"video" in Weblog

When the JCB song video did the rounds a few weeks ago I was completely charmed. I watched it through several times, ordered the album and then spent a while browsing the Monkeehub website. That’s every marketing man’s dream! Not only did I buy the product I also spent time looking up others involved.

Now, I’ve bought albums based on videos before - I have a notepad that I carry around with me that has band names and song titles scrawled all over it, but I don’t think the experience has ever been this easy. Because I saw the video online, it was only a couple of short clicks to get everything I needed… Offline it’s more of a chore: I get distracted, something else comes along, whatever. This one medium approach is something I’ve never come across before.

Are we going to see more of this kind of thing? What is the audience of MTV2? I’m told it’s relatively small… The catch is that to flourish on the web either the song or the video have to be something special, so that rules out a lot of the major label signings. Monkeehub did an absolutely incredible job, perfectly matching the tone of both the music and the lyrics, and the song itself is great. I’m not such a fan of the rest of the album, to be honest, but my point is that the online promo did something I very rarely do: go straight out and spend my money.

I would dearly love to know how Nizlopi’s sales have done since that video started circulating.

Many thanks to Sermad for the tip here… Check out the video effects on the Absolut Metropolis site! Apparently video effects are the big new addition to Flash 8 so there’s going to be some really interesting Aftereffects-meets-the-web type high media coming our way soon.

Completely unrelated, exept by its use of Flash, but also amazing is the Kinetic Singapore site.

It’s been a long time since I’ve managed to get excited about a Flash site but both of these are lovely…

I’ve just been shown Preloaded’s video for Evil Nine’s track “Crooked” and thought it’d be worth sharing. It’s done in Flash - no big deal - but check the hand movements. They’re actually animated properly, no tweening. Good job!

Vodaphone have created an incredibly slick, high-bandwidth site to promote their R&D department’s work. They’ve used streaming Flash video (Comm Server), slick transitions, heavy media, large pictures… Everything! With broadband spreading, is this what we can expect from the internet in the future?