Le futur de la vidéo sur le Web est ici

Absolute genius! This is one of the very first sites that I have seen a really seamless and harmonious convergence of video and internet come together as one.

Finally a video website being treated as a website and not some awkward production.

Video and the web kind of had this weird junior high school awkwardness that made it endearing but held back how sexy the two can be.

The honeymoon is over and these two mediums have grown as one.

This is one of the few sites I have seen in a while that is truly a foreshadowing towards the future of productions on the web.

It feels right, its comfortable and flows so well.

Hats off to Emakina.

Originally saw this link on TheFWA.com

Check out the site here ---> click!

Completely Loaded

We live in the age of self promotion and personal branding. Everyone and everything is a brand, the brand you, the brand us, the brand them.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter have us scrambling each and every day to come up with a witty twit or a twitty wit or some contrived status update message pertaining to our current condition. We are at a new social impasse.

Our community here in Interactiveland is no different.

We are the specialists, we created this stuff. However now that everyone is a marketing expert, our jobs should be to take advertising off of the socioeconomic plane and blast it off into the astronomic so that we at least have some sort of gap between creative storytelling and selfless promotion.

Each one of us is a concentrated, jam packed, chock full o promotion.

We now live in the Digital Advertising Age. An age where our President is a web celebrity who won the election online. Our brands have all become mini celebrities creeping and crawling all over the internet. Everyday people have become micro-celebrities, choosing to display their lives, thoughts, ideas and neurosis online for all to see.

I am not sure if I was kinda loaded or perhaps just PRETTYLOADED when I first saw this new "curated" site by Big Spaceship.

Its a web site featuring pre-loaders, yep that's right, those annoying little buggers who sit there and remind you that you are either on a really slow connection or the load sequence on the site wasn't programmed properly. A little device conjured up to distract us from the fact that our instant gratification isn't being met as instantly as we like.

Right now it is simply a showcase of SODA members Big Space, Firstborn, Odopod and AgencyNet but I am sure they will let others play too.

I am not sure what I make of this contrived attempt at coolness through recognition of a small nuance that seems to not have gained its proper place in the 15 minute slot we call fame.

The preloader is sort of like the SMPTE color bars on a TV.

Its purpose is to serve as a waiting pattern while something else is happening in the back. Sure they can be cute, adorable, fun, interactive and they serve a very important role, however some things need to remain unsung, a hero in the dark.

Self promotion is a great thing. Trust me I am guilty of it each and every day.

Especially in the age where it is as important as breathing.

But in this case I would rather these four shops created those funny puppet characters that said those funny things and danced around the screen like they did when they were playing ping pong and foosball against one another.

I loathe watching preloaders when I come to a site and the thought of a site dedicated entirely to those nasty little buggers makes me cringe.

Good try Big Curator.

Maybe the next exhibition can be a tribute to the Form Field or a retrospective of the Send Button.

Busted

It takes a single moment.

A single incident.

A minuscule fraction of time to change a whole industry and turn it on its side.

The buzz has been rampant about the economy and the digital shift, the fact that agencies may or may not survive the transition.

All kinds of discussions about who is taking over the reigns of the ad world and so on and so fourth.

The chatter has finally come to a head and a major agency has been busted for over billing on digital work.

Leo Burnett in Chicago has just been ordered to repay the Army (of all clients) 15.5 million dollars.

Ad Age writes.

"Burnett was treating the work of its own internet unit as if it was performed by a third-party contractor, as well as inflating the costs of subcontractors it worked with, in order to increase its profits."


Tax payer money! In a failing economy and the client is the U.S. Army, can it get any worse?

Finally the veil has been lifted.

I can't even imagine how often this goes on all over the place. Clients are getting reamed for millions of dollars and subcontractors never see a quarter of that money.

For years traditional agencies have been paying digital shops fractions of what their clients expect them to spend on their projects.

Leo Burnett just took a really hard fall and the domino effect may ensue. We all kind of saw this coming but no one was sure when it would hit and how it would start but I think it has started.

It will be very interesting to see what kind of ripple effect this has on the industry and if clients will start to come directly to the digital shops for fairly priced work.