Do you remember hearing years ago about the guy in New York who set up cameras throughout his apartment, electively living under a microscope for an online audience?
Josh Harris is that guy. As the keynote speaker at today’s The Digital Living Room and the New Family Dynamic conference, he kept coming back to one message for marketers: have devices and broadband TV working in tandem.
The question going forward is—and there’s not a definable answer yet—how do you orchestrate those sets together as a whole?
Why would marketers want to? Harris, a co-founder of the cloud television project Net Band Command, kept coming back to one thought: audiences want to “watch and be watched.”
If this sounds something like Big Brother on steroids, it kind of is. The issue marketers are grappling with is how do you take signals from everyone’s house and makes sense of them – attaching dollars to and deriving value from that info.
Harris recounted the infamous “piece of work” is did in 2000 with his girlfriend in a New York City loft. The space was completely wired with cameras, the phones were bugged and Harris even placed surveillance in the commode, the “last bastion of privacy,” he said. This social experiment was called, appropriately enough, “We Live in Public” (later made the subject of a documentary of the same name).
Harris said he put his signal out to a network and projected live chats with some of his followers on the walls of the loft. If, say, Harris commented that he was hungry, chatters would offer suggestions and sometimes a (paid for) pizza would turn up at his apartment. They became so involved in Harris’ world that some even sent Christmas gifts. (As a revealing aside, Harris said he had a nervous breakdown after the project because “I was not prepared for the experience at all.”)
More recently, Harris took the concept of interactivity to a new level with Net Band Command, which allows users to watch and interact with one another through a cloud TV network. Part Skype, part YouTube, Net Band Command awards users points for watching or being watched in “self surveillance” video and audio.
While interactive video generated via Skype doesn’t involve a studio, Harris’ idea is to get users to create their own studio. In Net Band Command’s “reflective/reflexive” environment, people are watching what folks are doing in their homes.
While 25 years ago, home theatres were a big deal, Harris said, “now home studio is the new home theatre.” Changing your living room into a sound stage will foster more two-way interactions, he said.
Sound farfetched? Harris says anyone can add a few lights to their home and produce the same quality of content on their computer that a professional studio was capable of 20 years ago.
The key for marketers, he said, is figuring out how to add production value to cloud TV, since that’s where he believes people want to be watched.
What this all comes back to, argued Harris, is that “people want to be watched” and “the audience is demanding self-surveillance.”
This, he said, is where the marketing opportunity lies. Brands can create opportunities for consumers to be surveilled (or ‘create content,’ as a marketer would say) using technology already present in the home. Using Coke as an example, he suggested creating a small event during which people are invited to toast en masse with the product’s trademark can.
Cameras in the home detect the product, link it to Coke’s social media operation, and those consumers gain points in loyalty or gamification programs. If a Coke drinker demonstrates more engagement, they would be rewarded accordingly. Harris likened it to manufacturing a controlled flash mob that follows an instruction from a brand.
To download a copy of Microsoft’s whitepaper “Make Yourself at Home in the Digital Living Room,” click here
