13:00 Kick Off at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam by Bas Verhart and Marleen Stikker, the event’s co-founders.
13.45 We Think Author Charles Leadbeater talked about “The Power of Mass Creativity”. An interesting talk but unfortunately he used all the old, well known examples, like the “I Love Bees” ARG or Wickipedia to proof his theory. – But I will read his book and hope to find some more examples and blog about them here.
15:00 Artist Aaron Koblin’s showed us his project “TheSheepMarket” and some other good examples for “Collaborative Creativity” and Crowd sourcing like the “10,000 Cents Buys You $100″ he did.
Tomorrow I´ll be at the PICNIC Conference in Amsterdam. It´s gonna be the third time for me and I´m looking forward to three inspiring days of ideas, fun and sensory stimulation in media technology, entertainment, art and science.
A great place to meet interesting people. Last year I had the chance to chat with Johnathan Harris, Kevin Roberts , David Weinberger (which singed my Cluetrain Manifesto) and many more.
I will keep you updated with some “live blogposts” straight out of Amsterdam.
It´s not easy for a big major label to promote a new Oasis album in the age of LastFm, Myspace and the Web.2.0. But it´s possible, and all you need to succeed is a good idea.
An idea like this one from BBH, New York. They took street musicians in the New York City subway system, thought them songs from the new album and shot a documentary. That´s the first way for the public to hear the songs from Oasis’ new record “Dig Out Your Soul.”
The musicians perform in subway station platforms across the city, including Grand Central, Times Square, Penn Station and Astor Place.
Oasis is also encouraging fans to film the street musicians themselves, and post the resulting content on a YouTube channel dedicated to the album launch. (great strategy!!!)
“This is a great example of new thinking applied to an album launch, a sort of backwards album release, where the music starts on the streets instead of ending up there,”
says Kevin Roddy, executive creative director at BBH New York.
And I totally agree with him. It´s a new way to launch a album and it shows that we can still reach the people if we start to think beyond classical advertising ideas.
A great way to start the week, just watch this video during your next coffee or lunch break.
The Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketing specialist, Peter Hirshberg takes look at emerging media and tech history and shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley.
- I love the statements from the kids talking about the media landscape.
“We don’t want it to be advertising; we want it to be real,” said David Roman, vice president for worldwide marketing communications H.P.
And thats a really good approach for a “Branded Entertainment Campaign”. HP and MTV brought together 16 youthful creative types in a loft in Brooklyn for a contest that can be watched on TV or online – the new series is called “The Engine Room”.
They are visited during the competition by guests like the musician Moby; Kevin Smith, the movie director; and the British pop band the Ting Tings.
The digital creations of the teams were judged by a diverse panel that included musicians, filmmakers, museum curators, a physicist, a tattoo artist, critics and Pete Connolly, an art director from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the Hewlett-Packard creative agency.
They started months ago to recruit contestants on a Web site and almost 2,000 people from 122 countries submitted more than 20,000 original artworks.
And they did a great job by using all the content- and social-platforms for their campaign. You can find a lot of the audition videos on Youtube and they have their own Blog and a group on Facebook.
Videos like this one:
“We’re learning as we go not to do so much talking about what we do but rather let people do things with the product,” Mr. Roman said.
“That’s where the ‘wow factor’ comes from.”
And I believe that´s a great insight: “Let people do things with the product…”. Because the best storys are coming from the people that are actually using it.
“The idea of giving these kids who are creating amazing things with computers a stage, a global stage, to show off their work seemed like a natural fit,” Nancy Reyes,account director at Goodby, Silverstein.
And MTV is a pretty good place to show your work to a broad audience. Viewers will be able to watch the episodes of “Engine Room” on mtvU in the United States, on various MTV channels in other countries and online — in nine languages.
A cool project that will generate a lot of buzz. But it´s gonna be interesting to see if MTV and HP will succeed because they have to walk a fine line between entertaining audiences and pitching to them.
Plus the “Ogilvy PR’s 360° Digital Influence team” (what a name) had set up a Blog to stimulate an open conversation between brands and digital media maven. I like their approach for a open dialogue here. www.the-open-room.com
Around 40% of 20-year-olds are using the internet while they’re watching television, says area/code co-founder and managing director Kevin Slavin
And that was a pretty good starting point for MTV and the designers from area/code to develop a play-while-you watch game for the new new episode of The Hills which launched yesterday.
Backchannel is a social game, a “competitive chat” where players score points by serving up the wittiest remarks and hope to be clicked and voted up by other users.
“It’s as much fun to talk about The Hills as it is to watch The Hills,” says Brian Graden, president of entertainment at MTV
And I totally agree. The most interesting thing about series like that is to talk about them with your friends an colleagues.
“There’s social currency, around not just watching the show but being clever about it, being clever about what you think about it, the opinion,” Slavin says. “The opinions start to be as valuable as the show itself in some ways. Competitive chat is about adding a game layer, saying some comments are funnier than others, some people are more clever than others, some people have watched it with greater acuity.”
The Hills airs around a dozen times a week, and each re-airing is an opportunity to play again and earn more points. MTV even plans to aggregate the comments collected over a week of a rerun episode and inject those into an on-air overlay.
“The right application can redefine how people interact with the content,” Brian Graden
And it is this kind of interaction that people want. Engage with the content and connect with other fans of the series to share their thoughts and talk about it.
For me, this takes TV to a new level and is a great example for combining different channels to an holistic brand experience.
Last Week Nike has launched “Nike+ Human Race” the World’s Largest Running Event.
It took place in 25 cities at the same time and over 1 million runners participated around the globe by turning on their IPods and logging into nikeplus.com.
On race day Nike organized live concerts with top musical artists and even a number of elite Nike athletes like Lance Armstrong in the US, Yuna Kim in Korea and Dirk Nowitzki in Munich supported the event.
But this event was more for Nike than a branded community happening, it was a global sales pitch. They highlighted their Nike+ product line, which tracks and communicates your pace while you run, and drive the people on their website nikeplus.com
They tracked the whole run and displayed the results online, so you can compare yourself with all the other runners worldwide that took part:
Here is the profile of the winner from Germany:
Nike also used every social media platform to scale the reach of this event online. If you search for the 10k race on Youtube you have over 600 hits, even more on flickr.com and what is so interesting about it, that most of the videos and pictures are uploaded from privat useres that want to share their experiences.
Nike has created a global community for every runner. Strangers linked together through iPods yet running side by side by combining the digital running world with the physical.
And with every new member in their own Running Community and every user that visit their site, they reach and engage with more people without having to pay an agency for creating spots or buying expensive media space. (I already wrote an post about Nike´s online activities here)
But most important is, Nike connected with their consumers and connected them with each other by creating this ultimate runner experience and that´s what advertising & marketing is all about.
After “The Break Up” Microsoft Advertising has launched the second episode “Inspiration, Anyone” .
Great fun to watch, but I´m not sure if Microsoft itself understands what they are talking about in their campaign. Let´s wait and see what their upcoming campaign from CP+G is up for.
