Shocking.
Two months since my last post proper. There’s no excuse for it.
But there is a good reason for it, though. It’s all because of Twitter. It’s Twitter that made me stop blogging and twittering.

See, it was through a simple Tweet that we found out that MTV and the European Union were trying to build a social-network-type-website to support their joint campaign, raising awareness about the upcoming European Elections.
And because my social-media pal Zuluzulu-slash-wildebees and me had been saying that ‘09 was gonna be the year of collaborations, that our skills were finally going to converge, we wrote an overnight proposal built around existing social media tools like Twitter, Qik and Facebook Connect. 
And we won the pitch.
So this is what took me so long: Can You Hear Me, Europe. 

We worked our socks off (turnaround time: 1 month, in 23 languages), but it’s been a great project and we learnt a lot. Most importantly: people have been using the website in a pretty good way. And, good for us, the site has been getting mentions on BBC, Brand Republic , Politica2.0,… 

It’s been fun. So much that we’re now thinking of a company name and a positioning plan. So we can truly start collaborating.

David Lynch embraces the internet yet again. On June 1 the director/artist will launch Interview Project,  a website that will release a series of 3-5 minute portraits of people that his crews met on a 20,000 mile road-trip round America. 
Watch the trailer and Lynch’s own little Lynch-style plug on the Interview Project website. Entertainment Weekly also has a preview of the first episode.

Would have been great if Lynch himself had interviewed all these people; the extraordinary meets the ordinary meets the extraordinary. Still, this looks like a nice piece of human content being dripfed into our digital brains over the course of a year.

Too many friends on Facebook?
But don’t have the guts to ‘un-friend’ the ones you don’t actually know? The ones that keep annoying you with uploading ‘funny’ pictures of their pet crocodile? 
If you were living in the States, Burger King would have given you a really good incentive to ditch them all. They promised a to give a free Whopper to anyone who got rid of 10 friends. The campaign ended 234,000 ‘friendships’ before they pulled the plug. After all, as some kind of proof, it needed to send a message to the ‘un-be-friended’, saying they were dropped. Which is not how Facebook likes to play the game. 
Read more about it here.
A little cyber-cruel, but I wouldn’t have minded coming up with the idea.
Campaign by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

2008 was the year when I started thinking that my background in television/video/moving image was a bit of a burden. By nature, I’ve always been interested in change and the not-so-traditional side of things, so I couldn’t help thinking that people with an education and/or experience in digital media started to get a big advantage in the communications industry. Everyone started a digital agency and told clients they needed Facebook apps and a blog or two.  

Obviously, that’s all very true and useful and what not, but 2009 is set to be the year of video. On the digital platforms of course.
‘Groundswell‘ already mentioned video as an integral of any good communications strategy, and more and more industry people and blogs are talking about it. What got me thinking was this article on Video Insider, bigging up the importance of video. I particularly agreed with the bit where it mentions that it’s time to be creative with online video. [Read more]

One of the (many) things I’ve been doing over the last few years is commissioning music videos, for smaller (and more interesting) indie labels. 
Needless to say I haven’t been overly busy with that part of my ‘business’. The music video as we knew it no longer does the promo job it was invented for. MTV and the likes don’t play many music videos, so not-so-rich bands aren’t keen to make the high-risk investment. Instead, YouTube has become the new holy grail for record labels and their commissioners. 

What’s interesting to see is that labels, who have traditionally been quite averse to embracing internet technology are now realising the digital potential. Big time. Major label commissioner Tim Nash (who won the award for Best commissioner at the recent UK Music video Awards) writes a very entertaining blog about his lovely job and gave an insight in how they deal with the ‘Truth Tube’ and how they’re analyzing the viewing behaviour and the tagging of their videos. Turns out that 52 seconds is the average ’switch-off moment’. [Read more]

Fashion is a notoriously closed-off world, but even this mythical industry is now opening up to its audience. 
SHOWStudio, the brainchild of fashion photographer Nick Knight, has been an internet-based fashion platform for a few years now. Since 2006 Knight’s approach has been to show the creative process as much as possible. Very 2.0 and what-not.

I had kind of forgotten about the project, but I just rediscovered them because of ‘Let There Be Light’, a 3-day fashion shoot that had a live video-stream as well as a Twitter feed. I only just heard about it (2 weeks late), so can’t say how well it went, but judging from the (edited) video excerpts, it looks beautiful and interesting. A great way of inviting the audience into your universe.

Next: the interactive Twitter-Skype-controlled fashion shoot. “Agyness, can you give me that look again, straight into the web-camera”. 

Two weeks ago I wrote about how I liked the Transport For London ‘Do The Test’ campaign. And it seems like the Observer liked it too, because they did a half-page spread on it in last week’s paper (online version here). That’s pretty good column inches for an ad campaign (is this what they mean with blurring the boundaries between advertising and PR?). 
But in the article, Fergus Adam from advertising agency WCRS (who created the spots), says that this kind of viral marketing is pretty much over, because people are less likely to forward clips and jokes. 

Does anybody know of any statistics that support that statement, because this totally surprises me. I agree with him that clients asking for “a viral that gets 5 million hits” are a bit naive. It’s not that simple. And I also think that the word ‘viral’ still gets used to justify lower production budgets (”but it’s only for the internet”). 
But if something’s good, surely it’ll be passed on, talked about and shared? No matter what platform it was originally made for. No matter whether it was ‘marketed’. Sharing has become such an easy part of communication that if you have a good product or make something that’s worth watching/reading/listening to, then I’m gonna tell my friends about it. 
Surely?

One of the most intriguing artists that has used, abused and appropriated the www with freshness and creativity is Han Hoogerbrugge. Artist, animator, designer, interactivist, call him what you want, but he’s always been intriguing, if only for his constant consistent attire of pin-striped suit.

And this week seems to be Hoogerbrugge’s week.

If you happen to be in Rotterdam, go check out his interactive installation ‘What You Say Is What You Get’, commissioned by the Boymans van Beuningen museum. He’s been developing a keen interest in installations recently and this is a next step. 

And then there’s the release of ‘Modern Living’, a book-cum-DVD all about Han and his wide range of work. A monograph as they say. It’s been a while in the making, but it’s all yours now. Check out Submarine Channel for more info.

And if you like the darker side of Han’s work, you should visit his new project, Prostress 2.0, an intriguing series of  ”Daily fresh servings of professional stress”. Different, as they say. 

I like the man. 

I was chatting with my friend ZuluZulu the other day about digital media (he’s a bit of an old school new media dude; you know the ones; they were programming CD-ROMS when I was still impressed by Word and survived the dotcom-crash) and got talking about Joost, the much-hyped, long-forgotten Future of TV. The application that was going to change the way we watched tv. Or content, I should say. 
Whatever happened to them, we wondered? And shouldn’t they be doing something with a browser (it was the day that Google released Chrome), incorporate their software into a more user-friendly website. 

Well, speak of the devil etc etc. Turns out that Joost is no longer focusing on letting you download a software application, but are integrating their p2p technology into a website and the browser, thus bringing it closer to the likes of YouTube. [Read more]