Emailing 25k Marilyn Manson fans a video of their house | Hacker News Reader

Emailing 25k Marilyn Manson fans a video of their house

medium.com

93 pointsleemartin33 comments

In June 2004 Reason magazine did something similar: Every subscriber to the magazine received an individualized copy with an aerial photo of the subscriber's house on the cover, and the title "[Subscriber name], they know where you are!"

http://reason.com/archives/2004/06/01/database-nation

YES. Wow. This is what I referenced when pitching the project.

People are very sensitive about other people seeing images of thier homes. I'm in the military and once had to deal with a complaint about our aircraft "buzzing" a house. As the address was in nearby farmland I called the person to confirm the exact location. Maybe the house was on an approach to our airport or maybe our pilots were using it as a landmark for an exercise.

"I'm with one of our pilots now. We're looking at what we think is your house based on the address you gave us. Is it the one with the gravel driveway and L-shaped pool?"

"What? Are you taking pictures of my house?"

"No ma'am. I've got a satellite view of your address on my screen."

"You have spy satellites over my house!!@!$#!#"

"Google maps!, just google maps!"

#Click#

This reminds me of the interactive video to Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

You nailed it Paul. That campaign really inspired me early on as a developer (and I think a lot of devs in music would say the same) and I've used similar tricks of geo-nostalgia in other projects.

Really clever campaign.

Architecture wise I would have rendered the video server side and just send a link to the MP4 to the user skipping the 6MB attachment.

Cheers man. I would usually do something like this server side but didn't have much time to test the pros and cons of rendering via something like FFMPEG vs. After Effects. I was pretty excited to try out the DataClay plugin as well.

We really wanted to mail the attachment because most folks would receive this via mobile and you can't download a link (easily, to my knowledge) to your mobile file system or photo library. By putting the attachment in their inbox, it's a one-click process which gets them one step closer to sharing.

you leaked the videos url in your medium post :( Now everyone can check the location of MM fans. https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_1.mp4 https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_22357.mp4

Haha. That's like saying Google Maps can leak the locations of people. There's nothing to tie the users to the videos but I've gone ahead and turned off that S3 because you gave me a small heart attack.

better safe then sorry! ;)

Agreed. Thanks for the nudge

This is awesome. How did you end up working on projects like this one? This kind of interactive one-off experiences are something I've been interested in for a long time.

1) Got lucky: http://leemart.in/origin 2) Worked really hard and stayed as curious as possible 3) Add 15 years

There are companies that specialize in one-off, 100% bespoke digital media marketing campaigns.

Source: worked for one for 4.5 years. Did awesome stuff. Burnout is real though.

Sounds like an wesome campaign. Congrats! Are there any sample videos available?

Cheers man, check this out:

https://twitter.com/leemartin/status/907308086184087552

This is pretty awesome. Updates on the AC bill would be appreciated ;)

Well it's probably not going to be as bad as my S3 bill but I'm not looking forward to it.

Smart idea, and you got lucky there with the addresses :)

If we're counting luck, this campaign was a god damn fluke.

I assume the competition had finished. Why hadn't this personal data been deleted?

Did competition entrants have to opt in to allow you to use their personal data for marketing? Or was that opt in assumed?

Competition is still ongoing. It's tied into a larger campaign.

The videos were sent directly to users as part of an email confirmation of their contest entry. We did not use the videos for marketing. It was up to the user to actually share the video.

I think parents question is about if you have consent from your competition users to use their location data as part of marketing campaings as part of the ToS. While from a technical PoV this campaign is awesome, in Europe you might easily get sued for this kind of use of the data, especially since you make it quite obvious how you used the data (v.s. "hidden" data mining, which most companies can get away with).

Yeh, I hear you. Users consented to sharing their location as one of the variables required to enter the contest. It was a ticket giveaway so knowing their location allowed us to figure out which show they might go to. Again, the videos themselves were emailed directly to users and while sharing them publicly was encouraged, it was not something we did ourselves.

It's like... you gave me an email address so naturally I'm going to email you. You gave me a location so (unnaturally) I'm going to make a video for you.

I should also note that the location consent was (in most cases) initiated by the HTML5 Geolocation prompt. Now a lot of companies use this technology to reposition something like a Google Map on their website. We did the same thing but positioned a static map and made it part of a video composition.

> Contestants were required to give their email address and share their location in order to earn a chance to win tickets to see Manson live at a show near them.

ah ok

In addition, we contacted a few online store customers since we knew their mailing address. I believe the Manson camp also mailed some of those folks post cards with a similar theme.

no video example?

Check this out:

https://twitter.com/Mapbox/status/908100445754859521

https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_X.mp4

where X is 1-22357

Access denied even after replacing X with a number. leemartin wrote that he locked the S3 bucket the exact same minute of your post, unfortunately.

  #!/bin/bash  
  for ((i=1; i<=22357; i++)); do  
     ffmpeg -ss 00:00 -t 00:01 -i

https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_$i.mp4 -vframes 1 -f image2 mmfanloc-%05d.jpg done

whoops..

Out of curiosity (since we are on Hacker News) - what would have been your next logical step on trying to connect those videos to their actual fans?

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