I first heard of anyclip when they received runnerups in the techcrunch50 awards. So I signed up to the private beta immediately to test it out. I’m still waiting on my invite though.
Now, I’ve just seen the demo video and I really dig it!
A service that lets you find “Any moment from any film ever made”. That’s a very powerful tagline. Kinda like the Bill Gates vision “A computer on every desk”.
Watch the entire video for the demo and the questioning.
FYI the guys on the judging panel are:
- Scobelizer (Robert Scoble) is a huge tech blogger, former Microsoft guy
- Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook and co-founded Napster, Plaxo and Causes. And now joined Yammer!
- Reid Hoffman, once an aspiring Academic and Rhodes scholar (i think), founder of Linkedin and mentor to many of the top web 2.0 CEO’s
- Dick Costas, founder of Feedburner, Head of Google Social Products, and now COO of Twitter
- Mike ?, he used to be chief engineer at Mozilla Firefox, now Chief Engineer @ Facebook.
As you can see, its the who’s who of Silicon Valley.
Essentially they:
1) Aggregate short form video (less than 4 mins)
2) Allow people to metatag and categorise
3) have monetization models so you can buy the video or download or rent it
There are valid questions around legals, getting buy-in from the studios re content and also discovery.
Discovery is a good point, because that’s how I find a lot of interesting content on youtube from browsing other videos. I also think its going to be an incredible challenge getting the studios on board. But they did it with Hulu via a JV.
Ultimately, the guys behind it are right suggesting that it reinvigorates our love of movies. By me watching that scene from the Big Lebowski, I wanted to go to the video shop and rent it immediately. It might encourage others to go find the torrent, but they were never going to buy it anyway.
My other question is that can’t Youtube do all of the above? Youtube’s biggest problem at the moment, is that the most watched videos and biggest traffic driver is amateur videos. Not professional. If the anyclip guys have figured out a way to automatically tag, categorise and scale it, that could be a winner.
I will never understand why people do sports like this….it must the rush, the adrenalin, overcoming your fears and the risk involved. I cringed when I saw some of those injuries.
Anyhow, this is pure co-incidence – but at work we did a creative exercise where we created online display ads for a fictious energy drink, Fuqu. Then I came across the new Redbull website. I really like what Redbull is doing with its video content. They are positioning it with an adventure / extreme sport image. Redbull is associated with skateboarding, BMX riding, flying planes etc… It’s very cool.
I don’t really drink redbull these days (as they are bad for your health!). However, their videos are very slick and their marketing strategy is very good, particularly with social media. Check out their facebook page and integration with twitter. Redbull sponsored athletes provide Twitter updates and the feed is aggregated onto the facebook page.
A few weeks ago I went to TEDxSydney. One of the videos we watched was the one above from Seth Godin. It’s quite good. Its about how change no longer comes from mass marketing, cheaper labour & faster machines, but rather tribes. Tribes can be used to start movement and connect people.
Very inspiring video. There’s more here. I’ve been watching them all night. There’s lot of really cool videos on music, design, technology. Other diverse topics include health, education, etc.. It’s more about innovative ideas.
On Monday night, about 300 people gathered for the inaugural launch of the social media club in Sydney. The event was held at the Polo & Supper Club in Oxford St and the event was well attended by the masses. By the masses I’m referring to marketing people, the digerati, the twitterati, PR people, etc…or whatever you want to call them. The key note speakers were the fake Stephen Conroy aka Leslie Nassar (love your work!) and Adam Ferrier of Naked Communications. The MC for the night was Tim Burrowes, editor of Mumbrella. The topic for the night was “authenticity & transparency in social media” – one of those airy fairy marketing topics.
At 6.30pm when I arrived, the place was pumping. They had two levels booked out, and the bottom level where the main arena was, was absolutely packed. Standing room only! (Well bars are made for standing room).
Man with the $349 jacket
Adam Ferrier went first and spoke about their infamous “girl in the jacket campaign”. This campaign was created for Witchery to launch their mens range and they had a budget of zero (emphasis) and wanted to generate a lot of buzz. So they created a fictious story where girl sees boy in cafe she fancies, boy leaves jacket, girl wants to find boy. Girl then goes to the enormous length of posting a video on youtube. The story then got amplified as the main stream press picked it up and they showed that Sunrise breakfast program, newspapers, etc… Their intention was to get the brand noticed and get people talking about Witchery Man. Check it:
As of now, 212,100 views in youtube. Pretty impressive for a budget of zero. I’ve watched the video for the first time, and although I have the benefit of hindsight, I would have been highly skeptical of it at the time. The way that she goes to great lengths to describe the jacket and how the “perfect guy” would be wearing it. In fact its not a bad jacket. Subliminal advertising must work on the weak.
