Merging Media For Fun and Profit

Steal this idea for your business: Mashup thinking is creating a cross-media revolution.

I just watched a fabulous and artful video mashup that featured two of my favorite pieces of content from the 1990s– a cornball, but iconic, movie and a headbanger rock concert.

Thunder Busters  combines clips from the movie Ghostbusters with a video of a famous AC/DC concert in which the band performed their hit ThunderStruck.  Sounds weird, but it really works.

BTW: If you’ve got a little headbanger in you and you click on this link, turn up the volume!

So what does my wasting time on a cool video have to do with anything besides my lack of discipline? (Sorry coach, my bad).

Well, quite a bit, if you think about trends in the media world.

The mashup is well done — is quite clever actually — but it’s still amateur. But these days it’s increasingly hard to tell what’s amateur and professional in the media universe:  The emergence of new technology has unleashed a torrent of creativity that is often near professional level quality.

And the same experimentation that’s going on at the amateur level is also happening at the professional level. Media is converging everywhere.

That’s probably going to be one of the main themes in Merging + Media, a conference being held in Vancouver Oct 28-29. The conference will bring together 350-400 media professionals from film, television, games and interactive media to learn how media today is becoming “cross-media”.

The conference also features top international cross-media experts, showcases “best in class” case studies, discusses hybrid business strategies and explores how new platforms + technology can be adopted to help companies stay competitive. Another highlight will be the M+M Masterclass in which media producers who have cross-media projects and concepts in development will be able to fine tune their proposals and business plans.

Mash It Up

The overall message, of course, is that media refuses to be pigeonholed or slotted today. Creative professionals, like the amateurs who made the video, are combining all kinds of techniques to create new statements in new ways.

And that kind of thinking is rippling out everywhere, maybe even into the traditional office or media. Who says cross fertilization has to be restricted to the film world or the music world?

Why can’t the same thinking be applied to the business setting?  

So, you see, I wasn’t really wasting my time and being undisciplined after all.

I was gathering material for a little cross-media action myself.