Archive for media
How Can Small Photo Agencies Compete With The New Web-Based Image Libraries?
Posted by: | CommentsThe very broad and pervasive emergence of web-based image sharing marketplaces (such as photo sharing sites and online free photo archives) has rapidly revolutionized the traditional photo agency market making it increasingly difficult for the many small picture and photography agencies to compete with the many free image sharing alternatives and powerful web-based stock image services available today out there. Photo credit: Maxim Kulemza Finding images with the help of the Internet has become such a different activity from what many advertisers and publishers have known for many years. Instead of having to stand in front of a light table checking out hundreds of 35mm slides to select the few that fit the assignment, today picture editors and independent writers …
Product placement presents consumer products, brand names and locations to film and television production teams for inclusion in their projects. The goal is the one of raising brand awareness while selling the idea to movie production houses as a “clever” way to reduce their costs while providing greater “authenticity” to the environments and characters shown.
“Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games and books, and is a relatively new idea (first appearing in the 1980’s). Product placement occurs with the inclusion of a brand’s logo, or a favorable mention or appearance of a product. This is done without disclosure, and under the premise that it is a natural part of the work. Most major movie releases today contain product placements.”
(Source: Wikipedia)
Photo credit: Brand Exposure
As a matter of fact, relative to the high cost of ‘above the line’ media, where both producing commercials and booking media space require huge money investments, product placement inside commercial films is a highly cost-effective way to gain huge exposure and visibility at a fraction of the traditional advertising costs.
Indeed, product placement inside movies have been around for at least as long as Hollywood has, but it never before has been as influential and powerful as it is now.
Old staples such as compelling narratives and artful film-making are increasingly taking a back seat to the promotion of brands, while many of the key creative decisions are gradually wrangled out of the director vision and handed over to the marketing people.
America, your movie-making dream machine is broken.
And with the Hollywood film-making in such a dire state, there is little wonder that audiences are rapidly turning their noses to Internet television, online video, to Open Source film-making and even to the newest game-inspired film-making craze, Machinima, to avoid the sanitized, hyper-commercialized fare being rolled out by Hollywood.
The saddest thing among these rampant practices, is that film audiences, especially American ones, are increasingly numb and unaware of the consequences and issues connected to such practices and voice little complaints and open critique to this ongoing creative slaughter.
Obviously, with some due exceptions:
The Media Education Foundation – or MEF – was set up to question our apathetic acceptance of these practices on the part of the mass media, producing a range of thought-provoking documentaries that challenge the media status quo.
”The Media Education Foundation produces and distributes video documentaries to encourage critical thinking and debate about the relationship between media ownership, commercial media content, and the democratic demand for free flows of information, diverse representations of ideas and people, and informed citizen participation.”
As grassroots, people media emerge as a powerful alternative and competitor to traditional mainstream media, it becomes increasingly important to question the motives, assumptions and practices of the “old” media to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Matt Soar and Susan Ericsson’s film Behind the Screens attempts to tackle the issue of Hollywood hyper-commercialism and supplies a solid critique of current mass media marketing practices.
In three short video clips, including highlights from Behind the Scenes, I have attempted to demonstrate the pervasiveness of blanket marketing in mass media culture.
Read on to see just how far product placement has permeated our culture.
Hollywood parodies its own greed
It is no secret, then, that product placement runs rampant through mainstream media and nowhere more so than in Hollywood cinema.
We know it, and apparently they know it.
And yet, somehow many among us still accept and actively finance with movie entrance tickets the production of such shallow movie content.
In this first video, taken from the Hollywood movie Wayne’s World we see Hollywood parodying its own greed.
Admittedly it’s funny, but only because it strikes a raw nerve. In the average movie, we are subjected to as much product placement as we are character development, and often considerably more than that.
While Mike Myers is smart for taking a jab at the product placement machine, it is ultimately the studio that has the last laugh. There are no Duffs or Brand X products to be seen here – as we laugh at the blatant hyper-commercialism of Hollywood, so we are fed yet more blatant hyper-commercialism.
Setting a fine example: George W Bush
Hollywood is not alone, however. For while Hollywood might take the most flack, product placement has permeated every strata of society, from the commercialization of schools, to presidential speeches.
That’s right – presidential speeches.
Now certainly advertising isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The growth of online contextual advertising, for instance, has had a great impact in terms of bringing web visitors integrated, non-invasive advertisements that are (at least some of the time) of interest to them.
Product placement is the antithesis of contextual advertising – it attempts to sneak in an entirely different agenda, shaping meaning into meaninglessness in an effort simply to push home its subliminal message. If this is unacceptable to movie goers, it should be even more so to political voters.
