Gamestop has this contest where you can win a gift certificate, but more importantly, you win the chance at being a character in the next Guitar Hero game, which is frankly hilarious. If I win this, I will lay down my plastic guitar forever, closing this ridiculous chapter of my life with digital immortality.
Here’s how you can help me out. In return, I’m giving away my full size Peavey Riffmaster AG Guitar Hero controller that I won at SxSW at the Dell Lounge. It’s worth $400. I stand to win a $400 gift certificate, so it’s one $400 item for another.
1. Vote my insane video a 5 here: CLICK HERE
2. Send me an email to contest@facerocker.com with your full name and YouTube account name
3. If you send me a ROCK HAIKU, a haiku regarding rock and roll, you get another entry into this contest.
In about a week, I’ll put everything into an spreadsheet and pick the winner at random.
Here’s the announcement video I made for it:
My friend Brian has started a website 5 Second Films, where each movie is 5 seconds long.
Watch me in one get punched in the face!
The T9 text messaging system is absolutely worthless. In fact, all those systems that try and guess what you’re typing to save you time are worthless because they don’t account for the fact that I am a salty dude.
Seriously, I have never and will never use “ducking” in a sentance, and unless I’m texting you from prison, I’m never going to “give a shiv.”
HD looks pretty rad! Now just let me link to it from the annotation and we’d be all set!
You may be wondering what’s the deal with this massive hard on I got for viral videos. Part of it might be explained by my undergrad thesis project for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy my last year at USC, entitled the 10^6 Project.
http://www.facerocker.com/106/
With this project, I created a number of accounts and attempted to achieve viral success by *gasp* employing the same techniques that the large ad agencies and seed companies use (but on significantly smaller scale) with a few web videos. The project also consists of interviews with professionals currently working in the advertising industry, users who have achieved viral success, and professors who are studying it.
An excerpt from my conclusions:
Finally, as one steps back from the gritty mechanics of creating and promoting a video, one begins to see the deficiencies and weaknesses of the medium, as well as how the advertising agency is slowly but surely infiltrating it. The economics are clear – as more people turn to web videos for entertainment, the more focus those videos will get towards monetization efforts.
From the conversation with Alexandra Juhasz, it’s clear that web video content is far from being free of the clutches of corporate interests. It’s an incredible new medium, with incredible possibilities. But those who espouse YouTube and web videos as a truly democratic medium of communication are only fooling themselves. Seven out of ten of the top viewed YouTube videos of all time are major label music videos. Videos are removed quietly and invisibly, with little recourse for the user.
Each time a poorly executed ad campaign results in backlash, the advertising agencies get smarter, and their next effort will be subtler and better designed to slip under the collective radars of the viewing public. Every single person I talked to agreed – the internet audience hates being deceived, and hates being advertised directly to. And nobody likes to think of themselves as unpaid shills for corporate interests.
Yet the very definition of a successful viral video advertisement, which compels its viewer to pass it along, requires the user to like its content and to be deceived.
Viral advertising seeks to evoke the emotions necessary in the viewer to unwittingly convert him or her into a conveyer belt, passing along the embedded message to their friends inside the trojan horse of word-of-mouth. It seeks to bypass critical analysis entirely, replacing thought with action, a voice with a mouthpiece, and trading a few minutes of entertainment for capitalistic duty. The best viral advertising is unseen and unfelt – it, like the numerous distractions that fill a day, fades into the static, and while perhaps memorable, is otherwise indistinguishable from every other piece of web video media that is consumed.
I’m not attacking advertising – they are only moving in a sphere that makes economic sense, and doing things the way they are because they know they’re not welcome. I’m attacking the fact that the consumption and transmission of viral videos is an impulse and without thought or consideration. Perhaps that is the reason so many people were angry at Dan Greenberg’s article – they weren’t outraged at the dishonesty of advertising agencies (after all, most people seem to just assume that), they were outraged that their castle had been undermined without their knowledge.
To some it may seem hypocritical or ironic that I’m simultaneously trying to make videos viral, as well as warning against the dangers of those same techniques. I feel that only by being open with what gets done can we understand it.
See, many of the people who worked at promoting and producing viral videos I reached out to for interviews were cagey or unresponsive. They didn’t want to reveal all of their cards. That’s fine – if everyone knew how they did what they do, they’d have a much harder job.
But I think everyone should know. That was the goal of my experiments to begin with – to see what exactly it took to get a video viral, and to share that knowledge, and to bring people along every step of the way. I’m fully aware that some of my techniques for promoting the videos were a little cagey, but one should understand that, cagey or not, they work and if they work, they’ll be employed by others who’ll be less open, and less forthcoming.
And the beauty of it is how fluid everything is. Technology has always enabled this back and forth race between the haves and the have-nots, between lock pickers and lock manufacturers, between the RIAA and hackers, and here between video consumers and corporate interests. These techniques I’ve outlined may work now, but as the consumer gets more savvy, the landscape will change, and both parties will have to adapt.
So if nothing else, think about what you’re viewing. Think about where it’s coming from, how you found out about it. Don’t consume mindlessly. And regardless of whether it’s a gem of honest media, or a cleverly disguised advertisement, be aware of it.
Only through mindfulness can we ensure the web video genre retains what little freedom it has left.
-fw
