Socially Wired

I have never been a fan of Big Brother or any of the me-centered reality shows. But there is something intriguing by the “real life” project the team behind Justin.tv have launched.

A co-worker of mine calls it living art. I call it living… period. Once again, the interactivity is the selling point. You can call Justin and have him answer your phone on the spot while the show is streaming. You can also talk with other viewers and the Justin.tv team in a live chat forum.

And perhaps most importantly you can order pizza for Justin and watch the Dominoes delivery guy bring it in.

The point I’m getting at is that with all this interactivity and user participation, there exist great revenue streams for video projects of the type utilizing in-product placement.

Assumedly since it is all part of real life, the advertisments won’t appear contrived or forced…. You mean Justin really does eat Fruity Pebbles cereal for breakfast??

Unlike Justin.tv, Amanda Congdon’s foray into “in-vlog” product placement appears less genuous. An article in The Huffington Post spells out the ethical concerns of having DuPont “info-mercials” hosted by Amanda while ABC News itself often delivers stories about Dupont Corp… like say this one.

I think DuPont’s bigger concern should be the danger of associating their “science-based” R&D labs with a not-so-scientific host like Amanda. I mean her tech stories may be geek-centric… but come on she’s no Bill Nye the Science Guy.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Online Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.