Then the press started asking who is this girl, is this a marketing campaign, who is behind this? They eventually got outed. Naked & Witchery came clean and posted a video response saying yes it was us. I’ve only seen the videos now (after the talk) so here it in all its glory:
Man, I cringed when I saw this. It could have been executed a lot better and definently with more class – the way that Heidi turns it into a ad for the jacket. In fact, the only time I cringed even more in the last 24 hrs was when I heard Adam Ferrier’s response as to whether Naked was arrogant.
Its all about generating conversations
It seemed that for most of the night Adam was defending Naked’s actions. He even had stats to back himself up. But at the end of the day, I think he was convincing and I agree with Tim Burrowes comments on Mumbrella that he did help to sway the crowd onto his side.
Honestly, I don’t have a problem with this tactic of creating a false story or building a mysterious story to get customers engaged and talking about a brand. Brands do it all the time. It’s what we do as marketers. Can Jordan really fly? (Wait, there is doubt?), are pure blondes really made from pristine rivers? Brands make up stories and fantasies all the time to get customers talking and excited. All they want to do is generate buzz. If that’s the objective, then Naked slam dunked it.
Was the public misled about Girl in the Jacket. I have no doubt they were. Was their a line that was crossed? Yes – only when they made that cringeworthy followup video. If Naked did not do the followup video like that, I think it would have been a great campaign. Consumers are smarter than what we give them credit for.
Was it groundbreaking? Of course not. In fact some guy in the audience asked “Did the Witchery Man campaign helped increase the popularty of social media?” – dude are you kidding me? They posted a youtube video about a fake story and it got picked up by the press. It’s not as if they created Twitter. When the story was being told, I immediately thought of the real life campaign of NY girl of my dreams, the cybersearch by one NYC man for an aussie girl he met on the subway. I came across this when I was travelling in the States, and I had actually thought about it when I started reading about this campaign and the connection became even more clearer last night.
I agree with Adam’s insight that social media is a communication channel. It could be more than that, but at the end of the day that’s primarily what it is. Yes it is democratizing media (see Ashton Kutcher). However, it does make it a lot harder for brands and marketers to do something similar now because people think they got screwed over.
It nots really Stephen Conroy?
I love Leslie’s work as the fake stephen conroy. Dude is funny but a walking PR disaster. He didn’t have a lot to say on the night and Tim was trying to involve him as much as possible by asking him questions as well. But he definently had a couple of good insights – that not everything created by companies on social media is great. Everyone does go nuts when they see a brand do something on social media.
If you want to see more of the Witchery Man campaign check the video from the night.
Mashup with Tokyo google maps and Nintendo Wii. Very Cool. It’s called Tokyo Jogging. The video shows that the Google Map doesn’t load fast enough to keep up with the jogging. The guy looks like he is running forever before he moves to the next section. However, this appears to be how Google maps work. You have to click through and press the arrow button before it moves you to the next section.
It listed in the Daft Punk Youtube Channel, but I don’t think its an official Daft Punk vid as I’ve seen the cartoon one (also very good). It’s more of a fan vid. Very simple, yet highly effective and creative!
If you are into Daft Punk, I would highly recommend this idaft. It has a console with different words. You tap the buttons on the console with your keyboard and recreate the song’s chorus. Very cool!
Rarely do I come across something so funny and so well done. The fail blog is da bomb as it has pictures and videos of fail situations. It’s titled “FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments“. All it has is a very simple layout with pictures and vids, and a bunch of social media links to digg, stumbleupon, etc.. to rate it. It might be simple, but by golly does it do it well!
If you hadn’t realised, the word “fail” and “epic fail” has slowly crept into our vocab. I’m not sure where it came from, as well as the words “Owned”, “Pwnd”, but I recall friends using it ages ago when referring to computer games moments in Warcraft, Counterstrike, etc… So that could be the origin and now its in everyday use. Anyhow, prepare to ROFL with these pics from the fail blog.
fail-owned-firetruck-fail
fail-owned-education-fail
I found this blog via the “top blogs today” section within wordpress. There was also “fastest growing blogs”, and top posts”, etc… I have seen them all the time, but I never looked at them or clicked through. I think I might start doing that now! It’s a form of social media recommendation similar to Digg or Stumbleupon as you can see what blogs are popular.
NRL has started and is now in round 2, and the AFL is about to kick off. What better way than to show case both season launch ads. Now I’m not an AFL fan, other than a Sydney Swans supporter by virtue of being from Sydney. However, I do think that the AFL ad is better. C’mon NRL, step yo game up!
This is a good video about web design from SXSW (South by Southwest Festival). It’s all about the user – you need to start with them and end with them in your planning. This guy argues its not about the “elastic user” but rather its about the “specific user”, which kinda flies against the thinking of cloud computing. Because cloud computing suggests that the user can come from anywhere and you have to cater for anyone from anywhere.
Another good video from SXSW is about designing community pages for the wisdom of crowds (yes, its that book!). It’s not the actual author but someone who is applying those ideas to online.
