Hooray for (Digital) Hollywood
14 May, 2008
I have just come back from Digital Hollywood where I spent the whole of last week. Highlights included:
- Listening to Chuck D, founder of Public Enemy speak. I reckon he might be the best speaker on digital publishing that I have heard. Some highlights included:
- Don’t worry too much about contractual terms and other barriers to getting stuff out there. If you have a good idea its most important that you just get it out there. The deal will fall into place;
- When somebody compared UGC to McDonald’s and said that people prefer editorially selected content (fine restaurants where people were prepared to spend big money) to UGC (McDs), Mista Chuck pointed out that whilst nobody ever reheated a Big Mac, if you bite into a fresh one, it tastes really good (and so it is for UGC).
- What was most special was that Chuck D used 10 words when most people would have used 100 and he clearly had not just read a bunch of blogs and regurgitated the consensus. Maybe not surprising given that he has a track record of innovation in music. Afterwards I got the chance to trade a few stories with him from back in the day (him from Long Island, me from the Swansea Valley) as per the photo (apologies for picture quality but this was taken on a 59p hamburger of a camera phone);
- Driving to meetings in an automatic hire car. I couldn’t get used to the fact that there was no biting point and you should only use one foot, so often the Mints showed up at meetings with a jerky motion as the automobile lunged into the car park. We also found an awesome radio channel so we had a soundtrack to our arrival, and at one point my voice was coarse having been singing in the car too much on the way to the meeting. The moral of this story is to save your voice for the meeting;
- Looking around the event and the wider Hollywood community, it struck me that most digital endeavours were either focussed entirely on technology or on making short form content for the web. I think Mint’s focus of combining technology with ideas for hit formats is fresh and exciting;
- I had a good chat with a lot of delegates about the importance of agile technology when it comes to TV on the web. All were in agreement that the agile approach demonstrated by Mint is the only way to build sites that move as fast as their audiences do.
