The Wilderness Downtown

Warning: extremely long post below. Read (and be fascinated) at your own discretion.

So I was scrolling through my Twitterfeed, and procrastinating from school work when I stumbled across a post which led me to The Wilderness Downtown--a Chrome experiment (and an experimental music video) directed by Chris Milk. After I read about it, I couldn't resist but try it for myself. (Ironically enough, I saw the whole thing on Firefox since it crashed the three times that I tried to run it on Chrome.)

Here's a lowdown of what it is. You go to their site (here) and type in your childhood address. If Google maps has that place on streetview, then be prepared to watch a custom multi-window video featuring your childhood home with Arcade Fire's "We Used to Wait" playing in the background. It's hard to describe, it's one of those "you've got to try it out yourself" kind of things, and I don't want to go into any further details for fear of ruining it for you, or over-hyping it up. Ultimately, in my opinion, it's an experimental music video for Arcade Fire.

Now, I wouldn't say that I'm a big Arcade Fire fan (simply because I haven't heard nearly enough songs to form any opinion), but I am extremely impressed with how the band has embraced different web mediums and social media streams to market themselves and their latest album (The Suburbs, released August 3rd 2010). The Canadian band teamed up with Youtube, Vevo, and American Express to live stream one of their shows in NYC. Online audiences were given the choice of 2 camera angles to view the show. Amazon teamed up with their record label and offered the label at a discount price ($3.99!!) during the week of their release--which consequently led to their climb to the #1 spot on Billboard's album chart. Twitter came into play and also offered a CD discounts tweeted the day the band made their appearance on The Daily Show. Now THAT is what I call making use of relevant social media streams to reach out to all their fans. And I LOVE how smoothly and cleverly the music and the video are intertwined together.

Also, it's great to see just how far Google has gone in terms of marketing their products while promoting and encouraging web experimentation. We all know of the Google Demo Slam videos, their "Search" videos, as well as their methods of research for their Chrome extensions/changes (they release their experimental extensions to Chrome Beta users and note the general feedback). When I found out about The Wilderness Downtown, I was truly impressed by the ingenuity of the execution. It was such a clever way to showcase some of their best creations (i.e. Google map and their streetview) while revealing the potential in latest open sourced technologies and the creativity amongst users in the web community.

Of course, this may be a bit of a biased post since I am a HUGE Google fan, and I always love to talk about Canadian music. But I thought this was also an appropriate topic in lieu of our upcoming conference theme, which looks at "The New Era of Marketing" (tickets are still on sale! Check our home page for more information!). I feel like this is just a sneak peek at the potential of future social media marketing, and how companies and bands, such as Google and Arcade Fire, are testing their bounds, and setting the bar for viral campaigns and even marketing in general.

Anyway, I've rambled enough for this week, I won't delay you any further in checking out just what The Wilderness Downtown is about! Word of advice: unless you want your whole browser to crash, close all your other browser tabs and programs.

PS. Congratulations on muddling through the long post! Here, have a cookie. *cookie*