The film 10 MPH chronicles the story of two friends and aspiring filmmakers that ditch soul-sucking cubicle jobs to claim a more fulfilling life by making a film about a cross-country journey by Segway. The filmmakers--Josh Caldwell and Hunter Weeks--are DIY all the way. So it makes sense that they've decided to open up their distribution channel to the Radiohead "pay what you want" model. I just sent the pair $5.00 …
Use Of Catchy Song Nabs Student A Trip To L.A.
Stuart Elliot took an interest in the consumer generated ad for Apple that led the brand's agency to do a broadcast quality remake. (The original verison is shown above.) “I was sitting on the bus and I got this e-mail on my phone,” Nick Haley, a native of Warwick, England, said in an interview last week from the University of Leeds, where he is a “fresher,” or first-year student. The message said, “‘We represent …
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Score One For The Freaks
W+K hosted an event last week called Ignite Portland. A bunch of people stood up and spoke for five minutes on a variety of topics. I selected the one above because Keith Gerr looks as interesting as he sounds. When he's not appearing on YouTube, he's running Kemo Active, a brand actualization and invigoration consultancy. …
Ideas Don’t Grow On Trees
L.A. Times is reporting on a looming strike by 12,000 members of Writers Guild of America, the union representing writers in the motion picture, broadcast, cable and new media. Writers maintain they were shortchanged years ago, when they agreed to a discounted pay formula for home video sales, only to see that business flourish. They currently receive about 5 cents for every DVD sold. And they're determined not to …
Dentsu’s Mad Man Called Out
Catharine P. Taylor points us to this salacious story in BusinessWeek: The former creative director of the U.S. arm of Japan's largest advertising agency sued the company Wednesday, saying he was duped into visiting a brothel and pressured to engage in other sexually explicit activities on company outings across the world and then was fired after he complained. In a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages filed in U.S. …
The A-Word
Steve Rubel reminds Web 2.0 firms of a harsh truth they may not want to face. Nearly every online start-up you can think of is basing their business model on advertising. It's as if your digital budgets are a bottomless pot of money with more than enough to go around for everyone. Ask any of them how they plan to stay solvent and they all fire off the "a-word" - advertising. ...the harsh reality is that there will …
Developing Without A Conscience
Marketers spend too little (if any) time considering the manufacturing process behind the brand. Which is a mistake. Our job is to find the essential truth in the product and reveal it in a powerful way to the public. But what if the truth is horrible? What if the truth is unlawful child labor practices? What if the truth is environmental and community degradation? And so on... Manufactured Landscapes, a feature …
Have Content, Will Travel
Speaking at a conference this week, Beth Comstock, president of NBC Universal Integrated Media, said this a "golden age" of media. "It's a great thing to be a content company in the digital age," she said. "Content is always going to win." She also said media technologies can be considered mainstream once 40% of houses adopt them. That means video-game consoles, just over 40% by her account, are already mainstream …
