Hello blog readers!  Let me introduce myself.  I’m Gary, one of the co-chairs of this year’s >Play Digital Media Conference.  Planning for the 2008 conference is in full swing and we have lots of exciting things in the works.

The conference will take place on November 15, 2008.  Our theme is Disruption: Changes in Today’s Media Economy. I’m excited to have a team of motivated, enthusiastic and passionate people who care about sports, entertainment, gadgets, innovations and everything under the sun as it relates to digital media and technology.

In addition to organizing the conference, I got my hands full with my summer internship at Nike.  As a marketing intern for the Digital Content & Media department, I get the chance to carry out a promotional campaign, perform industry research, and funny enough, help organize another conference!  But that’s not all.  Every marketing intern participates in a marketing case competition where we are put into teams that will present recommendations on a challenge that Nike is facing.  Our group is currently working hard to conduct consumer research.  There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but I’m having fun doing it.  Plus, you can’t help but take pleasure in all the green scenery Oregon has to offer.  As a SoCal native, this is unfamiliar to me so I am soaking up every moment.
So that’s my little tidbit.  Stay tuned for upcoming announcements!

One of the advantages of spending the summer in a big tech company is meeting writers / singers / miscellaneous interesting characters who come to talk to 30-100 of us at a time.  These people are like exotic specimens in the fish tank at the dentist’s office… which is why we call these presentations “fish bowls”.

A couple of weeks ago we met Marie Digby. Marie who? Marie the very talented and beautiful singer… that’s who. After she sang for us, she broke out of her shell and handled some Q&A. It turns out that Marie spent a full year recording her album in 2006. Her label, however, wasn’t inclined to release it, mainly considering the marketing efforts needed to promote an anonymous singer. Marie was kind of desperate, she had heard of other singers with albums never getting released. As this industry works, she can’t take the album elsewhere. That is when the proverbial friend told her to put some songs on YouTube. Marie’s cover of Umbrella, which has 8 million views to date, received Jay-Z’s praise when he told her that it was the best of the 200 covers he had heard. The label, now with a heavy dose of viral marketing, decided to release her album last April and now she is touring. The rest is history (still to be made).

Where the hell is Matt? Harding, spent an hour with us sharing stories from around the world. If you missed him, Matt is the guy dancing his geeky, silly dance on every corner of the globe. The video he released in June already has 7.5 million views. Matt was originally a game developer who liked to do his goofy dance. His first video was published before the YouTube era and got enough attention to connect him with Stride Gum, his sponsor until this very day. His second video has almost 11 million views, and his third was just released. Matt works on these projects full time. If you think it is a lot of fun going all over the world and dancing, you are probably right. But Matt actually spends typically no more than a day in each destination so I guess he spends most of his time on air planes.

To me it’s amazing how a medium that didn’t exist a few years ago is already responsible for the creation and promotion of new artists. If it wasn’t for YouTube these artists wouldn’t be where they are. Video on the internet is disrupting the way art is created. We decided that our next >play conference will be about disruption. You should be there.