Here's a list of Kate Modern links, party to help me make sense of everything:
On Bebo:
The cast:
- Kate
- Charlie
- Gavin
- Tariq
Fan site:
Production team
On Youtube
Press
- Lonely Girl sought for profitable relationship - The Times
July 2007 Archives
I've finally taken the plunge and registered on Bebo - just so I could keep an eye on Kate Modern, the new venture from the team behind Lonelygirl15, the famous, or perhaps infamous YouTube character.
Kate Modern kicked off on the 16th July, so it's early days yet. As I understand it, the idea is that videos will be posted on YouTube whilst the creator(s) will hang out as fictional persona on Bebo.
So far we have one short video on YouTube, the mysterious Fight and Flight. That video is posted as a response to another video, We Have A Plan, which in a somewhat breathless way is setting up the whole drama... I got as far as something about how we need to manufacture a serum from the girls' blood before thinking that perhaps I should get on with some proper work.
To add to the post-modern layers, the production team at Lonelygirl15 are posting their own commentary to KateModern's videos: this includes comments like:
"This video was uploaded and then taken down within a minute. It was then put back on for a brief period of time, then taken down after about an hour. When it was posted the second and third time, some people claimed that the video quality was significantly improved."
All a bit silly - but then again, I have spent about half an hour zipping around on the various levels of this, so perhaps I am getting slowly sucked into the narrative.
Meanwhile, my only friends on Bebo are fictional characters, which makes me a pretty sad person!
Tucked away in the Guardian Media diary this morning is a little story about Jeremy Vine, who gave out his email address on Panorama and asked for viewers to email through their feedback. Grand total of responses: one.
Interaction is such a buzzword these days, but logically there has to be a limit to the number of things we are prepared to interact with. And if Panorama doesn't make the cut, what chance to most brands have?
I'm loving the new National Gallery campaign - The Grand Tour - which has, with beautiful simplicity, taken its art out onto the streets of central London. The campaign is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and comes with its own Flickr group.
Amazingly, most of these pictures seem to have survived being stolen or vandalised - perhaps the art really is having a civilising effect on us all.
This Manet is hanging outside the front door of the Harvest Digital office.
Here's the card describing the picture - with a nice link to an audio tour you can access via your mobile.
And finally, a sense of what some of these pictures have to compete with in terms of a typical London street scene - this is the main entrance of what used to be the Regent Palace Hotel, near Piccadilly Circus. You'd like to think that the National Gallery provides a slightly less cluttered visual backdrop for their paintings!
Some informative presentations at "Christmas in July", netimperative's seminar on online retail today. And a classic bit of marketing jargon from Bruce Fair, Commercial Director at Yahoo! Marketplace who managed to keep a straight face whilst suggesting that online retailers should:
- Diversify marketing mix to complete a 360° tier 1 ad strategy
Can't wait to slip that bullet point into one of my presentations - preferably one that someone else is going to present!
Continue reading Jargon in July.
P>... is the topic I have for a session at Ad:tech London on the 27th September.
I'm doing 30 minutes on the achingly trendy subject of 'how to integrate web 2.0 opportunities into your marketing strategy'.
It's impossible not to be impressed and excited about the rise in social networking sites in particular and we are certainly thinking very hard about if and how they can be used to help achieve marketing goals. I know all the arguments about invasion of personal space, but speaking personally, I'm not especially offended by having advertising on my Facebook profile page. Would I like it to be better targeted to me? I don't think I have a problem with that either.
On the other hand, we do have a tendency to be seduced by the latest shiny new thing. From a media perspective, I'm a big fan of boring old buys on the big portals or networks - fantastic reach, great brand association, normally pretty good results. The social networks might have the page impressions, but that doesn't of itself mean they will automatically be great choices for all advertisers.
I went to Shiny Media's Brands and Blogs seminar on on Friday.
It's great to see that the blogging debate has finally moved on from stories about how powerful blogs are at destroying brands - not a positive argument to take to a marketing director. One theme that many speakers on Friday returned to was how blogs can deliver a good platform for online media.
The Guardian, B5 Media, Glam and of course Shiny Media themselves are all attempting to create blog channels which can be attractive to advertisers. I'm slightly sceptical about some of the arguments delivered from the stage: I paraphrase a little, but there was a sense of "We're delivering a highly targeted audience, so of course our CPMs should be $20 or so". Out in the chilly world of media buying, the truth is that your CPMs can be whatever you want them to be - but if the media doesn't deliver conversions at volume, you're going to struggle to stay on any plan.
I was also wondering about the status of the blogger in all this grand new world of aggregated blogs. Essentially many of these companies are offering bloggers a way to monetize their work in a way that they would struggle to do themselves (away from the easy embrace of Google Adsense I guess).
But isn't all this just a bit reminiscent of the relationship between the record industry and its stars? The Marillion reference in my title is of course to the dreadful prog rock band (only hit, the uber-dreary "Kayleigh") who pioneered a new online relationship with their audience long before Myspace brought us the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. Marillion were dumped by their record company, but acquired a (presumably quite small) database of the email addresses of their fan base. An email appeal to their fans raised enough money for them to release a further album, Marillion.com. Last.fm has the whole story.
Perhaps I'm a hopeless dreamer, but couldn't individual bloggers find a way to market without needing to wrap up their wares into an aggregated site. At the final reckoning, will the world belong to middlemen like record companies or blog aggregators - or to individual bloggers and 'creative artists' like Marillion?