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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

"Good Enuff" Production Values - A New Model of Social Media Production


Been on a rant recently about a new production option for the social web in face of ubiquitous, cheaper, faster "Good Enuff" technologies like camera phones and laptop editware.

This tech democracy is amplifying how wasteful micro-site development (just make a really hype MySpace page or YouTube Channel with widgeted contents and plow all your budget into savvy media buys) and the overly produced "viral" video is. On YouTube, people probably don't care about our craft. So get to the idea quick(er), cheap(er). Stop pursuing perfect and make it "Good Enuff".

"Good Enuff" isn't just for users, it enables us marketers to shoot more ideas fast(er), cheap(er) instead of rolling all our energies into a single overly produced "perfect" idea that just may fail. So fail fast(er). And fail cheap(er).

At the Social, good ideas are still seen as good ideas as long as production values are "good enuff" (Can they see it? Check? Can they hear it? Good, ship it and see how it fares on YouTube and Digg). And bad ideas aren't made any better on the social web because they were shot expensively (honestly all that gloss goes over the heads of low bandwidth viewers who are skeptical of commercial gloss).

Success at The Social dictates that it is best to fail fast(er) and cheap(er) and Try, Try Again till you strike the right "viral" chord (the more important pursuit).

Below is an interesting user-gen commercial for Trader Joes - shot on a handheld Palm Treo. 212,491 views so far on YouTube.

5 comments:

Charles Edward Frith said...

The loudspeaker monologue culuture is gone. The days of taking six months to figure out what you want to say reveal the machine behind the voice.

Identifty the context and if Lo Fi is appropriate, what's the excuse in a depression?

http://tinyurl.com/6pml74

Anonymous said...

used this in a presentation to non-marketers today and it pretty much killed. just like the best big budget commercials i showed. sure, helps i'm in ny and was presenting thru ppt and online videos (everything was just good enough). but no one questioned quality. and the fact that it was a person, not an agency increased cred.

Marty Wetherall said...

And as we observed recently Aki, higher production value actually hurts you at the social since we tend to give the homemade UGC movie a fairer shake. 35mm film needs to show something really special or else it's quickly dismissed as the man trying to make you buy stuff.

All the more reason to go fast, cheap, and outta control.

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