Not sure, how new this site is, but poptent.net looks rather interesting. It’s a site for connecting brands with freelance videographers:
Poptent is the best place for independent and freelance videographers to build their portfolios, connect with companies and brands for commercial work. Here you will find the best and brightest up and coming creative minds in the business. Hire them. Collaborate with them. Join them. We’re building a crowdsourcing revolution and we want you to be a part of it. Become part of our community by clicking the JOIN NOW button.
It looks like some form of agency 2.0, and at the same time it raises the same debate that comes up when brands ask for creative submissions without guaranteeing a reward for every submission. Videocreators get the chance of having their video selected by a well known brand, yet they risk loosing their initial investment (time&money) if their video isn’t selected. And the brand gets a range of creations to choose from without having to pay for every single one.
Here is an example of a current project, asking for video content for snickers:
You know Snickers®, that unique, delicious, and substantial combination of peanuts, chocolate, caramel and nougat.
This assignment is to develop video content starring Snickers®. They are looking for either traditional ‘commercials’ or pass-along (viral) videos — original, authentic and entertaining Snickers® content which consumers will pass along, and use as inspiration for their own content creation.
Your challenge is to be creative, so don’t just follow the approach of previous Snickers® campaigns. You can either:
• Produce a fun, engaging traditional :30 second commercial
• Or produce a pass-along (viral) video of about :30 seconds in length …you choose
Your creative ‘bulls eye’ is males age 18-34. Snickers® has played a memorable role in ‘guy culture,’ with a long and celebrated history as the ‘go-to-bar’ for satisfying hunger.
You could earn $5,000 for each video they purchase or one of the $2000in guaranteed awards. Register below and read the Creative Brief for all the details and some more delicious inspiration.
$5.000 doesn’t sound like much to me, but I guess it depends on what they want to do with it.
You know it’s getting closer to a years end, when people start forecasting trends for the following year. This time it’s really early. It’s only the beginning of November and the first selection of six trends is already online.
David Armano writes about these 6 trends:
Social Media begins to look less social: as more people contribute ever more content on social networks, updates-fatigue sets in and people filter out other users for reduction of clutter. I agree, and I would like to add: social media will have less farmville and mafia wars…
Corporations look to scale: companies leveraging social technology to better serve customers, e.g. Best Buys Twelpforce
Social Business becomes social play: playful social (mobile) applications with a competitive component for users are used for (local) marketing.
Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced): the title says it all.
Mobile becomes a social media lifeline: Due to the IT departments locking down social sites, people will increasingly turn to their smartphones during (or instead of) coffee breaks.
Sharing no longer means e-mail: Well, that is kind of obvious in times of facebook and twitter…
Fascinating idea, even though against advertising, I can sympathize with it:
New York City is covered with illegal billboards and advertisements. One random day, civilians decided to take back the public space by covering over 120 illegal billboards with original works of art.
Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy UK spoke on TED Global about the value of the intangible, and how advertising helps create that value:
Highly entertaining, as usual for Rory. Having worked with Rory in a brainstorming some time ago, when I still worked at Ogilvy, I can tell you: he really is that entertaining. The story about how to make the train ride between London and Paris any more enjoyable I already heard back then, it’s a classic…
For the rest of that talk: I do believe that we’re now living in a world of mass produced commodities, no matter what you buy, the added value almost always lies within the imagined value that you yourself (with the little help of stories created by advertising as well as socially networked word-of-mouth) asign to your individual brand experience…
Martin Oetting – sorry, Dr. Martin Oetting, as of a short while ago (congratulations!), just published a reference to his newly released thesis: ripple effect (How Empowered Involvement Drives Word of Mouth). The link leads to a page with a small „social media release“, which includes a PDF with a short summary (in German), a video interview, etc.
The key question triggering this whole study was: „how can marketing leverage word-of-mouth for products and brands?“
The answer, in short: empowered involvement, by offering choice and meaning, leveraging consumer competence, allowing for real impact by the target audience. The long answer: buy the book 😉
Here is the video interview with Dr. Martin Oetting (in German):
A guy named gary has produced a widget which demonstrates in „real time“ the explosion of the social web. As you can see below, the rate of new content and interaction on the various social sites and applications is enormous! He writes about it:
I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009.
Wo ich sonst so bin...