Category: media

honda civic spot

confessions of a pixel pusher internet marketing media

a nice spot from W+K London for Honda.

As a flash player movie. The usual sad story:

I think the concept is brilliant.

It got implemented alright, although not appropiately: I am not sure about that the frozen car in the middle for instance).
Imagine for a few seconds what Frank Budgen would have done with this spot.

I like that they did a 120 again. Of course by now it’s the trend:
cog, hate, bravia: they all use the new format at least in the time dimension.

Aside-1: Nobody really used the freedom of aspect ratio yet. It always takes years for people to understand and use change.

Aside-2: I hope that they get it and make decent cinema commercials out of these overlong web edits. All of them would work great. Did the Bravia have a cinema media buy?

Then they have ‘viral’ intentions. And that’s usually when things fall down. Sony thought they needed to put things into a zip file for Bravia. Lame. W+K has an IP address and a flash player for the movie. YouTube and google also use this player.

It is a shame that Apple messed up and was unable to put quicktime in this place. Now we have to live with the wrong flat color and weird resizing artefacts. And with the fact that its’ tricky to download.

Google video:

I thought they would not get it all. It gets slowly better. Of course nobody will ever buy any contentfrom them. I think that Apple and Google are in for a surprise: there is no 2 dollar clip market.

Maybe G&A think that if you can make billions with ringtones that you might be able to monetize something a bit more meaningful like clips. I am not an expert on the ringtones thing, but isn’t it that it’s somewhat tricky to get free ringtones? The default costs money. Clips are different. There is ample free content.

Which is where google video starts to become better. I like that you can copy paste links:

THAT is something that W+K should have done for their “Viral”.
It’s easy and it respects the laws and dynamics of the internet.

Maybe next time. Or in five years. Ideas take time.

update:
there is a quicktime / mpeg4 Version that looks so much better.

update2:
There is also an iTunes video cast Version with a 3 part “making of”. Maybe that campaign has more depth than was initially visible from that one link I found everywhere.

update3:
it work’s
digg, del.icio.us the whole nine yards. I am sure boingboing will follow. They are late these days.

vilodex the wiki

confessions of a pixel pusher internet media

vilodex has a wiki now

In theory this might be a good idea. What comes from it we will see.

buy and destroy

internet media

the independent writes about MySpace, Murdoch and YouTube

He paid 0.6 Billion for the site. Then he started altering content secretly. At least thats what the article says. If that is true and should continue, then I am very very curious how long it would take for a competitor to come up with a different site.

Yes, there is the ‘power of default’, and how many kids do really care about this kind of cheating from Murdochs side? Interesting question. It will show much of “Web 2.0” will be left once the big money interests are done with it.

the chain of events;

1. Some service is what people want and becomes huge
2. Somebody arrives in a Learjet and drops billions
variation MySpace:
3. Corpogreed kicks in, and the the very asset that they bought for all that money evaporates
my desired outcome:
4. People show this kind of behaviour the finger. They go somewhere else, and the person
in (2.) bought a really expensive domain name. Like “broadcast.com”

We will see.
The article ends with the mentioning that Murdoch gave Jeremy Philips 1 Billion US$ for future acquisitions. He is 31 and head of News Corp internet strategy or something. Bubble Bubble Bubble.

push push push

internet media technology

CES breaks loose in Las Vegas, and a big and involuntarily sigh of relief escapes me:

“Finally some content for the internet”

Video! Great, from Google; Music from the lovely M&M combo via ‘Urage’.

It got kind of boring out here on the net. All those TV episodes
and music files to pay for is what was missing. Now I realize.

And if you have a Windows PC, then you can have not only Microsoft
and anybody in Russia with an IQ above 87 on your machine. No,
also Google can be part of the party on your hard drive now:

With the aptly named GooglePack comes GoogleUpdate which will
provide you update versions of anything that they think might be good
for you.

cinema commericals

confessions of a pixel pusher history media

In this recent ars technica article the author writes that cinema commercials grossed 315 Million US in 2003. Which would make it the 3rd biggest movie of that year. Right between Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean. Sounds big, of course. But when you sum up the ten biggest movies then you get close to 2 Billion. It’s fair to say that movie theatres ruin everybodies experience for less a fraction of their income.

