That’s very 2.0. Did you know that?
I saw this earlier today, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to post about it. First, it’s a “Remembering Katrina” story. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important for us to remember the life changing events caused by Katrina, but the evacuation and aftermath story feels a little old, a little stale, a little inappropriate at this stage in the game. I think it’s more helpful to talk about rebuilding, moving on and bringing people home.
Ranting aside, Peter Mayer has done something sort of 2.0 here, but I don’t think they realize it. They created LivesConnected.com which displays a group of Peter Mayer employees represented by dots on two, diagonal intersecting timelines. When you click on a dot, a video window appears and an uneditted interview with the employee starts to play. They talk about their Katrina experience. That’s ok, but what’s cool is that you can jump to points in the interview that you may be more interested in. So, in a sense, they’ve tagged the video. Moreover, they connected tags to other employees, and formed something of a social network.
Wow, two 2.0 buzzwords, but is that what they are going for?
I doubt it. First, it’s not as 2.0 as it could be because the interface could be a little easier to navigate. I would like to see a grab and drag so that I could see the top and bottom of the chart they’ve created more easily. Second, I admit that I don’t know much about Peter Mayer (other than they are a fairly large ad agency here in New Orleans, and I’m sure they have a national reputation for producing excellent work), but I’ve never read about anything like this from them before. In other words, Peter Mayer isn’t known (at least not to me) to be a leader in emerging 2.0 trends, so I can feel confident in saying that I’m sure they weren’t trying to be 2.0.
But They Should Be
They should be trying (if they’re not already) to push the envelope and change what it means to be an ad agency today. Not only would it have implications across their industry (as they could be spearheading the inevitable), but it could help New Orleans regain some of its “Creative Culture” status lost by you-know-what. No one can ignore the progress Google in making in the ad world. I’m sure these guys aren’t going down without a fight, but in the face of Google who stands a chance?
Maybe someone at Peter Mayer is ego tracking, and will come across this blog post. I would love to hear what they have to say about LivesConnected — where they’re going, if they plan to do more things like this in the future, and how they feel about Google and the future of advertising online, on the radio, in newspapers and on TV. Stay tuned! bk