In this second brief video we see George W Bush sliding a blatant bit of advertising into a public speaking engagement. Now certainly there are a good few more reasons not to trust Bush than this, but that’s another story. What is amazing is that product placement has moved out of the movie theater and up onto the political podium.
See for yourself.
Hyper-commercialism as a way of life
Advertising does not need to work this way. There are other evolving models that allow for a bottom-up, customized and credible approach to marketing.
But for as long as we accept this Hollywood staple gone wild, we will be subjected to pernicious, insidious, creeping product promotion at every turn.
In this final clip, which gathers highlights of the excellent exposé documentary Behind the Screens, we see how advertising serves as the driving force behind Hollywood movies, at the expense of entertainment.
The film blends actual footage of product promotion with sharp critique from screenwriters, critics and political economists. In this clip, it becomes glaringly apparent that:
- Hollywood has, in the last thirty years, entered a period of hyper-commercialism with much greater ties to marketing, advertising and product promotion
The future
Of one thing you can be sure: For as long as we accept this diluted pseudo-entertainment, Hollywood will continue to serve it up.
The best thing any of us can do is vote with our feet and with our wallets by stopping this endless funding of this blatant, unethical, uncaring and relentless corporate propaganda machine.
Media are becoming increasingly personal, and increasingly plausible for anyone to take up and get involved in. The days of mass audiences for mass media are quite clearly numbered, and if advertisers want to survive beyond the next decade, they are going to have to take advantage of new business models.
The engaged, discerning audiences of the evolving new media landscape will demand that this involves film-makers, reporters, videographers and other media makers being allowed to retain their autonomy and integrity.
For while many of us accept Hollywood’s product placement as business as usual, web audiences, who can pull and steer their viewing preferences with much greater control, are less forgiving, as we are going to increasingly witness in the coming years.
As Hollywood box office figures seem to hold steady figures for the last few years it is only up to you to vote with your choice whether you would like to continue seeing this practices expand and conquer what once was a space reserved for communicating insight, vision, philosphy and our own history.
There maybe a good lesson to be learned here and a great opportunity to regain that credibility and value, that, at least in my eyes, Hollywood has long lost.
Additional reading
If this article has been of interest, you might also want to check out the following websites:
- The Media Education Foundation’s website
Internet video and online collaboration were massive growth sectors in 2006, and as 2007 forges ahead the two are finally coming together.
With the emergence of the first real-time video synching and sharing solutions, the Internet video experience is definitely bound to become a critical work platform for video and television production as well as for a thousand more applications from research to collaborative review, where watching video together while being at a distance, provides a truly breakthrough new opportunity.
Photo credit: Tomasz Trojanowski
The ability for groups of people to watch the same video in real time – from different locations – has two main applications so far.
On the one hand we are seeing communal video watching and commentary emerge as an extension of social software. Groups gather around a video playlist and chat about the videos as they view them, just as friends might talk as they sit in front of a TV show.
The second major application of this emerging technology is that of video review, and is likely to be of more interest to video professionals or online independent producers looking to discuss video footage at a distance.
As online collaboration has made working from remote locations increasingly easy, and popular, it was only a matter of time before the opportunity to work on video projects joined the list of possibilities for those working in different cities or even countries.
Our own team at Robin Good’s Media Network is scattered around several countries, and the ability to discuss video productions in real time has become increasingly important in our day to day work. As such, the time seems ripe for online collaboration that allows for a strong audio-visual element, and several contenders have risen to this gap in the market.
Last week I looked at how the innovative ConceptShare has made it easy for designers and visual communicators to enter into visually rich online collaboration.
Today I am going to take you through three recent applications that promise to do the same for Internet video.
Three levels of complexity
It would be unfair to compare the three applications I’m going to take a look at, as they are attempting to reach different audiences and satisfy different needs. On the other hand, depending on the level of complexity you may need for your remote video viewing and sharing needs, one or more online tools may be suitable for your requirements.
The services under review are (in order of complexity):
- YouTube Streams, a beta project from the YouTube people that offers a no-frills way of chatting about online videos with friends or strangers.
At the time of writing all of these projects are in the relatively early stages of their development and each is improving at a rapid rate. Doubtless there will be other services emerging in the coming months, as online collaboration and Internet video continue to dominate the evolving web.
YouTube Streams
YouTube Streams is by far the simplest of the bunch, and is currently in beta, so has some rough edges. But if you are looking for a way to easily discuss videos with a group of your contacts, your online audience, or a group of strangers it may provide just what you’re looking for.
