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, Chris Williams, managing director of Toronto-based Media Contacts (and Brandnu.wordpress.com blogger) shares his perspective:
1. Envy. When you see a great campaign, you can lie and say you are just happy to see the work, or you can be truthful and admit that you wish you had been part of it. Of course, the result is you drop the URL into an email and send it off to the next person.
This viral nature helped Archibald Ingall Stretton in the UK push social networking and multimedia messaging into a frenzy for mobile & broadband service provider O2. To participate, people entered their unique invite code on the website Thinkyourepopular.com and attempted to persuade as many people as possible to join their guest list. The prize? A private party with Moby and 1,500 of your best friends at the IndigO2 arena. The brilliant part is the primary campaign medium is the O2 product, mobile messaging; all other media are focused on driving this mobile frenzy. The result was a race to get to a 1,500 person list, which occurred within two weeks. Over 4,000 lists were created in that short period, with over 100,000 people participating.
Agency website:
http://www.aislondon.com/Work/IndigO2/
2. It seems we are in the middle of a re-fusion of media and creative as disciplines. New tools developed do not sit easily in either the media or creative camp. For instance, is linking YouTube and Twitter together a creative idea or a media idea? Does it matter? How does that integrate with the brand’s website? Does a brand need a website?
For instance, Skittles sent all their content into the computing cloud. Photos were uploaded to Flickr, videos on Youtube, postings on Facebook, Tweets on Twitter…and all linked from a simple page-over found at Skittles.com. Is it media? Is it creative? Is it saving money on servers? It really doesn’t matter but the point is that the Internet has become the unifying force for creative and media. Now more than ever, creative and media need to brainstorm together with a tech-savvy person acting as a catalyst.
3. Finally, we have always kept the notion that the brand belongs to the consumer, even if we talked about our brand assets and developed interruptive media occasions. However, have a look at Polyvore.com. This website aggregates brands and retailers as content to be married willy nilly together, serving fashion aficionados’ desire to mix and match to their heart’s content. But the main activity is not so much between consumer and brand but between consumer and consumer as they build ‘fashion sets’ to share with their friends. Even further, many of these sets are based on consumer choices for movie stars and singers. Then each item in the set is traced back to the retail source for purchase.
4. I lied, here is the final thought. Is Mayor Miller’s Twittering to 5,654 followers a media choice for an uncalled election, or is it part of the mayoralty infrastructure?
