Lightning in a Bottle is in a week, and i have no time to write anything else, but check out this issue of the Artist Network. it’s all about stories so that’ll absolutely keep you entertained in the meantime. i will get back to having time to be more insightful after may 28th.
thank you to y2, brian shaw, albertico, and arin ingraham. it’s always an honor and pleasure to get to create inspiration with you.
the ad in this case is the overall concept and execution of this whole thing. not just the video below.
Adidas Originals Left To Right:To celebrate the iconic Superstar shoe, Adidas Originals produced a pair of giant sized exact replicas. Housed in separate studios, they invited friends and artists at Surface2Air and Upper Playground to celebrate their own originality by customizing the huge sneakers – the right shoe for the East Coast and the left shoe for the West Coast. For three days, the artists’ collectives and upon completion, the shoes were put on a flat bed truck and the two parties set off to meet in Venice Beach, CA. The showdown on the boardwalk drew L.A.’s finest “originals.”
Lucent Dossier’s first night as the house band circus at the Edison goes down tomorrow night.
The Edison is re-introducing and reinventing the spirit of cabaret. Reminiscent of Paris and Berlin of the early 20’s, Wednesday nights the venue is transformed into an exploration of the past — a peek into the decadent, sensuous underbelly of historic LA.
with an inadvertently steampunk twist.
ps. the edison’s site is just completely kiler! such a fantastic, immersive online experience. and if all of that doesn’t go to show how well-rounded this place’s kickassness is, Thursdays from 5-7 you can get martinis for .35 cents! what what!
shot and produced by the kicakss siouxzen kang, and featuring an unreleased glitch mob track! if this doesn’t make you wanna go, you’re probably not someone who likes FUN!
This whole thing Radiohead’s doing, encouraging remixes of its songs is way clever.
To make remixing easy, the separate ’stems’ from the song are available to purchase from iTunes. The ’stems’ available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. You can mix them in any way you like, either by adding your own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.
The public will listen and vote for their favourite remix (voting ends May 1st). You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be counted as ‘mix votes’ back on radioheadremix.com. Radiohead will listen to the best remixes.
Once upon a time the product and the ad for the product were completely separate entities. Then content itself began to do double duty as the promotional unit. Now it’s the direct personal experience with the content that can become its own promotion. It’s not just Radiohead pushing their song anymore. Everyone who creates a remix of the song, creates their own personal experience with it, is now involved in generating more exposure for it.
Culture no longer fits all that well into the role of a packaged good (if it ever did). Now there is more and more opportunity–and reason–to approach cultural content as a raw material, one used in the construction of expression.
PS. Go treat your ears to the ESKMO REMIX.
LIB06:
an immobile little flash dookiy embedded in the site:
up close it looked like this:
at the time we thought it was quite the snazz.
LIB07:
we figured this kind of media thingie shouldn’t be trapped on our site, so we created a “portable” popup player that you could launch on our site, and then take along with you on your web travels:
the other cool thing about this portable online player is that it linked back to the LIB site, allowing peolpe to return with one click at any time.
and that was fine and dandy until…
LIB08:
we made the music player embeddable! now not only does it move (it still comes in popup form, that you can grab on the site), but it also rolls over, fetches, and sits wherever you tell it to:
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oh yeah, and it also let’s people passs it on too :). (tho if you happen to be seeing this in a feedreader, you prolly won’t see it. to see–or rather, hear what i’m talking about click HERE.)
(thanks to brian shaw and y2 for making this fancy thing happen! our widget don’t mess!)
Have you seen these billboards?
They’re all over the place:
Been wondering what the hell that’s all about, maybe?
Well, answer #1 goes like this:
Hope people have been seeing the billboards that I have put up around town. I think its important everyone knows how much Sarah Marshall SUCKS! How she does look fat in those jeans! How my mom never liked her! How over her I am!
So, I used the money that I spent on her engagement ring to buy every available billboard around town. (That’s right Sarah I was going to propose to you. I was just waiting for the right time. I guess that time is never O’clock in the month of Nev-ruary).
Sarah, I really hope you are un-happy for the rest of your life – that you understand how totally over you I am.
That said, you should call me if you want to talk, I can have these things taken down.
Answer #2 goes like this:
While driving home I saw a billboard that read “You Suck Sarah Marshall”. At the bottom of the message I saw the URL www.ihatesarahmarshall.com so when I got home I jumped on my computer and checked out the website. [It’s] a blog that is currently being written by a loved obsessed 26 year old guy who is YouTubing videos about how infatuated he is with his hot TV star girlfriend.
Well, as it turns out this website is the launch of a new marketing campaign for a movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall“. I have no idea if this movie is any good although it is brought to us by the guys who gave us the 40 Year Old Virgin. On a quick side note I can not recall seeing the R rated warning on the billboard but if I had I would have known right away it was a movie.
The point of this post is to point out the way this movie is being marketed. They are utilizing a combination of vague yet somewhat shocking billboard ads to drive people to a Google Blog thats incorporating YouTube videos as a way to create buzz. It should be interesting to see how it works out.
And answer #3 goes like this:
At OMMA a few weeks ago the theme was “Welcome to the Machine.” All the panels and presentations were framed around the question: How to prepare for the kind of dubious advertising that would be in store in the “Machine”-mediated future? (At least that’s what I think the theme was supposed to mean.)
The model for creating advertising has, in general, been pretty conglomerative. The media department buys the adspace, the creative department puts stuff in the adspace, the “new media” department does….who knows what, and the whole process is as compartmentalized as an assembly line. You know, it’s funny. There’s now hypersonic sound technology, which can be used to literally beam audio ads DIRECTLY at individuals in its path, yet we still insist on referring to the internet as “new media.” And that kind of segregated perspective may be part of the problem.
In strict media buy terms all that’s going on in the IHSM campaign is a grip of outdoor and a domain name, you could even say that ihatesarahmarshall.com is a kind of “microsite” I suppose, or maybe an “adverblog,” but are any of those elements individually responsible for the effectiveness of the campaign? While there’s certainly no shortage of ads out there that make a play on our curiosity, the IHSM billboards are the first that immediately struck me as possesing a deliberate, blatant, “What the hell is that about? Oh, I’ll just check it out on my iPhone,” quality.
There’s now more and more people carrying the internet around in their pocket. What does that mean in terms of how we approach Mobile, Online, Experiential, Outdoor, or Out-of-home media–all together! Then multiply all of that by the coefficient of search.
Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently went to Japan and noticed an interesting trend in advertising there: search boxes have replaced URLs.
Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!
An ARG–which stands for Alternate Reality Game–is defined as: “An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.” Which could also serve as both a philosophical definition for marketing in general, and a more advanced version of what the I Hate Sarah Marshall campaign has started to touch on in a very basic, accessible way. The opportunity is now there to create advertising that works not by managing to take our attention hostage for an instant, but because it’s able to move between media the same way that our attention does.
“Integration” may be getting primed to become the next “viral” when it comes to overabused industry buzzwords, but it’s more than just a trendy new widget. The next phase is not about defeating some monolithic “Machine.” It’s about figuring out: How do we create messages that cater to the way technology lets us interact with all different media? Meanwhile, the paint-by-numbers, assembly-line approach is still trying to figure out which department’s responsibility it is to come up with the answer.
May 23-26, 2008
Issue #4: Winter 2008 ~ Music & Visual Effects
