Cool Marketing Thoughts

Consumer generated media is very hot, but it isn’t new. The Beastie Boys did it already almost two years ago, when they handed out over 50 videocams to fans at a concert and told them to just shoot to their hearts content. The footage was edited and the resulting film, “Awesome, I Fucking Shot That!” is breakthrough.

From The New York Times:

New York punk rockers turned rappers turned caring hip-hop artists and family men, members of the Beastie Boys have more than most musicians used technology to involve fans in the creative process. They have been posting a capella songs on www.beastieboys.com, for instance, and inviting fans to use those building blocks for remixes of their own. [...]

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”[...]

The longest cut in “Awesome” barely breaks a minute. Many shots clock in at less than a second. All told, the hour-and-a-half “Awesome” contains 6,732 edits. [...]

At Sundance the Beastie Boys will be the headliners at a party next week being given by MySpace, the social-networking Web site, to celebrate the debut of its filmmaker-community site. And MySpace will hold a contest urging its members to create a video of one of two Beastie Boys songs, “Sabotage” and “Shake Your Rump.”

Read more at the New York Times | via Ernie Schenck