Streams will not be any use to you if you want to synchronize your videos, though, as it doesn’t currently have this capability. The concept is simple – any YouTube member can create a stream – which is effectively a chat room, add videos to it, and choose from a limited list of options before their stream goes live.
These streams cannot be set to private, although as the person that created the stream you can remove attendees from the proceedings. The choices you will be faced with in setting up your stream are:
- Selecting a name and background image
Given that the streams are open to anyone that cares to attend them, the primary function of YouTube Streams seems to be social, and in practice it seems to be used in much the same way as any other chat room, with the addition of video providing a talking point for those attending.
With the ability for attendees to select videos activated, this makes for a great way for people to share their video finds with one another, and freely discuss them in real time. However, as videos cannot be synchronized in any way, chatting is limited to discussing the videos in general, rather than commenting on specific moments in real time.
As such, this will be of limited use to video professionals who may need to discuss specific moments in a video as it plays. On the other hand, for semi-synchronous review, discussion or even online classes, this could prove to be a valuable tool.
The other major drawback is the inability to create ‘closed’ rooms, which will be a major hurdle for those wishing to use the service uninterrupted by uninvited guests. If you add to this the need to upload your videos to YouTube, and thus to the general public, this automatically discounts its use for copyright or confidential works in progress.
YouTube Streams‘ interface is simple and works pretty well, though. Along the top of the screen is the line up of videos on offer, which can watched by clicking on the thumbnail of your choice. Center-left is the YouTube video player, and hanging to the right a chat box, with a list of current attendees.
Videos can be easily added from within the interface, either by adding a URL, or else by choosing them from your user profile’s Quicklist or Recently Watched videos, which makes sharing your latest finds a very easy prospect.
In summary, this is a service that will appeal to those looking to share and add a social dimension to their Internet video viewing experience, and will only prove lacking to those who require privacy and video synchronization features.
ClipSync
With a far more impressive feature set, the ability to sync videos with other users, and a choice of Internet video networks, ClipSync provides an attractive solution that will appeal to social networkers and semi-pro videographers in equal measure.
Certainly ClipSync would seem to be aimed at the same target audience as YouTube Streams, and this is evident in their overall interface design and basic pitch. In actual fact, I think that some of the design choices the company have made radically undersell the power of the technology behind them.
Take for example the hideously tacky cartoon characters that adorn both the service’s front page and video interface. Apologies to the person responsible, but I can’t help but feel that these poorly conceived gargoyles are likely to appeal to anyone over the age of ten. While the social networking scene certainly appeals to a young audience, it is my personal belief that these characters are likely to alienate more potential users than they will please.
If that sounds a little harsh, it is only because I have a lot of respect for what is otherwise a very powerful, useful tool that goes beyond the social chat function of YouTube Streams and offers quite a lot more besides.
So what are these features? In a nutshell, ClipSync offers the ability to:
- Watch video sourced from any of the major Internet Video sharing sites, including YouTube, Google Video and MetaCafe
This is a very impressive list of features that while still leaning heavily on the worlds of chat and instant messaging, with their use of emoticons, the creation of rooms, and the ability to boot out the undesirable, nevertheless takes things a step further than YouTube Streams.
What sets this apart from YouTube Streams, besides much better interface (cartoon characters aside) is the aforementioned ability to synchronize clips with other viewers. For anyone hoping to actually analyze or talk through specific moments in a video, this is priceless and already takes ClipSync to the next level.
If you add to this the ability to be much more selective about how enters your video sharing session, it already becomes apparent that ClipSync has a much broader range of applications than its YouTube counterpart. This could easily be used by those giving presentations, teaching or working in a learning group, quickly discussing video content for production purposes, or – as was intended – simply socializing and shooting the breeze about the latest viral video.
There are effectively four options in terms of moderation and privacy, as listed here:
Just by adding these basic settings, the ClipSync team have acknowledged the fact that different users will have different needs for the service, and that these will involve greater or lesser degrees of control.
VJs, presenters or teachers will enjoy the ability to set the session to hosted, so that other participants can contribute to the session without taking total control of it. Educators might also make great use of the moderated setting, as could corporate trainers who want to extend the sharing to those taking part, but effectively reserve the power of veto for themselves. And then, if a group of friends or colleagues are using the service, the ‘free for all’ setting removes all formality from the clip selection process.
By being given the option to remove a session from the site’s directory, users also have the choice of creating invitation only sharing sessions, which will be vital in a number of environments and settings.
In summary,then, ClipSync is a very versatile tool that will appeal to a great many audiences, in spite of its narrow, slightly mawkish marketing as a social networking digital youth destination.
