Art (and Marketing) In the Age of YouTube

At the Creators Series, a “multidisciplinary salon-style conference” held in New York last weekend, which will travel to Los Angeles this weekend, an audience member asked a panel of artists whether the interactive filmmaking techniques they were discussing had any commercial potential.In terms of individual artists’ work, the answer may vary. But as for the overall field of new media art, the sponsor of the conference, Tomorrow Unlimited, is betting it’s a resounding yes. Tomorrow Unlimited was launched earlier this year by Tribeca Enterprises, an umbrella company that also includes the Tribeca Film Festival and Tribeca Cinemas. Tomorrow Unlimited aims to foster “emerging creativity,” particularly in the areas of new technology and multimedia. The clothing manufacturer Diesel is already a sponsor of the Creators Series, and Tribeca Enterprises expects that other companies wanting to attract a young, empowered consumer will soon be eager to attach themselves to Tomorrow Unlimited’s maverick image and network of emerging talent.Welcome to marketing in the age of YouTube, where brands seek to appeal to the consumer’s so-called creativity, in part by associating themselves with genuine artists and creative dialogue, in part by exploiting interactive technologies such as social networks.Tribeca Enterprises launched Tomorrow Unlimited with the founders and former principals of RES Media Group. RES Media Group developed a digital film festival called RESFEST, a bimonthly magazine called RES, and a network of Web sites, including the music site Epitonic. (The match between the parties was made by Robert Nathan of Cinetic Media, a media and entertainment consulting firm.)Right now, Tomorrow Unlimited exists as two things: the Creators Series and the Tomorrow Unlimited Web site, of which only one part, “Notes” — a sort of blog about articles and events related to visual art, music, film, fashion, sustainability, and other hip topics — has been launched so far. Eventually the site will include reviews, news articles, opinion pieces, as-told-tos and first-person essays by artists about their projects, the editor, Jesse Ashlock, said. Mr. Ashlock said the Web site would combine aspects of a wide variety of existing sites, including Cool Hunting, Boing Boing (a blog by a group of Wired contributors), Design Observer, and Salon.Among the artists and projects featured at the Creators Series conference were Matt Hanson, a “cinema futurist” who is raising money for a feature film by recruiting collaborators online (his project is called, appropriately, “A Swarm of Angels”); Chris Doyle, a Brooklyn artist whose collaborative video project, “50,000 Beds,” will have its premiere next month at three contemporary art venues in Connecticut; the Graffiti Research Lab, which describes itself as “dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication,” and the reacTable, a glowing synthesizer that looks sort of like a very physical video game, and which Björk has been using on her world tour.Executives at Tribeca Enterprises and Tomorrow Unlimited said that advertisers are looking for media companies that can reach a young, and increasingly global, creative community through multiple channels. Among those channels are things like the Creators Series, or what the chief executive officer of Tomorrow Unlimited, Karol Martesko-Fenster, called “authentic events” — meaning authentically creative, rather than cynical and marketing-driven.“We have partners on the ground who can provide an authentic event in Tokyo or São Paolo,” Mr. Martesko-Fenster said, speaking of Tomorrow Unlimited’s potential to market a global brand like Diesel.Mr. Martesko-Fenster said next year’s Creators Series will include a section of curated presentations by some of the leading boutique advertising firms, which would function as sort of a singles event matching ad executives with young artists and designers. “The creators are doing work, and they don’t necessarily have an economic benefit, and a lot of the agencies are looking for the next wave of talent,” Mr. Martesko-Fenster said.Diesel isn’t the only fashion brand trying to market itself through a real or virtual community of creators. The fashion label Dr. Martens recently launched a program called Freedm, to spotlight emerging artists. (“We’re not calling it a campaign, and we’re not calling it an initiative — we’re calling it a movement,” Dr. Martens’s senior marketing manager, Kimberly Barta, said.) There is a social networking site called freedm2.com, where people can post their art, their writing, or their music.Earlier this year, two curators chosen by Dr. Martens, the street artist Shepard Fairy and the brand manager of Surface Magazine, Riley Johndonnell, selected 10 artists from the site to have their work exhibited on street-level billboards in Brooklyn and San Francisco, in a promotion called “Sidewalk Galleries.” Currently, Freedm is soliciting young bands to compete to perform at Ibiza Rocks, along with established bands such as the Arctic Monkeys.“There’s been a big move over the last five years for brands to become more connected at a street level,” the president of the boutique advertising agency Attik, William Travis, said. “A lot of marketing budget [is spent] to empower the individual user to have a richer brand experience, so they won’t just be looking at a billboard or a TV commercial; they’ll be looking at art or reading about how a new music video was made or how a fashion came into style. It makes the consumer feel like they have an influence on trends of the future.”Influence, empowerment, interactivity — these were all big themes at the Creators Series conference, as they are in new media development in general. Of course, when applied to marketing, they can mean the opposite of what they seem to.

Art (and Marketing) In the Age of YouTube

Art (and Marketing) In the Age of YouTube

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