NTV New York 2.0 Recap

Thanks very much to all who joined us last night in New York City for our viral ads edition of the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings. After any number of snafus (including the NYU campus police denying us our beer!), the video line-up for the evening and the folks who came out were truly special.

We did this month’s event a bit differently from our others, in that we didn’t solicit submissions but rather worked with video analytics firm Visible Measures to find ten ads that had viral qualities but weren’t so overexposed as to be redundant for people. The ads were from all sorts of now-familiar viral categories, like “Is it real?” and PSAs and musical parody. Our judges — Ian Schafer, the CEO and founder of Deep Focus; Kate Cohen, the creative director of TBWA\; and Ben Relles, the founder of BarelyPolitical.com, home of Obama Girl — used their with extensive experience in virality and advertising to add great qualitative comments and additional context. And then Matt Cutler of Visible Measures gave us the hard numbers on how each ad was doing in a number of categories, including number of views, number of comments, and number of placements by fans across the web.

Dynamite Surfing – More bloopers are a click away

The night’s winner by audience vote ended up being a PSA called “Chemical Party” from Marie Curie Actions that was funny and hip and unexpected. In second was “Dynamite Surfing” from Quicksilver — an “Is it real?” that was actually covered on Mythbusters recently — and in third place was “It’s Called epMotion,” an over-the-top R&B music video for an automated pipetting system (a product we clearly all need to run out and buy!).

Thanks again to our co-hosts at the New York Video 2.0 group and our sponsors, ON2 Technologies, G-Technology, Volomedia, Move Networks and DF Splash — and our great partners Threadless, Eventbrite and Mozes.