As a totally free service, it offers a halfway house between the simpler YouTube Streams and the professional-level, paid service syncVUE. ClipSync may very well satisfy the needs of independent video and media producers looking to quickly look over their work, although again the issue of having to upload video footage to a public, hosted site may still prove an issue for some. This is where syncVUE comes in.
syncVUE
syncVUE sits at the other end of the scale. While upon first impressions it bears some resemblances to the other services under review, it is clearly aimed at video professionals looking to collaborate remotely.
While the first two services rely on streaming video that has been uploaded to the web, syncVUE’s job isn’t so much one of sourcing media files as it is synchronizing time code accurate data between video files. These video files are resident on the hard drives of the team members collaborating via the service, and as such remain entirely private.
With the ability to sync and annotate video files in real time it is possible for whoever is leading the session to scrub and scan through the video and have all of the other user’s footage mirror theirs instantaneously. Furthermore, syncVUE allows you to add annotation to videos at exact time codes, which can be imported to professional editing software such as Final Cut Pro, which will prove priceless to the pros.
syncVUE’s time code precision puts it in the pro-league
This is much less a video sharing application as it is a very well conceived video review product clearly geared up to enabling online collaboration between video and film professionals. The service seems priced to allow for independent producers to get in on the act however, as payment takes the basis of a one of license, depending on the amount of users. While the prices aren’t in pocket money terms, they are unlikely to pose too great a threat to anyone that can afford a copy of Final Cut Pro.
In short, the features that set syncVUE apart are:
- Integration with Skype to provide a total teleconferencing/video editing environment
syncVUE makes smart use of Skype’s open API to synchronize video
This is top-drawer online collaboration for those engaged in intensive video review sessions, and may be well beyond the needs of most users. For those who don’t need this level of precision and video quality, ClipSync’s impressive range of features may well be enough. However, if quality, precision and privacy are of paramount importance, syncVUE provides an affordable solution for getting video review jobs done efficiently without having to be in the same location. That is a major breakthrough in and of itself.
Like ClipSync, syncVUE makes use of Skype, who wisely opened up their API in 2004 to allow third party developers to make use of their technology. syncVUE is a great example of one such development team making use of this ubiquitous, free technology to provide a new and much-needed service.
In conclusion
Internet video and online collaboration are converging in a number of interesting ways, and in these three synchronized remote video viewing services it is possible to see a hint of what’s to come.
As Internet video grows to dominate the web as we know it, and social networking continues to define the Web 2.0 paradigm we are inevitably going to be seeing a lot more of social and collaborative video technologies emerge in the coming year.
The diversity of the three products touched on in this overview is likely to expand even further into niche categories, fulfilling specific needs as it does so. As it is, though, we have in these three services three levels of complexity that are likely to fulfill a range of users needs making online collaboration and sharing all the richer for it.
Synchronized remote video viewing and sharing is certainly here to stay.
Additional resources
If you found this overview of the video sharing scene interesting, you may want to dig into the subject in more depth via the following websites:
- YouTube Streams – the beta website for YouTube’s social video experiment
NewTeeVee.com’s coverage of YouTube Streams
Corporate Web sites may not push out awesome viewership statistics compared to many media sites, but the data coming out of recent research is pointing to direct communications with online audiences providing multiples more impact on their bottom lines than media-based advertising.
Photo credit: Andres Rodriguez
Online media companies are likely to have a great year in 2007 but the looming question is how much longer marketers are going to care about Web site advertising in an era when direct conversations between sellers and buyers are pushing traditional media to the sidelines.
The media isn’t dead yet, but if it can’t shoehorn its way into these conversations more effectively it better start thinking about it’s retirement plan.
Here is the full story:
The environment for online media is looking pretty robust, these days: forecasts for 2007 online ad revenues are looking great and new forms of electronic media production are flourishing everywhere. Brand advertisers are also beginning to embrace the Web more enthusiastically, shifting more of their spend into online channels than ever before. Yet for all of the buzz and bubble over online advertising the greater fact is that media companies are beginning to face the greatest challenge of all: disintermediation.
Disintermediation is a word that has challenged publishers before, but it was a less important threat in the early days of the Web. Corporations were content at first to put out “brochureware” Web sites with little meaningful content and user’s interactions were limited to viewing pages and filling out forms for the most part.
But as corporations have learned to create and to sponsor their own engaging content and Web 2.0 technologies have encouraged users to write about and engage corporate content, things have changed quite a bit.
Advertising Age brings this together (registration/subscription) in an article that highlights some interesting statistics surfacing in recent online ratings data. Consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble Co., for example, does not have blockbuster Web sites by media ratings standards – P&G sites captured about 3.3 percent of ComScore’s U.S. October audience ratings – but by comparison this percentage is more than double it’s percentage share of overall U.S. ad spending and nine times its percentage of online ad spend share.
