Canadian New Media Awards 2008
Posted by Laura Paolini on December 3rd, 2008
I want to take a second to direct you to 7a*11d’s blog where Andrew J Paterson and Elaine Wong will catch you up. That might be a good way to segue into this blog; I tend to be the type of gal that has more fun watching an artist come dangerous close to lighting himself on fire, than discuss ways to capitalize on new media.
On the evening of Tuesday November 18th, CiRCA hosted the Canadian New Media Awards. This posting is so late because while I was at the awards and the majority of nextMEDIA conference stuff, the hours were long and I had to deal with other life stuff too. The last time I moderated this draft was November 25th.
I walked into the awards ceremony and accidentally bypassed the area where I could get press kits, English and French programs (grabbed the French by accident) and drink tickets. It was not an open bar and I kindly thank Asif Khan from Octopz Media for giving me a drink ticket. I spoke briefly to the Canadian Film Centre faculty and found the atmosphere overall calm and celebratory, though the rest of the conference was lightly peppered with economic worries and strategies to still engage and work in this sector with increasingly less government support.
The Canadian new media awards have been going on for eight years now, and the nominees are put together from peer and industry suggestions. I was personally surprised to see several public broadcasters nominated, including TVOkids.com in the category of Children’s entertainment. There was also an educator of the year award going to Dan Zen, and I was also really happy with the representation of new documentary and narrative forms. If you haven’t yet, please see the winner for Best Social Media websites homelessnation.org. Created by Daniel Cross, the Montreal based project (with out reach locations across the Country) is a forum for the homeless by the homeless, and uses the conceptual space online to offer the homeless a solid hub for discussion, making friends, and ultimately a voice to battle the prejudices and barriers many of these capable people face daily.
To contextualize, nextMEDIA is an annual conference in its second year and the next one will be held in Banff in the spring of 2009. What’s nice about it is all aspects of the industry are invited to come, from CEOs to programmers to entrepreneurs, students and the enthusiast like myself.The theme for this year’s nextMEDIA conference was “Monetizing Digital Media” and discussed things from branded entertainment to the importance of web presence.
Lori Schwartz’s Trendspotting panel was the highlight of the second day for me. The Director of Emerging Media at IPEM Lab was a compelling speaker, knew her stuff and was able to share it in a convincing and exciting way. After that the day was not too fabulous for me. The mobile discussions were really disillusioning because while they were interested in talking about apps and using smartphones, no one really addressed how damn expensive a lot of these features are for users anyway. The talk also didn’t really address the fact that we have teh technological means to do innovative things with apps or short codes, yet the Canadian telecom infrastructure in place makes these experiments incredibly difficult.
The panel/ networking opportunity I think I regret missing the most (since I was in crit at the CFC at the time) is the one titled “Making Money from Pay-per-Use content services ” with Missy Suicide (yes the co-founder of the SuicideGirls). I think it would have been somewhat informative, but I must admit for a panel that was aimed at discussing the models, financial viability and rate of growth for VOD (Video on Demand) and Adult Entertainment, I can guess where Missy Suicide sits and I gotta say, that’s pretty vanilla. But it’s daytime hours so you can’t really hold it against them.
found on nextMEDIAevents flickr page
Something I found particularly interesting was the focus on content yet the inability to really discuss what that meant for a company or how content could be used in an innovative way. After all, the conference was called “monetizing digital media” not “monetizing digital content.” Alexandra Levy (Director of Branded Entertainment at Google) used the Burger King/Seth McFarland campaign as a case study of targetting demographics using branded content. That 18-35 male demographic can generate a lot of income. In fact it’s also equally interesting (perhaps not surprising) to see how many beer companies have successfully implimented online campaigns to perpetuate a brand lifestyle, the Canadian Code being a particularly interesting project I encourage you to check out. Molson set out this campaign with the concept of an unwritten code of conduct their target demographic would articulate to them, and they partnered with Heavy video to produce this webisodes sharing and deciphering this elusive (and exclusive) code.
One of the gold partners of the event was the Ontario College of Art and Design, my own alma mater and that of several readers and friends of our community. I bring this up to return to the discussion of content. That’s something OCAD is pretty good at, from what I remember. Something I would suggest in this discussion is a move away from branding digital content to questioning how a company could benefit from the plethora of content that already exists. I won’t be the one to argue there’s a business model in user generated content, but even while the ecomonic tides are rough right now, people still make things and take ownership of what they put online. It may seem I’m arguing sponsorship or some other altruism, but really I’m just agruing if the discussion says content is king, then the user generating the content must be pretty special too. All million plus of them? Food for thought.
