Ideas on advertising, creativity, online marketing and the web
brought to you by Armando Alves,
an Interactive Ninja from Portugal.
Here goes one more online political marketing post. Pro-Obama, of course.
As if it wasn’t enough that BarackObama.com rocks, will.i.am teamed up with agency Syrup and builded a site where Obama supporters can join in to momentum.
The same way the video came to life, the website is counting on crowdsourcing and UGC, by uploading photos with name and location into the music video, or tagging their Flickr photos with “hopeactchange”, and create a mosaic visualization.
Yes We Can.
DNTEL, Marié Digby, Swizz, The Blakes and The Raveonettes inspired other like minded directors to create 5 music videos, with color as the main concept. The result is a website with a solid work on the sharing features, linking to goodies such as interviews, making-off and FREE MP3s.
So, for my portuguese friends that were tonight at The Raveonettes concert, here’s the sound of black and white:
Source: Adrants
At least online, with Arrotes.com.br, a new site by Almap BBDO for Pepsi Twist.
Using Text-To-Speech technology, the site allows you to type a sentence, that is burped after a educational pre-roll video. Gross, isn’t it? I’ll guess you won’t even bother to try it. Not enough? You can burp-a-friend too.
If you’re really “twisted”, why don’t you search for “burp” on YouTube? Guaranteed to make you sick after the first 10 videos.
Source: Brainstorm#9
How about a LCD Soundsystem powered lava lamp? Well, that’s exactly what Park Studio did for Nokia Trends Lab.
The site has some groovy music visualizations, using the Actionscript 3 SoundMixer class. And altough i don’t understand a word of Russian, it seems to be a localized version of the global Nokia Trends Lab, “a physical and virtual hub of mobility experiences”.
I’m feeling rather lazy to write a decent post, so here’s a load of links:
Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfXb6zb6Upc
Source:Marc Andreessen
Just don’t take the headline serious, since it’s a dark humor European no smoking campaign.
And just in case i’m still feeling lazy on Monday, i can always use the services of The Excused Absence Network.
Lucky bastards these folks. Four groups of friends started a journey from Tarifa (Spain) to Murmansk (Russia) with no idea whatsoever of their track and only with 1.400Euros on their pockets.
The 12 spanish backpackers are documenting their journey of a lifetime on blogs (Group Uno, Dos, Tres, Quatro), sharing their experiences and allowing others to comment to help them along.
One of the journey videos, uploaded by Group One
With one of my friends doing the same kind of trip on his own (hope you’re doing well Pedro), i wish he could send updates so often as these groups. Blogs are becoming one of the favorite ways to keep connected, thanks to today’s easy publishing of video and text. Although this trip is co-sponsored by Bacardi, i believe that the tourism industry (in Portugal the most) would greatly benefit if they started to provide digital platforms so their clients could share their holiday memories.
URL: www.murmanskroutebacardi.com
Client: Bacardi
Agency: Seisgrados
To refresh our daily creativity, it’s always helpful to have a different perspective, such as to change our online video diet. Here are some fine selected resources that are guaranteed to ignite your creative sparkle.
Some of the videos are really worth keeping for future reference, so get the Firefox extensions DownloadThemAll and DownloadHelper to easily save them.
If you care to browse for a while and ignore the game trailers you can bum into the original 1932 Nosferatu, The Kid with Charlie Chaplin, What To Do In A Zombie Attack or something more surrealistic such as Un Chien Andalou by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. As many of the movies have keywords and descriptions, it’s easier to find a movie on a particular subject.
From Brazil, a premium selection of movies available on the web. Recent additions include It’s a Wonderful Life by Frank Capra, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins or Sicko by Michael Moore.
One of my favorites, with several awarded short movies and with careful chosen content (heck, they even feature Arcade Fire) . Warning: be generous on the bandwidth.
Each year the world’s most brilliant minds gather at Monterey, inviting speakers such as Al Gore, Richard Branson, Steven Levitt, Steven Pinker and many others discussing themes ranging from Technology to Global Issues. The videos are later posted live, but with such passion from the speakers it’s as if we were there.
There’s more at UbuWeb than meets the eye, so when you land on the film section you could spend days wondering around the video works of acknowledged directors or artists such as Orson Welles, Dziga Vertov, Marcel Duchamp or Ginsberg.
A digest in motion design and animation, where you can find works by renowned studios such as Blur, Lobo, Imaginary Forces or Psyop. And even if a picture is worth a thousand words, they also have great content.
The video podcast of MakeZine, it’s a somewhere between a video tutorial channel and a crazy professor showroom.
Learn how to program in Arduino, make a ring out of a coin or build a Grocery Propelled Vehicle on a Weekend Project .Pretty cool if you ask me.
One of the first “weblebreties”, the man really knows how to entertain. Having seen him live, my best compliment would be to regard Ze as the “Buster Keaton of the web”.
South Park, Daily Show with John Stewart, Sarah Silverman. ‘Nugh said.
So, what’s your excuse for still watching home made videos on YouTube?
Al Gore’s Internet TV project is launching their new beta version at beta.current.com, with new features that should keep them a close competitor to Joost but also Youtube.
The biggest change seems to be (one more) social network, with the option to connect to other users with similar tastes or share your uploaded content with friends.
The beta version still lacks some of the quality content of parent site Current.tv such as Google Current, but with the ability to build a network of friends and a crowdsourcing community filter, it stands as one of the most serious competitors to YouTube, and a much safer harbor to brands.
One of the most interesting features on current.com are viewpoints, a place where users can record (via webcam) their opinion on topics such as climate change, stem cells or Iraq. Talk about digital democracy :)
CurrentTV strategy of filtering the best content but providing the community the tools to foster creativity might be just the right way to go in today’s video overloaded landscape. Let’s hope they manage to blend it right with the parent site.
Nice to know that portuguese brands are spreading some link love to from national bloggers. Rather than the usual top 100 blogs, the portuguese brewery, is awarding the best portuguese blog with €3000.
From the site:
“Super Bock Super Blog Awards are a tribute to you and all those who celebrate every day the portuguese language and the freedom of speech, helping to create a new Internet, a Web 2.0. Let’s make our own blog party in Portugal, awarding the importance of this (…) platform”.
“With this initiative, Super Bock intends to promote the best Blogs, and invite all portuguese to be part of our national online identity”
There’s not much of a chance for me to win, since they only allow portuguese written blogs. Go figure.
Anyway, if you’re a portuguese blogger, go ahead and register your blog.