The AdAge article also points to McKinsey & Co. research that showed visitors to one corporate site generating $40 in corporate profit per visitor on average, compared with $5 for audiences reached by traditional media. Not only is going through intermediaries an expensive route through which to acquire customers, but one which doesn’t pay off as well in the end.
While content generated by media companies continues to engage audeinces it’s not clear that advertisers seeking return on their investment are going to follow suit endlessly with major brand-building campaigns. If markets are conversations, as The Cluetrain Manifesto once intimated, then media companies are having a much harder time figuring out why anyone should be chatting with them.
User-generated content is held out oftentimes as a way to help media companies to find a place in the chit-chat between sellers and buyers, but owning a user-generated media property is not synonymous with being able to engage in a conversation. Brand advertising is about seduction: conversations are about relationships. In the meantime the focus on user-generated content leaves fewer dollars to spend on traditional media products – further weakening their potential to appeal to audiences.
Are we witnessing the death of media? Well, yes, in an abstract sense.
There will always be advertising and there will always be companies willing to extend their conversations with their markets through media-based advertising. But if marketing is better served through more direct and focused communications with audiences and through multi-channel advertising wholesalers like Google, then traditional media companies have nowhere to go but down.
The conversations that drive media spends are shifting radically and rapidly and will continue to do so over the next several years. Here are a few ideas as to how media companies can keep abreast of these changes:
- Polish your conversation skills.
In spite of the influx of user-generated media services being adapted by media companies most are pretty “hands-off” when it comes to integrating user content with editorial sources. While traditional editorial content is still valuable it’s lack of integration with conversations found in user content is going to compromise its ability to attract premium ad dollars in the long run.
If marketing is moving from a command-and-control economic model to a networked model then media needs to adjust its fundamental purpose from being a medium for advertising to being a gatherer of market participants exchanging views. It sounds simple enough, but making a conversational marketing model work in the long run is going to take a lot more skill than slapping banner ads on MySpace pages.
- Move beyond your roots.
- Rethink aggregation.
Advertising at the very dawn of commercial radio was thought of – literally – as a phone booth in a studio which people would rent for a limited time to broadcast a message. Today that phone booth is online and interactive – much to the pleasure of advertisers, but also to the detriment of publishers who still struggle with their role.
Media companies can continue to focus on renting out studio phone booths, but it’s a better bet to focus on providing content that marketers can contextualize as they please in their own “phone booths” and in contexts defined by their audiences – and to provide expertise and technology that will allow marketers to extend those conversations into deeper levels of engagement.
For the vast majority of publishers aggregation is about gaining an edge by bringing together your own content or licensed content into one “walled garden” or another for advertisers or subscribers. But search technologies and services such as social bookmarking, feeds and web mining have make the ideal garden something that is much closer to the needs of individuals and institutions than the ambitions of publishers and aggregators.
Marketing value is now maximized when content flows to the contexts that users desire most as efficiently as possible – rather than trying to corral them into contexts not conducive to marketing conversations.
With a near-infinite inventory of content and a finite inventory of advertisers, media companies are in a race with corporate marketers to come up with the most compelling content and context that can get a marketing message across to audiences.
In the long run this is a race that most media companies can only lose. It’s time for media companies to shift permanently to being enablers of effective conversations from all sources.
Today’s “media star” is no longer the one with the least common denominator gazing at them but the one who can get audiences and marketers looking at one another most effectively.
Originally published by John Blossom as “The Death of Media: Are Direct Online Marketing Channels Superseding Publishers?” on December 14, 2006.
Find out more about John Blossom and the management consulting services of Shore Communications Inc. covering enterprise, media and personal publishing at Shore.com.
Photo credits
Blue duster: Alvin Teo
Step out of line: Michael Brown
Render of molecule: Sunagatov Dmitry
Free Speech: What I Hear, What I see, Leave It Up To Me – FCC FU Video
Posted by: | CommentsRestriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions… Video: FCC FU – Full Version "Protest and activism take many forms. Some people write their Congressperson… some initiate and sign petitions… some organize and participate in marches. Many donate their time, energy and hard-earned money. Many work toward fighting injustice by keeping others informed. Others protest through humor, and by attempting to inject their political message into the popular culture â in hopes that popular opinion will begin to change or crystallize, and then result in more "true" activism, as described above. FCCFU.com falls primarily into the latter category. But, because we understand how crucial the former category is, we've attempted to bring all of…