Three weeks ago Gary Sanchez Productions a company run by comedians Will Ferrel and Adam McKay launched Funny or Die a comedy focused YouTube like site. With millions of views and tons of great content, a quick buyout could be eminent. A little hint of buyout aspirations comes from Sequoia Capital’s Mark Kvamme and Randy Adams involvement.
We have all been there. It’s been a long week at the office and double espressos don’t cut it anymore. Saturday afternoon at your friend’s pad and all you wished you could do was sleep. You give up. Always a bad situation, immediately you become the life of the party. The culprits: your friends.
Coca-Cola, by way of Saatchi & Saatchi, launched their viral Sprite Zero campaign. The video clip shows a group of buddies giving their sleeping friend a ride he won’t soon forget, nor remember, for that matter, as they miss calculate the strength of the slingshot. The payoff in the clip ends with “Friendship is overrated” followed by the overall campaign tag, “NO SUGAR, NO BULL@#*T.”
The target for this campaign was to get 135,000 views of their “jack ass” inspired video clip in hopes create buzz prior to the actual campaign. The video proved to be a strong agent as it was spread to almost 3000 websites and blogs. During the first month, more than one million people viewed the clips and after nine months, nearly three million views in total, while it still generates over 3000 daily views.
Today, Netflix officially announced it is almost ready to move online.
Convergence of Television and Internet is getting closer and closer. Netflix puts itself in the middle to be a participant in the market of allowing users to watch movies and TV shows through downloads on their PC. Although the amount of movies is limited at this point, it is important to note that Netflix is betting its entire operating income of $40MM to gain traction in this area. We see three potential strategies here: 1) become a first mover in this space to establish the Netflix brand as an ultimate online movie and entertainment destination 2) combat Blockbusters encroaching market share for online video rentals 3) set themselves up for acquisition by one of the leading TV networks, such as Viacom, Fox, who are unable to move as quickly as the pure online shops are. We saw this with YouTube, MySpace and others.
Kodak just sold its health imaging unit this week for $2.55 billion. This originally internal only, Kodak video shows that Kodak is ready for the fight to change. As a consumer it will be fun to see what’s in store for Kodak’s future, but they have a big, tough road ahead. A good start would be for them to improve and open up Ofoto, now Kodak Easyshare Gallery, making it more of a community like Flickr. I’m sure they will find more ways to further monazite its 52 million users.
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Video content online will improve and the first online only mass appeal TV show will receive mass press and attention.
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YouTube, MySpace and Picassa are great starts, but are really just pieces of what people want to do online. This year Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple will consolidate their content sharing applications into a single place to share your world (photos, videos, thoughts, calendars, music, bookmarks) with friends, family, coworkers, or be brave and make it available to the public. Sony will make a push to get in this game and Apple will open up their huge content world into a friendlier web 2.0 space.
Nice design, but this site is a strikingly similar concept to Adobe’s The Creative Mind. I wonder what came first, or did two agencies have the same idea at the same time? Will we ever know?
On Toyota’s mind.
Great concept, animation and videos.
Adobe’s Creative Mind
YouTube can be fun, but it’s starting to feel more and more like an artform. Separately almost all of the videos are not very good, but together they feel like a patch-work of human life. Like a bustling world of people, with different tastes and different personalities. Taking a picture of yourself everyday is similar to YouTube, in that it is a patch-work of photos of one person’s life. Enjoy.
IKEA has come up with ideal way to sell something as simple (and somewhat boring) as closets to all walks of life.
Their “Come Into the Closet” idea utilizes high end video and simple flash to highlight the benefits of their closet collections while personalizing each product to cater to a certain audience. The site features a clean layout, nice typography, and crisp, vibrant flash video in which you can navigate through with the use of elevator-type buttons that seamlessly take you from one floor to another and demonstrate the features of each closet through contrasting subjects.
There is one downfall to this site, the load time, but once you’re inside, it does a great job of effectively showcasing the benefits of the product through a somewhat virtual reality of everyday human experience.
