One of the movies which immediately caught my eye when looking at the line-up for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival is Morgan Spurlock‘s new documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Spurlock shot to fame at the 2004 festival with his feature doc Super Size Me, and has since produced two seasons of the underrated reality cable series 30 Days. His feature follow-up Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? was met with mixed response. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is his third theatrical feature film (not counting the segment he directed for the Freakanomics movie).
The initial announcement described the movie as “A documentary about branding, advertising and product placement is financed and made possible by branding, advertising and product placement.” Sounds like an interesting, if not gimmicky, concept. Hit the jump to see the first image from the film.
Sundance’s longer description of the film follows:
Acclaimed filmmaker and master provocateur Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) returns to the Sundance Film Festival with tongue-in-cheek perfection as he examines the world of product placement, marketing, and advertising by making a film financed entirely by product placement, marketing, and advertising. We live in an age where it’s tough even to walk down the street without someone trying to sell you something. It’s at the point where practically the entire American experience is brought to us by some corporation. Utilizing cutting-edge tools of comic exploration and total self-exploitation, Spurlock dissects the world of advertising and marketing by using his personal integrity as currency to sell out to the highest bidder. Scathingly funny, subversive, and deceptively smart, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold shines the definitive light on our branded future as Spurlock attempts to create the “Iron Man of documentaries,” the first ever “docbuster”! He may very well have succeeded.
Spurlock says that he has “funded this entire film with money from some pretty straight-laced companies, and the end result will surely make you laugh all the way to therapy.” The plan is to release the movie in Spring of 2011.
via: Gordon and the Whale
Who will set 2011′s standards in NewNet technologies like social media and real-time feeds? In terms of growing user adoption, revenues and technology innovation and influence, a few types of companies come to mind.
First, there are the obvious leaders: Facebook and Twitter. These NewNet behemoths — though it’s hard to call such relatively young companies that — remain two of 2010’s highest-impact players and can’t be excluded from any forward-looking discussion of the social media space for 2011.
Facebook. You can’t miss the influence of Facebook’s user growth and its technology platform. But even if it’s a billion-dollar business, Facebook is making far less money off its users than Yahoo, let alone Google — both of whom sell many more ads per user. I don’t expect Facebook to cash in on its social graph by licensing the data — that would be a privacy PR nightmare. I also believe its execs when they say the company is not working on a social media ad network — yet. But in 2011, we should expect at least two things from Facebook:
- Facebook will build out its advertising and sponsorship offerings. It needs to do that to get more money from big-brand advertisers. Facebook Pages should get a richer creative palette, and may also get better integration with off-site targeting and measurement. That might require an ad network partnership — are you listening, Microsoft?
- Third-party developers will handle apps. Facebook will likely leave the development of more engaging app experiences to third-party developers in its ecosystem, and concentrate on communications. Facebook Groups and Messaging are both heading down a path toward a unified communications hub.
Twitter. At some point, we have to answer three questions about Twitter:
- How can it make money?
- How important is its data?
- How can its information feed be made more useful for users?
The answers may not be as related as you’d think. Twitter bailed out on social commerce, and it is still only experimenting in advertising, though its recent site redesign is much more accommodating of display, video and search marketing. Expect to see it expand its data licensing and concentrate on building out features — probably something that feels like topic filters — so users will find its site and apps both more addictive and more flexible. That focus would be at the expense of solving the real-time advertising opportunity, although we’ll probably see richer and better-targeted ad formats on Twitter built off its learnings from promoted tweets and trends.
Facebook and Twitter may be a given in 2011, but other mid-range companies stand to potentially disrupt the NewNet space this year.
LinkedIn. One of the original social networks, LinkedIn’s professional social graph includes extremely rich data, including profession, expertise, sophisticated contact relationship info, “six degrees of separation” connection weighting, etc.
LinkedIn already acts as an easy-to-use, efficient Twitter filter: Users’ contacts who tweet are automatically added to the LinkedIn network activity feed — no need to follow or make lists. LinkedIn offers company pages and product recommendations, and is even trying to syndicate its own Like button. But what would be more interesting would be mining that professional graph for more than job-hunting, say, for instance, by building out ad targeting, sales opportunity connections and more professional services.
Skype. Skype, the leading global Internet voice and video communications network, has 124 million average monthly connected users and half a billion accounts, many with billing relationships. Skype is well-positioned to act as a unified communications hub for managing different types of communications, contacts and groups. It could play a role in presence management. Most of its integration efforts have been done to get Skype voice and video on more screens. Could Skype be a social network, or is the company content to offer communications services to social networks?
Of course, these companies aren’t alone in the space, and there’s a handful of stalwarts I suspect we haven’t finished hearing from. To read about that group, see my column at GigaOM Pro.
Image source: flickr user compujeramey
Related Content From GigaOM Pro
- 4 NewNet Companies That Made Headlines in 2010
- 5 NewNet Milestones That Won’t Happen in 2011
- NewNet 2011: Advertising and Communication will Drive Innovation
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