I will be speaking at Sydney’s AdTech 2012 on “Fragmented Storytelling In An Evolving Media Environment” (today 11am). My co-panelist is Jeff Julian, a great production designer who among other films has worked on Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report’. I thought it might be a cool idea to document the evolution of my own talk here:
Storify is a tool that has been around which is kind of like a curated friendfeed. You select and pull together whatever helps you tell your story. It is probably more suited to non-fiction than fictional stories but I haven’t researched into the latter ones.
Have a look and if you are interested, drop me a comment or reference link afterwards. And I hope to see you at AdTech in a few hours!
America’s TODAY show has borrowed heavily from the usage pattern and structure of Pinterest. Browse to your heart’s content, ideally on a tablet and discover something that you can collect and take away. And because Pinterest is such a mainstream past time already, many brands should take note. With the rise of tablets and touch sensitive computers in the future, this just feels more human and easily accessible.
TODAY’s digital director, Jen Brown is succinctly quoted with the following.
“There’s something about the mindset of Pinterest that is similar to what [people] love about TODAY.com— and that’s discovery. Sometimes I go to Pinterest and I’m not sure what exactly I want, but I know I’m going to find something fun. That’s really how we try to program our site.”
I spent an interesting lunch at the IAB Creative Showcase where the last quarter’s winners explained their work. For me The Monkeys ‘Put a Motor To It’ for coffe milk drink ‘Ice Break’ stood out. The campaign documented people adding engines to all kinds of unusual devices – think ‘Top Gear’ meets ‘Mythbusters’. Here is the Ice Break YT channel and below is the campaign’s case study:
As Ben Cooper from The Monkeys explained, the staggered release of videos over 7 weeks allowed the agency (to a small degree) to creatively react to the audience’s viewing behaviour and also integrate fans into the edits. Professional seeding, careful uploading (naming, descriptions, inter linking, meta data etc) and special attention to the inner circle of brand adorers/ambassadors were key. Paid media (e.g. featured video on YouTube’s homepage) actually kicked in only later and formed a second stage.
Other experts like Josh Spears of Undercurrent favour an immediate release of all material. After all, the user doesn’t ‘have all minute’ and probably won’t return to your channel anyway.
In any case, The Monkeys definitely succeeded in bringing a brand that previously aired the same TVC for 9 years in a row to take a leap into the wild world of online video and content.
A while ago I started following the excellent photo blog 52 suburbs by Louise Hawson. She is a Sydneysider who decided to a) turn her interest in photography into a full-time passion and b) discover her own home town in the process. For one year she travelled to one suburb per week,- here’s a video from her appearing at Creative Social and a previous post about her project.
By going out into the ‘burbs, the less fashionable places, she lets us see the humanity and diversity that sometimes escapes us. After turning this fantastic project into that an exhibition and a book she is now taking it further under the title “52 Suburbs Around the World “. And you might be interested in supporting her via her Kickstarter page. Watch the video below for more.
This Sunday afternoon from 4pm onwards Splendour in The Grass will be running as a free live stream in the masthead on YouTube’s homepage as well as on Virgin Mobile’s channel. This is a first for paid media in our region so everyone here at Mojo is properly chuffed about getting this up.
Even better, if you happen to be mucking around at Splendour itself, or know someone that is and/or have a Twitter or Instagram account, please participate with the hashtags #splendour, #splendourliveor #SITG . All tweets will be picked up and displayed underneath the videostream. And some of the Instagram shots might end up in The Vaccines new crowdsourced music video.
Splendour Live Stream Party
There are also live streaming parties running in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne this Sunday, so come on down to the Beach Road Hotel in Bondi or the Bimbo DeLuxe in Fitzroy from 4pm on Sunday and enjoy the festival atmosphere without the mud!
