To identify the work Canada’s media gurus think best exemplifies smart new media thinking, every Friday MiC invites guest curators to share Really Important Things That Are Happening in the mediaverse.
Today’s guest curator is Bill Wittur, owner and operator of London-based digital strategy and consulting co Bottree Digital Services. Wittur consults for some of the country’s top media agencies including Mindshare, Starcom Mediavest Group and ZenithOptimedia. Nominated for Media Buyer of the Year by the Ad Club of Toronto last year, and drawing on a decade of avid online media biz know-how, here’s his pick of the digital crop.
Canadian media is at a crossroads. Our broadcasting model is in the process of collapsing, and media innovators in the country have to worry about non-media issues like net neutrality and the high cost of mobile and wireless access. That said, I’m still seeing some unique initiatives that offer inspiration, despite these barriers to entry.
MiCpick 1: Cantags.ca. This project has been under wraps for a little while, but it will have a significant impact on local media buying opportunities once Cantags and similar projects take root with the general public. Basically, if people tag their comments and content according to specific guidelines, it’ll make it much easier for aggregators like Google and Yahoo! to improve the relevance of search results.
MiCpick 2: MetoWe is a project sponsored and developed by ‘Free the Children,’ the organization founded by Thornhill, ON.-based activist Craig Kielburger in 1995. These people continue to astound me with their unique initiatives to generate awareness about specific issues. Recently, they launched the ‘We Generation’ project, which encourages kids to get involved and to share their stories about what they’re doing to ‘be the change.’
MiCpick 3: It’s a little dated, but I applaud the CBC’s placement of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister on Bit Torrent. People were able to download the show via this P2P network and watch it at any time. Unfortunately, access became an issue because of ‘throttling’ and a lack of net neutrality. As mentioned earlier, certain access points are becoming bottlenecks to creative and innovative distribution of content, which of course limits the advertising opportunities. That said, I encourage other content suppliers to continue to use these tools because they acknowledge the consumer of content and not the existing infrastructure.
