Engaging Digital Content Examples
I was recently watching a couple of new music videos - on the net - and they made me recall a conversation I had with digital media producer / programmer Damon Berger about what makes for engaging online content.
In our discussion, one of the most important points Damon made was that content companies should treat the internet as a unique medium to communicate with audiences. That is a point that my colleague Scott Brown also echoed in an earlier blog post. Yet when online, I bet often most of us just come across TV content that has been re-purposed for the net - which is fine too if you need to play catch up and you consider your PC as equivalent to a sort of “online DVR”. But what kind of content just seems tailor made for the internet? A few recently discovered examples in the form of music videos follow.
In the past few days, I came across two music videos from two different musicians - one from the Norwegian electronic music duo Royksopp, and another one from California / Bay Area based rapper Azeem.
Royskopp - Happy Up Here
Happy Up Here from Röyksopp on Vimeo.
Azeem - Latin Revenge
Latin Revenge from Ben Stokes on Vimeo.
I feel like both of these videos were created just for me; I describe myself as the typically very very busy, very passive video content consumer. I may have a TV show or online video playing in the background, but my mind often is squarely focused on the PC and my emails, IM’s, or on the absorption of information from the Twitter stream. Yet because these two music videos I recently found are chock full of amazing digital animation techniques, both of them captured my attention on my smaller PC screen - pretty amazing - as I mentioned its hard to capture my attention online.
Both in the Royskopp “Happy Up Here” video, and the Azeem “Latin Revenge” video - the video producers / directors created content that screams “I know your time is short, but look at me now, I will amaze you” - great examples of engaging digital content.
Producer Reuben Sutherland created the Royskopp video and you can check out other great digital video productions he’s responsible for at his employer’s web site, Joyrider Films. I found a pretty interesting commercial he created for Sony’s Playstation 3. Ben Stokes directed the Azeem video. He created the “Latin Revenge” music video by shooting thousands of still photographs of rapper Azeem as he walked about San Francisco. Stokes then animated the thousands of still photos using Adobe After Effects Software.
Do you have other examples of online content do you consider engaging enough for you to keep watching all the way through instead of minimizing the video and getting back to work? Leave any examples in the comments below - thanks.
At the top of course are the Royskopp and Azeem music videos so you can judge for yourself - do you find them to be engaging as I do? One last note - I notice both the videos are hosted on Vimeo.com. I find more and more musicians are migrating away from using YouTube as the exclusive place to upload their content, and are now instead going with video players like Vimeo, Blip.tv, Metcafe.com, and Dailymotion. Or as I mentioned in a previous post they are using syndication services like Tubemogul.com to just syndicate their content to as many video sites as they can find.
Posted by Chuck Fishman at 01:27PM PST
Cisco Around the Web