the face and the globe. The new Silverjet spot is the similar but slightly different. See embeds below.
As well as the other BA spot ‘Island’, Hudson is famous for directing the classic spots for Fiat ‘Handbuilt by Robots’, Courage Best ‘Gertcha’, the Benson & Hedges cigarette ‘Swimming pool’, and Cinzano “airplane”. Here is the making of video for Silverjet commercial - link
Disclosure - I'm an employee at RSA Films which produced the new Silverjet commercial and the top embed below. You can watch the original BA commercial here or bottom embed to compare.
Here's the original BA commercial.
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?
THE LINKS
Joseph Jaffe, on his Jaffejuice blog finds the latest reason for low TV ratings to be Daylight.
Found this from the great adland blog. An Atlanta agency''s attempt at engaging clients - ourindustryisbroken.com
Here's a simple 'remarkable' viral for the supposedly smallest MP3 player...