What's Next In Marketing

Campfire: Blair Witch to The Art Of The Heist

Great article in Fast Company about Campfire, the firm that put together the amazing campaigns for Sega (Beta-7) and Audi (The Art of The Heist).

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/open_rabbit-hole.html

What most folks don't know is that these guys are also the folks behind the famous movie The Blair Witch Project.

It's very interesting to read about how they go about crafting these stories, and the convergence of old shcool storytelling techniques and the leveraging on today's technology to help tell the story and develop word of mouth.

Saw this article today.

Survey: Internet Users Ready For Web-Over-TV http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=40478&Nid=18809&p=289720

Also took a look a Veoh.com, which is a new app which allows for users to download (to an itunes like library) and play (on demand) video content in broadcast quality.

As we move more and more quickly towards broadband delivery of content, and more and more quickly towards a lot of this content being viewed on demand through commercial skipping devices, where do ads fit in?

This is one of those areas where advertisers, and their agencies, really need to experiment. Play around with these new technologies. Get used to them. Learn how consumers are going to use them. It's part of What's Next.

Podcasting

There is an article from Adweek that highlights the fact that Podcasting, while growing quickly, is still a relatively insignificant part of the media landscape.

And advertising on podcasts, "is in its infancy to put it mildly," says Mike Chapman, eMarketer editorial director, who authored the report. "Podcasting is not set to become a new mass-market venue, at least for the next half decade. By way of comparison, U.S. broadcast radio still reaches close to 200 million Americans," he said.

Ah, but they miss the point. Radio is a mass reach vehicle (with the ability to slightly target), while Podcasting is much, much more narrowcasting to a specific audience. If a Podcast only has 1000 listeners, but they are loyal, passionate followers of a certain topic (and willing to spread the gospel), how much would it worth to reach them?

A Short Film About What's Next

Here's a really clever, fictional, sometimes funny, film (about eight minutes) about the future of "media". It's a little more about news media than marketing, but there are some interesting parallels.

http://epic.lightover.com/

User-Generated Video

Cory Treffiletti is SVP, Engagement Architect at Carat Fusion, one of my agency's media partners. Here's a great posting he wrote on What's Next with consumer generated media: video.

http://publications.mediapost.com/?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=38586