“Colbert’s light saber and cutting the bleeding edge”

I was flicking through some late night television last week and I stopped at The Colbert Report hosted by Stephen Colbert. As he was talking they showed a clip of him fighting a CG space alien.

It seemed odd but it was the Colbert Report so I followed along. Colbert explained after it was over that the clip was a submission by one of his fans. He went on to talk about his ongoing Green Screen Submission campaign.

They have a green screen video posted on thier fan site, The Colbert Nation, of Colbert jumping around with a toy light saber that viewers can download and create their own clip. Once completed you can upload it for all to see and possibly be shown during the show. Of course many clips are showing up on YouTube as well.

I checked out a few of these on the website and other places. Most are low grade but a few a very cool. A great one, and a Mac shout-out, is this one on “You’re the Man Now Dog” website.

Now this isn’t the only interactive web buy-in they have going on. Colbert also did his “Word” rant with a Wikipedia bend. He went in many directions but the funny thing was how he put it to his viewers to change the document on elephants , on Wikipedia, to say that the elephant population in Africa has tripled in the past six months. A potential weakness in the Wikipedia design.

Well they tried and Wikipedia admins blocked edits to the elephant entries and (apparently) they had a database crash after his segment went to air. They say it was unrelated…I’ll stay out of that one.

What is cool is how the Colbert show embraced some of the new, hot Internet trends that other broadcasters are starting to closely look at and be concerned about. As more people can become their own broadcasters and create their own content some of the audience is drifting away from mainstream television and watching episodes on their laptops, Ipods and whatever the new video watching gadget is coming down the pipe.

So with one swoosh of a toy light saber in front of a green screen, Stephen Colbert drew blood along the cutting edge of the Internet and opened a gash between mainstream broadcasting and user driven (and created) programming.

So, you have heard enough. Clicked on a few links and caught up to some late night fun. But what does this mean for me?

Well the spin for me is the cutting edge part. How close to that edge can you get without getting cut? You want to stay current but do not want to lose your investment on something that is out of date in three months because it did not catch on.

For video, the cutting edge is being redefined every day with advances in compression, disk formats and competing camera makers. As I mentioned in previous blogs, format wars have not yet spit out winner. But like the concept behind Wikipedia, video users are quickly deciding for themselves what works best for them.

Video and the Internet have had a laggy and pixilated beginning but with advances from Windows Media and QuickTime things have quickly come clear. Depending upon your connection speed you can watch clear and good quality video on most computers.

You now watch video on the Internet and think about the content versus thinking about how out of sync and the audio is or how the video is riddled with artifacts. It is a valid communication tool and you can now create products that were previously costly (to adhere to broadcast standards, a.k.a an online edit process). You can then show them to your public at an acceptable cost by hosting them on your own website (or in the case of video podcasts via iTunes) and sidestep traditional broadcast advertising costs.

So you can make your own commercials! Now the benefit to broadcast time is that a market is proven to be watching television. Using the Internet you could create a series of product demos and samples and email existing and potential clients with a link to the clips that also direct them to you website thus doubly promoting your company.

So this is not such a new thing for most Internet users but the format the content is created in is. So you balance between using the latest codecs (i.e. QuickTime’s H.264 or Windows Media Player 10) against eliminating some of your viewing audience because they do not have the latest browser or browser software. But the benefit of being close to that cutting edge is a faster playing video, better looking graphics and showing that you are in the “know”.

From a marketing perspective it would all depend on your audience. If you think that most of the people you are contacting can easily click to upgrade their software (as it usually takes only a few minutes to do so) then get close to that edge. On the other hand if your client(s) are tied to a heavy IT department that only does company wide upgrades every quarter on more, then you might want to stay back a few generations.

A little advice a marketing executive gave me in a chat about new technologies was this, “Stay on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge”.

CM
www.cmcreative.ca