Digitas NewFront 2013: Video Centric

We’re live from the Digitas NewFront! We’ll be recapping sessions all day. Watch it live on DigitasNewFront.com, and follow Digitas on Twitter and Tumblr for updates. Tweet #NewFronts to join the conversation.

Video is evolving and Digitas’ own John McCarus just sat down with two leaders in the space, Peter Vesterbacka CEO of Rovio and Adam Bain from Twitter. 

It’s not only about video but storytelling.  The conversation has shifted and is now focused on content and the story. Twitter is a mobile-first company and video is now a bigger part of their offering.  Twitter just acquired Vine and it is one of the most downloaded apps on iPhones, it’s creative :06 videos.  The Twitter video strategy is to bring in more content partners and scaling through the acquisition of Vine.  Taco Bell at SXSW used Twitter to use Twitter’s new Twitter Cards ad product to watch the bands live within the platform.  Ultimately, with Taco Bell, the bands are creating full-length fan-viewed music stories.  It’s an experimental crowd-sourced “rockumentary”. 

The success of Angry Birds is astounding (over 1.7 Billion downloads) so what are the real lessons from that experience? It took about eight months with a very lean team.  The lesson is the attention to details, a lot of testing and learning.  The franchise is much more than an app today, they are building global theme parks.  

Today’s New Front live-blogging was done by Digitas’ Amie Green.  For more insights from Amie – Follow her on Twitter @Smit

Digitas NewFront 2013: Working Media No Longer Works On Its Own

We’re live from the Digitas NewFront! We’ll be recapping sessions all day. Watch it live on DigitasNewFront.com, and follow Digitas on Twitter and Tumblr for updates. Tweet #NewFronts to join the conversation.

David Karp, CEO of Tumblr just took the stage to make a plea to the room of brand marketers.  In short, social media has given us the tools to share so give us something to care about.  Don’t limit creativity to the confines of the platforms.  

Today’s New Front live-blogging was done by Digitas’ Amie Green.  For more insights from Amie – Follow her on Twitter @Smit

Digitas NewFront 2013: Find Your Story

We’re live from the Digitas NewFront! We’ll be recapping sessions all day. Watch it live on DigitasNewFront.com, and follow Digitas on Twitter and Tumblr for updates. Tweet #NewFronts to join the conversation.

We just heard a panel of brand storytellers in the Find Your Story conversation moderated by Alison Norrington of storycentralDIGITAL.  The conversation featured a range or traditional and new media icons including:

– Tina Brown, Daily Beast;

– Mark-Hans Richer, Harley Davidson;

– Jules Daly, RSA;

Tina Brown talked about how the Daily Beast responded and published ninety-four stories within the two days of the Boston bombings.  Each story had to have a specific purpose from second-to-second real-time updates to long-form emotion captured by Michael Daly.  The key to their story-telling operation: “You have to be talented with the rhythms of working and have a multi-talented group.  It’s like conducting an orchestra – they are all skilled at playing different instruments.”

So what’s the audience’s role in these stories?  Alison Norrington broke down the theme of “audience as participant” in four buckets: “Evangelists” (they love what you are doing), “Advocates” (those that share the word), the “Gardeners: (they keep it tidy!) and those pesky “Disruptors”. 

Tina Brown talked about opening up their stories to commenters and they have actually reached out to those top commenters to write on behalf of the Daily Beast.  She mines what she calls “obsessionals” – when a story becomes an obsession for their audience.  “You have to sense when the story is going to become an “obsessional” and then I throw everything I have at that story.”

Jules Daly, President of RSA Films talked about collaborating with Ridley Scott and Machinima and how being able to get real-time data back from the audience has been a great feedback loop to their work.  Their project is a sci-fi collaboration working launching later this year. 

So how does a brand like Harley Davidson handle the “disruptors”?  CMO Mark-Hans Richer says, “We let it go.  It’s not about their relationship with us, it’s their relationships with one another that matter. Harley is a social network, no computers involved.” 

Some great advice and insights from expert storytellers to marketers looking to find their story: Find your meaning – not your tagline, take risks, find a theme and remember the audience and how they want to consume your story.

Today’s New Front live-blogging was done by Digitas’ Amie Green.  For more insights from Amie – Follow her on Twitter @Smit

Digitas NewFront 2013: Tony Weisman

We’re live from the Digitas NewFront! We’ll be recapping sessions all day. Watch it live on DigitasNewFront.com, and follow Digitas on Twitter and Tumblr for updates. Tweet #NewFronts to join the conversation.

Tony Weisman, CEO of Digitas North America, takes the stage with a quote from Douglas Rushkoff:  If the end of the 20^th century can be characterized by futurism, the 21^st century can be defined by presentism.

As Tony says, the present for our world looks like this:

- AOL is joining forces with cable, specifically Mark Cuban’s AXS TV

- 20-something digital entertainer, Jenna Marbles, has a place in the elite club of 1 billion views.

- Netflix has 29 million subscribers, surpassing HBO for the first time.

- And the digital video market is currently a four billion dollar business—expected to double in the next three years.

But the digital video vision and marketplace is much more than just about video itself. It’s also about the context that determines whether that content lives, thrives, or dies.

This week the Digital Content NewFronts have unveiled a number of new digital video series. What makes today’s Digitas NewFront unique is that our focus will be on the equally critical context. In the right context, your brand content will thrive…and be alive

Today’s New Front live-blogging was done by Digitas’ Amie Green.  For more insights from Amie – Follow her on Twitter @Smit

Digitas New Front 2013: Present Shock

We’re live from the Digitas NewFront! We’ll be recapping sessions all day. Watch it live on DigitasNewFront.com, and follow Digitas on Twitter and Tumblr for updates. Tweet #NewFronts to join the conversation.

Today’s NewFront event opened with Doug Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.  Rushkoff contends that in today’s always-on world humans and businesses have a new relationship with time. 

“The opportunity is to unwind brand mythologies; we’re no longer living in a world with a beginning, middle and end.”

So how do you tell that advertising story?  The only real choice is for the brand to BE the story.  Rushkoff proclaimed, “Turn the company into something worth talking about.  Our job is to not cover-up but do the things that comprise a non-fiction story happening in real-time.”    

The thesis presented in Present Shock sets the stage for this year’s Digitas NewFront theme: Your Brand is Alive.  Today brands must also be thinking and acting to align with their customers – in the here and now. 

Today’s New Front live-blogging was done by Digitas’ Amie Green.  For more insights from Amie – Follow her on Twitter @Smit