Let me say that I made good money with cinema commericals: Software that I wrote for a “Solitaire” Film Recorder provided plenty of content for the european cinema market in the nineties. Mostly commmericals. A cinema commercial can actually a decent piece of entertainment. It’s just that most of them are not. The worst is always when a quick edited TV commercial gets pushed into the cinema. Mostly out of media buy consideration: “Let’s get that cinema demographic”. This afterthought shows: The content is not meant to be seen on the ‘big screen’ and that causes troubles that will ruin everybodies experience. You can not sell things when the whole presentation looks like junk.

The overall ‘junkification’ of the cinema experience will cost the more and more viewers. Which is a shame.
A decent cinema can provide amazing images and sound. I still prefer to see a movie in a decent Theatre.
Just that they are hard to find these days.

this is all it takes

internet media

What the current Pirate Bay looks like. More than 800K registered users. One rack that makes the RIAA and MPAA cringe.

iTunes and vilodex

internet media

update:

simply click on this link.
Works with Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X 10.4.3 and iTunes 6.0.1

Before I thought this was slick:

Again it is so easy:

1. Open iTunes
2. Select “Subcribe to Podcast …” from the “Advanced” menu. ( it really is simple)
3. copy paste:


http://www.vilodex.com/freshvideo.xml

into the window and hit “ok”

Now your computer will make sure that you always have all the latest vilodex videos.
Never have to wait for a download again.

Those videos could be downloaded to an iPod, but they don’t have to.
The files can be found under your home directory:

Music
iTunes
iTunes Music
Podcasts
vilodex

or you copy paste this into a terminal window:

open Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/Podcasts/vilodex/

to get a finder window.

make your own posters

internet marketing media

National Geographic had a nice idea.

HP or Canon or any color printer manufacturer should have done this a long time ago. Before yhey should have given you a DVD with lots and lots of images in super high resolution and a decent and fast way of browsing them. Gets you in the habbit of spreading that ink generously. But no, good ole NG had to come up with this one. And it might never dawn on Canon and Co what they are missing out on.

Beats me why HP has not signed deal with deviantart for instance.

Box office year 2005

communication daily life economy marketing media

It has been a bad year for the US movie box office.

Now everybody jumps to conclusions. Me too. Of course the theatre owners point to everything but themselves. I think they share much of the responsibility for their demise.

People stop going to the movies, and theatre owners blame the bad Hollywood product for it. Maybe they should buy some diversity instead. Maybe -gulp- they should take some risk? Only few theatres have more character than a chain restaurant. Most of them are generic as it comes. And then they show dismal ads.

Cinema also lost the arms race in quality: For the average consumer the picture at home can look as good as it does in the cinema. And this is mostly pre HD DVD we are talking about. The audio at home already is as much 5.1 as it can be in a cinema. Plus that the volume will be always right, and there is no talking person next to you. Or if there should be then that is your own choice, and there is always the pause button.

During the 50s TV took away the cinemas monopoly of showing moving images. Colored movies got a boost from this, but Hollywood and the theatres went one step further: They changed their own format to widescreen. This was costly for production and theatres. But seperated the movi experience from the pale 4 by 3 Black and white TV set. Content adopted to what worked well in cinema. Some Movie genres surrendered to “I Love Lucy” and the likes,
new ones like the Cinemascope Western thrived.

Nothing like this happens right now. The movie theatres have the same whinning tone that we heard from the recording industry for years. They seem equally unable to adopt. Media habbits are changing. Games, DVDs, Internet are booming.

Just like the recording industry the Theatres blame piracy for their demise. Which is the classical looser argument. It’s not going anywhere. It does not help to search your audience for camcorders.

Theatres would have a chance though: They could make movie going an experience. Something that is fun and cool. With bad projection, bad seats and dirty theatres you will loose against any big screen TV. If movie theatres don’t make the show an event again, then they will go away. With the advent of color TVs in the early 70s many cinemas in Europe started showing porn in their struggle. I don’t think that this strategy would help US theatres right now.

If (young) people would start dressing up to go out and to the movies then theatres would have a market that nobody could take away from them. People want to celebrate an evening. Current multiplex generic mall type popcorn outlets are not the right offering for this.

xbox 360 and King Kong

media technology

It’s called gamma stupid.

Funny that this kind of simple thing can happen. But then again you never know how much of the real issue is left once the BBC got a a hold of it.