You Tube Videocracy

• Posted on Dan
• in travel, work
• on February 29, 2008
• 4 Comments.

I’ve been terrible about blogging and updating people on my life. Frankly, I realize the last thing I want to do is talk about work in my down time. But here it goes since it’s new…

So I worked on this project for this company called You Tube. They’re owned by this other company called Google. I was hired as a contractor by a production company (same person I did some Levi’s work with). I was half event producer, half VIP Talent manager. What does that mean? I dunno, but I worked my ass off, met the founders of You Tube, executives at Google that Ben would literally kill me for their phone numbers, and made sure our celebrities felt well taken care of. Other interesting people I met included Anderson Cooper, SouljaBoy, Esmee Denters, The Will It Blend Guy, The Flute BeatBox guy, the artist Jason Baalman who did a portrait of Angelina Jolie entirely from lipstick, PaintJam artist Dan Dunn who did a roughly 6ft x 6ft portrait of Johnny Cash in about 4minutes while this crazy kid Vince Mira sang (he sounds just like Johnny Cash), singer Lisa Lavie, and other You Tubey popular people.

The event was essentially to bring YouTube to life for a night, and present to about 500 top-tier chief marketing officers, CEO, and execs how they can harness the YouTube community, since apparently they’re scared of it or something.

We took a 3 story club on the west side of NYC, installed so much audio and video equipment that it took us a whole week to get it all in. We had a few of the Panasonic 103 in HDTVs, but that was nothing rivaling the giant stage monitor we built. There was roughly 6 stage areas, so basically 6 things going on at once at all times. It as a lot to manage and apparently it has taken 2 weeks recovery for me to even talk about it.

There’s coverage out there if you google “Videocracy.”This one has pictures: http://blog.nextnewnetworks.com/index.php/2008/02/15/on-videocracy/This one has a video: http://www.tilzy.tv/news/2008/2/YouTube-Google-Videocracy-Party.htmThis one has words: http://valleyvirgin.blogspot.com/2008/02/night

In more new news, I’ll be heading down to Austin for this little thing called SXSW (South By Southwest) to coordinate Ray-Ban’s involvement. So look forward to more crazy work stories to follow, this time with music, film, and interactive media people. …wait, sounds similar to people I met during Videocracy.