Nina, a friend of mine from Holland made me aware of a media phenomenon happening wih two teenage girls Pomme & Kelly:
They are now in the semi-finals of the Google Idol, a contest which is like a sort of inverse karaoke: The song, up to the choice of the artists, is from the original singer which plays in the background and the task of the contestants is about making a funny show with lip moving and whatever else they want in front of their cameras at home.
Pomme & Kelly are absolutely hilarious, they have started their own blog where they are asking for support and getting much more back of it due to their originality. They have recorded quite a few songs as one can see on the right side navigation of their blog, but my favourite - also the one which is now in the semi-finals - is Aretha Franklin’s Respect.
Besides the undisputed entertainment factor, three things are remarkable about it and in line what I wrote yesterday about the unexpensive production capabilities of basically everyone of us:
1. Content is King. Nothing has changed about that. However, it is no longer necessarily the old and capital intense Main Stream Media (MSM) who are its producers. It can be “just” two girls from the Netherlands from their parents’ kitchen are now competing about the most valuable asset media is after: the attention of the audience.
2. The Power of a Network. There hasn’t been a single Euro in advertisement budget allocated to make this show percolate through the system. It all happened through a robust word-of-mouth network where I got the link from Nina, spoke to Markus on Tuesday who wanted to get it, showed it 20 min ago to Stephan Roppel who was cracking himelf from laughing and immediately asking me to send him the link and so the network journey is far from over jumping from nod via edge to the next node and so on. Exciting, terrific and cool.
3. Crossing the Chasm. Parallel worlds just exist in the imagination, in reality there is no such thing. So this phenomenon with Pomme & Kelly is no longer just bound to - what a lot of MSM-executives wished - a bunch of nerds who are indulging in “low quality” entertainment. It might start there, but from a certain point the activation in the network might become so strong and powerful that a media editor becomes aware of it and makes a story out of it and then other MSM might follow up. The tipping point. From there nothing can hold the wave of moving on. With the result of Pomme & Kelly being featured on Dutch radio stations, newspapers and TV.
These are the models of the media future we will have to look at closely. And I believe this is not a bad thing.
Feeds
Ha, my morning coffee tastes better with your blog;-)
BTW, if you visit Pomme & Kelly’s website, you would see that they are now also PRed in LA newspapers and broadcasted all over the world. With the net being what it is (sans frontier), whatever which is happening in Holland (the brick and mortar demarcation line) is no longer valid, even if you are interviewed on TV - broadcasting media cross over the broadband vessel almost seamlessly making not only “word of mouth” the vehicle of success but also innovation drivers.
Yes, we all think money, so advertisers…get on board!
As for Pomme & Kelly, I think they are having so much fun competing the Chinese boys. Healthy competition between East & West - the thing I love most about being a global nomad; “koffie verkeerd” (Dutch for coffee with milk) an anology I use to represent my main personal mission in life - the best of both worlds. Of course, online and offline too!
Must go back to morning coffee, this is too much tech-business talk (too early in the morning).
Hasta pronto amigo.
I schmeiß mi weg! Cool.
Hi Nina,
That’a a good one with “the best of both worlds” which I also feel to be my mission. So I enjoy both being in India and in Germany and forgetting the downsides in each of the countries which means not realizing the ubiquitious garbage in India and not realizing the ubiquitious rigidity in Germany :-)
“Peace, sista! Yo, yo …”
Rene