I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking around video content distribution, and my primary thoughts at the moment is that videos get most of their views via embeds on other blogs. This sort of proves it. Die Antwoord has shot onto an international stage by embeds on a couple of large international blogs. Next Level shit.

It’s a pity that all of the videos are on different platforms. It does mean that it’s tricky to consolidate all the stats.

City guides are really a dime a dozen, you have about 10 different options to choose from, but this Nike app looks like one of the best

Watercolor: September 08 on the Behance Network.

The Sleeping Bear | Outdoor | Home.

How awesome is this?

Eko: A Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars – information aesthetics.

Pretty cool way to show when a light is going green. This could make you start up a little bit earlier and keep traffic flowing more smoothly.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Take note of this screen shot of the stream. Notice all the little screens? Almost everyone is documenting the event. The camera’s made a VERY explicit point of taking crowd shots of everyone with their phones whipped out.

It makes a lot of sense seeing as a while ago Nokia had “The 4th Screen” video that everyone was blogging about. I didn’t, but here it is below:

Now, I’m actually finding The 4th Screen pretty damn irritating. No one is having a party anymore, everyone is too busy documenting it. The other crowd shots were of people standing around with their hands in the air, holding their video camera or cellphone. The same happened a while back at the Vice Magazine party, which was billed as being bat-shit crazy, but none of the people who would normally go bat-shit crazy attended. It was full of industry folk hanging around at “the cool event”. It was still a cool event, Jack Parow, Die Antwoord and Driemanskap played some good music, but everyone was either too busy “watching” and documenting, and not “participating”. It fell flat because of that even though it had lots of potential.

And I’m kind of feeling the same about people documenting events/gigs/partys using their phones. When you tell the world “I’m having this amazing time at this party, here is a photo”, it can’t be that amazing because you took the time out to document, upload and share. Sure it’s quick and easy to do, but still… why?

Now, I’ve done my fair share of documenting for 10and5 – we covered the Loeries quite extensively, as well as some other events, but that’s always been because it was work. One feels obligated to document it since you are drinking their bar dry on your media passes. Lovely. But the times that I’ve been having a rocking party are typically the times that I’ve left the documenting up to other people. Like We Are Awesome, JR or Justin. Or whoever has a camera out at that stage.

When everyone is documenting the event, no one is participating and it makes the event fall flat. Put away your cellphone every now and again and participate.

Dirk from Cow UK has featured this video/site on This is HERD:

Erin from Yaybia! sent me this amazing YouTube video by US ad agency BooneOakley. The company answered the question of ‘do you actually need a site’ and created a You Tube video instead.

This piece of interactive content has become their whole website. And even better, by making it shareable they’ve actually succeeded in getting other agencies like ourselves (and Darryl and Ben) to embed another agency’s site into theirs!

An excellent idea and in a space where everyone shouts new and different, here is something that really is.

• Call to action was sign-up on a Facebook FanPage.
• Strong advertising budget – little reliance on virality for acquisition but still used the Facebook news injection feature.
• 350k people signed up to the Fanpage
• Risky as it could end up bombing if the two players don’t head up against each other.

The Glaceau campaign fits in perfectly with the siteless site concept. It will be interesting to see what Glaceau does with the users/fans once this campaign is over, as they could easily rebrand the site for a new campaign.

Now, with the release of Jetpack, it will allow developers who develop a microsite or other campaign related material to develop new plugins for the browser using technology that they are most familiar with – CSS, HTML, Javascript, etc. This means more stuff that you can do for a campaign. Here is a brief video explaining the basics – it does get quite technical later on so if you are an account or brand manager, don’t bother watching past 3:00 mins as it gets a bit techie, you’d be able to understand the gist of things though.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

So what does this mean?

Well, it means that your development team will be able to develop an extension a lot quicker than previously as they won’t need to learn a new technology, plus your users would be a lot more willing to download and install the extension as they won’t need to restart their browser (this has always been a barrier to adoption for Firefox extensions).

By making it easier to develop and install these extensions, we might see the advent of “throw away extensions” – plugins that exist only for the duration of the campaign and are removed afterwards. I mentioned the Orange Internet Balloon Race campaign yesterday – something like that would work brilliantly as a quick extension for your campaign.

As with the emergence of constellations, brands need to realise that they exist on many different levels – not only on their own brand site or microsite and that the browser is a great place to tie all these elements together. A Firefox extension is a fantastic way for brands to develop engaging conversations with their fans – the danger of course being that you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much!

On another note, Mozilla has now also decreased the barrier to entry for potential extension developers. As stated above, one required different knowledge to build a Firefox extension previously, Jetpack now allows any person with knowledge of the standard web technologies to create an extension. And it’s been the extension market place that has led Firefox to become such a popular browser in the first place (that, and the fact that it’s NOT Internet Explorer!). This is a great step by Mozilla to expand on their Marketplace strategy (just as Apple, Nokia, Facebook, etc have done).

Here are links to Techcrunch, as well as ZDnet for some other light analysis.

Are there any great extensions that you can think of to develop for your brands’ campaign?

Some Examples:

Skittles and the Modernista website were two of the most popular examples. The feedback on the campaign quickly pointed out the negative reviews and comments – something similar happened to the Yogisip campaign locally in South Africa where semi-explicit videos were uploaded, but also immediately taken down. These types of sites will always require a moderation tool built in.

However, the feedback and hype generated by the campaign can most certainly be argued for in a positive way. Estimates range that the Skittles campaign was seen by close to 500k people directly, generated more than 10k tweets plus all the earned media that it generated was worth the hype. The Skittles campaign definitely worked as a once-off, it is tricky seeing that this type of concept would work well in another iteration. But the lessons one can learn out of it is valuable.

Regarding Modernista, the site is a brilliantly executed and produced piece of work. It shows us what is possible with a simple piece of javascript. They’ve used the best tools possible (Flickr for sharing work, Delicious for thoughstreaming, etc) to achieve their objectives.

In the Jeep example (they’ve since launched a new campaign and site), a small widget pulled through examples of member photo’s uploaded to Flickr and tagged with Jeep.

An older campaign is that of the Orange Internet Balloon Race campaign also some more info here.

If you found this interesting, you might also like the Constellations not Destinations theory of social networks.

I’ve been fairly quiet of late, but I promise to start ramping up my blogging a lot more now!