what interests me might interest you
Via: Field Notes: Red Blooded from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
Field Notes releases Red Blooded notebook to its standard line, available Valentine’s Day and every day thereafter, with a sweet pop-up video from one of their own– a love letter to his wife.
So this is the new year
And I have no resolutions
For self assigned penance
For problems with easy solutions…
via YouTube user JimFrommeyer.
This video recreates some of the more memorable Calvin and Hobbes snowmen massacres Bill Watterson graced us with over the years. In addition, someone’s created a best of gallery of these cartoons over on AngelFire.
AdWeek has a great piece on the New Era rivalry commercials starring John Krasinski and Alec Baldwin. The spots help bring back some cool to baseball and help bring non-fans into the game. Interesting tidbits include the fact that Krasinski and some writers for the Office rewrote most of the scripts to amp up the humor. Also, Alec Baldwin does most of his acting for this series and 30 Rock off of a teleprompter, which he uses to help get his timing right.
The spots have only aired a few times on television, but have found a huge audience online. In fact, my wife — not exactly a baseball fan, but a huge Krasinski and Baldwin fan — told me about them.
My favorite spot, “912,” is posted below, and you can see all of them over at AdWeek.
Song Of the Spindle from Drew Christie on Vimeo.
A human and a whale talk about their similarities, the problems of the world and how song can help solve the world’s ills.
Little Boat from nelson boles on Vimeo.
Laughing Squid has more on the artist.
(Found via Scott Beale on Google+)
I’ve been looking at the way music is presented online these days and there are two programs in particular that have really captured my attention: NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts and AV Club’s Undercover. These two programs take different approaches: Tiny Desk presents longer, 15 minute mini-concerts with camera work that really concentrates on the artist with tight, intimate shots. You can really see this style in their most recent segment featuring Amanda Shire. Undercover focuses on one song, so most segments fall under the magic five-minute mark for online video. In other words, Tiny Desk seems to be built for enthusiasts — and particularly enthusiasts of the artist featured — while Undercover is set up for the web browser and video snacker. Even the format — independent artists covering more well-known songs and artists lends itself to snacking. If you don’t find an artist you know or like, you can at least find a song that you find interesting.
Both formats have their merits and their audiences, but my hunch is that the quicker, snacker format used by Undercover would attract more viewers. Either way, they both present some pretty amazing music, so enjoy:
NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts
(Note: NPR doesn’t allow embeds, so you’ll have to hit the llinks. Boooo…)
Amanda Shires
AV Club’s Undercover
The Low Anthem covers Wilco
Justin Townes Earle covers Bruce Springsteen
New York Cosmos: Carlos Alberto Torres talks Blackout – YouTube.
Carlos Alberto Torres played for the New York Cosmos in 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980. He arrived in the city during the blackout of ’79.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the honey badger recently. I’ve been thinking about how badass he is and about how he doesn’t give a shit. I’ve been thinking about how the honey badger can kill a cobra and eat it and get stung by like a million bees while it’s eating bee larva. I’ve been thinking about how the honey badger can get bitten by a cobra and just pass out, get up and just start eating its corpse again. I’ve been thinking about how the honey badger provides food for scavengers in its habitat.
What’s got my thinking about the honey badger, the Jesus Lizard, the American Bull Frog and the Nasty Disgusting World of Vampire Bats is Randall’s World of WIld Wild Animals.
Admittedly I’m a little late to this party. The honey badger video was posted in January of this year and has racked up 12 million views. Randall’s latest animal video was posted in June and has garnered close to 100,000 views, down from the over 200,000 (and in some cases 300,000 to 600,0000) views his preview videos received, so this meme may have run its course. Still, Randall’s Wild Wild World of Animals is a monster YouTube hit.
With it’s off-color, femme-voiced narration and pirated animal videos, Randall’s Wild Wild World of Animals is both hilarious and nostalgic. The clips bring viewers back to a childhood of watching nature documentaries while at the same time reminding them of the crazy friend of a friend they met last weekend (or last month, or that time before they had kids and used to go out to bars — remember how crazy he was!?!).
What’s most surprising about the shows is that they actually have a lot of interesting information about the animals they profile and you get the sense that Randall is really fascinated by these creatures and cares about them. Without this secret sauce, I don’t think the videos would be as popular as they are.
The question I’ve been mulling, and haven’t really come up with an answer to yet, is how can an organization like mine (The Nature Conservancy) — an organization trying to get GenX and GenY to care about environmental conservation — capture some of the magic that Randall’s Wild Wild World of Animals has tapped into. To be clear, that magic is a potent combination of humor, familiarity and honest concern.
Certainly the easiest (and most assuredly least successful) thing to do would be to simply ape the shows and create a knock off. That’s a bad idea.
The second easiest thing to do would be to hire Randall to do a series of spots with a deeper environmental/conservation message, fewer swear words and some light branding. That’s a better idea and would probably get tens of thousands of views if marketed properly — I don’t think it would become as popular as his home-grown videos however because branded doesn’t work as well as user-generated on YouTube. As evidence just look at the hit counts Randall’s Wild WIld World of Animals is getting compared to National Geographic’s YouTube presence.
The most difficult and most successful long-term play would be to study Randall’s secret sauce, learn from it and infuse it into some targeted marketing campaigns. To do this, we need to be brave. We need to not be afraid of the inevitable (and I would guess, swift) backlash from old-gaurd donors and supporters. This means really not being afraid to fail. it also means taking on an underground marketing campaign that you run on Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter (probably not Facebook) and other spots where your target audience hangs out, but the old-gaurd ignores. If it’s successful, maybe it means approaching someone like the Cheezburger Network about a long-term content partnership.
Environmental groups need to do more of this kind of messaging if they want to reach younger audiences. They need to not take themselves so seriously and they need to not be afraid to offend. Otherwise they’re just going to be left behind and ultimately Randall’s Wild Wild World of Animals will have fewer subjects like this awesome guy:
(Sorry, they don’t allow embeds.)
