There's creative strength in numbers...
I was fortunate to attend the excellent Own It event held at Channel 4 on Tuesday, which was entitled, "Formally known as the audience... the power of collaboration". Of course, any seminar as highly relevant to Mesh as this would have me beating down its door... So, without further ado, here's my round-up of the evening's discussion:
Superb moderator, Paula Le Dieu of Magic Lantern briefly introduced the speakers:
During the Question and Answer session, Stefan noted that whilst initially the switch in focus to becoming a consumer-centric brand adopted by Moo was down to a lack of marketing and advertising budget, the ongoing value is clearly now the high standards of content created by their patrons.
When pressed on the topic of whether Ford's aim of 'reaching out to a different audience' was met by the Where are the Joneses? campaign, Damien revealed that in the next round, they would be focusing on identifying which target audience would be best suited to such a brand engagement exercise and how to reach out to them. I suppose that means there was no 'giant leap' in sales of Ford cars as a result of the foray into the world of Web 2.0.
The Where are the Joneses? footage makes use of the Creative Commons Licence thereby allowing bedroom-based producers to mix and mash the content before re-uploading it to YouTube. My mind briefly fleets to an ideal world where out-of-work people moonlighting in the tv and film industries have enough cashola behind them to af-Ford to leave their Hackney-based broadband-linked bed-sits, let alone purchase a car. Then I come back to reality.
The next item tackled was whether there is now the beginning of a new approach to constructing contracts for a networked audience. Robert was quick to shoot down the positive vibes from Stefan (who bestowed a rather hippy-esque response, "You just need to focus on the mutual benefit rather than the worst case scenario", which sadly lacked a "share the love" addendum). He warned that you cannot afford to be too cavalier in your approach to Creative Commons. Ultimately, whilst giving away your work for free may seem like a good idea "before you get famous", work donated in this way could affect the overall value of your new work should you actually reach the heady heights of stardom. He also brought the attention of the audience to the Dump Your Pen Friend advertisement by Virgin Mobile which has since provoked a nice juicy lawsuit. Excellent.
Amongst the audience, there were one or two murmurs about the benefits of the Creative Commons Licence, but Robert's message was loud and clear - do not enter into any such Licence without seeking solid legal advice. Your rights are at stake.
Once Mesh launches the Projects feature next year, which will facilitate online collaborations between the arts and business worlds, we will publish a full feature in the Magazine which will detail accessible information on how to approach joint authorship, if artistic collaboration is envisaged. Whether we will be promoting Creative Commons Licences to our audience is not certain at the moment considering the Licences' shortcomings.
Following the event, I was fortunate to meet two very interesting film producers - Andrew Hinton (currently artist in residence at The Southbank Centre for his work with Saint Etienne) and Ajay Rai of Invincible Pictures who is embarking on a politically and socially focused film project. It was a very great honour to meet them, especially considering both of them had heard of Mesh before! It is always good to know that word of mouth seems to be working...
