About Us
A dude’s sitting on his couch, using the commercial break to pour himself second bowl of cereal. A network promo starts up; the two-minute warning for when his show’s about to start up again. He hooks the milk jug with a free digit and moves toward the – CRACKLE — HISS – FLICKER — POP — !!!
Click INTERRUPTION to see scaled, shortened version of the flash… some actual images and noises!!
Jarred from his commercial stupor, he looks up – briefly flashes to finding the number for the cable company – WHEN….;
A cartoon monkey appears on screen (everybody loves and identifies with monkeys), amidst a quick bright flashy intro. The monkey speaks to camera — in a strangely familiar voice. He’s clever and thoughtful, funny and enthusiastic and entertaining. He talks up a bit of content (a video, song, article, film clip, image, show, game, meme, etc, etc, etc..) that he sincerely loves; he digs this thing, and can’t help but want to tell you about. He’s just sincerely enthusiastic in pointing out that you could be a step away from watching/reading/listening to… from consuming this little bit of awesome out there.
All by way of saying; ”Wake up kids, there’s so much awesome out there that you could be watching right now!”
You might recognize his or her monkey voice (varied buzz-worthy list of uncredited personalities will set the tone in the first run of 6 or 7 vids) and you watch their words visualized in animation and imagery.
‘DANCE MONKEY DANCE‘ flutters across the screen, with another few flashes of bright, jarring imagery and sound and… you’re snapped back into your regularly scheduled programming without missing a beat.
The log line is: Interesting folks talking about stuff they sincerely love.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Oprah would often have on a super celeb – a Julia Roberts type – to prattle on from a list of her favourite things; ie. favourite potato chips or favourite movie for a Sunday afternoon. It’s insight into these guarded, private people that can’t come through a telephoto lens from across the street and over the hedges.
The take away: What they like says most about what they are like.
Moreover, sharing the stuff you sincerely love is the best way to connect to another human being in the modern world.
The most intimate medium – audio – puts you in the room with the conversation. Besides, everyone knows when you get someone talking about stuff they’re enthusiastic about and you’ll finally meet the ‘real’ person.
In its long form and as a feedback mechanism it’s a radio show/podcast, Let’s Be Specific (the videos build out to/from here); guests ‘bring in’ 5 specific bits of content they love (ie. a song, an episode of a show, a video, a documentary, an article, etc, etc.) and that list of content/’stuff’ is archived as a set of links; kinda like an iTunes Celeb Playlist that allows for more than just music.
See how it works? “Oooh, that voice… that sounds like Ryan Reynolds…. he’s declaring his love for the ‘Petit Tourette’ episode of South Park.” Click. Download. Forward. ‘Check this video of this wry monkey telling you in an entertaining and dynamic animated clip.’
From a repurposable podcast, we can chop up raw audio just begging to be repurposed; put it online, pieces on radio and ultimately do our “value add” by pairing it with animation to ‘break’ into TV broadcast (a modern “Max Headroom”-style pirating of the airwaves).
The buzz comes off the appearance of pirating the airwaves; the YouTube generation’s banner reads “broadcast yourself” but, it’s a quick path to relevance if you understand they’re really saying, “Eff you guys, I’ll do it myself.”
The virtues of building this on the bones of a Let’s Be Specific podcast: no barriers to contribute and consume.
Novel and therefore noteworthy, this convergent media allows for mechanisms of inputing and/or contributing content that fosters the feeling of ‘taking back the people’s airways’; these are keys to the grail of “going viral” and, without fail, they’ll get you earned media (articles, blog posts, tweets, etc.) as people scramble to show a jaded public something they’ve not yet seen.
