Hello, who are you?
That’s a difficult question to begin with! Do I consist of my name and function? Or do you want to know what my ‘big purpose’ in life is? I think I’ll just start with the basics. My name is Saskia Lammers and I work in marketing at Theaters Tilburg. Every year we host about 400 theater shows and concerts, which are attended by 150.000 visitors a year. As I love the work I do and can’t get enough of it, I’m also a board member at TAC, a cultural breeding ground for starting cultural entrepreneurs and artists.

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The 26th of November Joost will be speaking at Kom Je Ook in Amsterdam, organized by Mediamatic. The ‘public as programmer’ is the focus of this third edition of Kom je Ook? (Are You Coming Too?). It’s a program with foreign speakers like Fiona Romeo (Head of Digital Media at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London), Dutch case studies and do it yourself.

The sponsorship relation between Freshheads and Incubate is seen as a co-marketing alliance, as presented before on this blog. In this presentation I tried to give the core of the alliance. On what is the relation based? What is the deal? 
The presentation is in Dutch, but just little words are used. It might be (partly) understandable for you who don’t speak Dutch.

First of all I would like to thank Incubate for inviting Andrew Keen to the Incubate Innovation Lecture. Andrew Keen gave a clear lecture about his vision on Internet issues. He raised some legitimate questions about the future of western art in a civilization were nobody pays for an artwork. He states that the digital revolution has destroyed art, industrial art as we know it. I won’t summarise his ideas any further, for it is well known and can otherwise be read in his book The Cult of the Amateur, or his essay in De Groene Amsterdammer: ‘Waarom zijn kunstenaars arm?’

I would like to give my reflections on the debate after Keen’s lecture led by Xandra Schutte and with Konrad Boehmer, Amelia Andersdotter, Hans Abbing and James Kirby. The Incubate innovation lecture lived to its name by using an innovative way of audience participation through the use of Twitter. As the discussion proceeded people were twittering on the issues. This was interesting because what was happening was a real time demonstration of one of the discussion topics: filtering. The content of the Tweets varied from being a useless commentary (@ajkeen pronounces Vermeer as ‘Vomir’ #iil09) to legitimate questions (Is internet really democratic? Only 20% of us can take part in this discussion… #iil09) In this case I do felt the tweets needed filtering. Following the different tweets and small talks on twitter doesn’t contribute to an in depth engagement of the discussion. Being distracted by all sorts of sense and nonsense one is constantly filtering, constantly forming an opinion. This can be a good thing but it can also take a lot of energy without really getting somewhere.

I have one point of critic on the discussion of filters. James Kirby made a rather cynical remark like all human filters are hypocrites who want to be taken out to dinner. In the following discussion the filters were interpreted as reviewers or post-artwork filters. But the pre-artwork filters, that decide on the access of an artwork before it has access to a wider audience, such as musiclabels, publishers, etc., were not considered. In my opinion there is a major difference between the two. Thanks to internet the influence of the pre-artwork filters has shrunken significantly with the result that more artists were able to expose themselves and find an appreciative audience. This is for me one of major contributions of internet to the art world.

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A research on sponsorship models will be performed at Incubate the coming half year. Once in a while a blog post about related subjects will be posted. 

Sponsorship is one of the most important income generators of the cultural sector, but also of the sports sector. Private parties have been donating money or in-kind for cultural and sport events for ages, both without any return and as a marketing tool. However, in the past decennia companies start to implement sponsorship more and more as an important marketing tool in their business model. In times of increasing competition for both the sponsors and the sponsees the marketing tool of sponsorship is getting to a higher level to stay in advance of their competitors. Sponsorship evolves into a professional entity that can be seen as a long-term co-marketing alliance where the sponsor and the sponsee both invest in a structural relation to gain maximum result.

The Australian marketing scientists Francis Farrelly and Pascale Quester published the idea of seeing a sponsorship relationship as a “co-marketing alliance” in 2005. In this post their view is presented, all referring to their journal article (Farrelly and Quester, 2005). Farrelly and Quester analyzed sponsorship relationships between sponsor and sports entity as a form of co-marketing alliance. We assume that sponsorship in sports environment and arts and culture environment is similar in essence.

Traditional sponsorship relations are often one-sided where the sponsor provides financial assistance to the sponsee and uses its philanthropic behaviour as marketing tool. However, Farrelly and Quester believe that a sponsorship relationship have higher potential if operated as a co-marketing alliance.  Five factors which are fundamental for a sponsorship relationship to act as a successful co-marketing alliance are defined:

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I’m from an era where the parents taught us to be modest: What you do is only good enough when others notice and compliment you and of course tell others about it.

Then you could conclude that expressing yourself on the internet is something for younger people or not done?

I doubt that! It’s more or less, are you comfortable to scream: Look at me!

Or is the case that I wait for the comment of the professional who has a valuable critic about my work. If you are singer per example, and there are a lot of them, there is no guarantee that you will be heard on the internet. In fact I think the chance is diminishing. How do you want to be discovered then? Because of your looks?

We learned from Andrew Keen that a phenomenon like Alfred Hitchcock was ‘one of a kind’, those talents are rare. Isn’t it right that talents like that come out in the open whether they want or not? So is it luck? Is it the environment where you grow up or education? Is it support or chances and taking opportunities to become successful?

Because when you express yourself on the internet there is no reason that, if you have lots of followers, you can trust them for an independent evaluation.

“Don’t trust anyone” is what Conrad Boehmer’s opinion is. “Be confident with yourself because you cannot rely upon all kinds of organizations or opinions anymore”.

If you are that confident with yourself, do you allow then any other authority but yours? Is this what we want? I doubt, that we become very happy in this lonely kingdom, when you are the only inhabitant. “When we want to experience colour, freedom, excitement and power, do we find this in the digital world?” is what Andrew Keen asked us.

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A new and very interesting book called “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” was published last week. It was co-created by 470 strategy practitioners and should offer you “powerful, simple, tested tools for understanding, designing, reworking, and implementing business models.” Sounds good, right? We sure think so. If you’re interested, you can get a free 72-page preview of the book right here. Or download the file as a .pdf.

In order to keep the price affordable, the book is being sold at the book’s website for the first few months before distributing it through Amazon.com.

Copyright killed the video star from Kicks for Free on Vimeo.

They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine and new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see

Oh-a oh. You might have heard of the new Buma/Stemra law called Fair Play. They will charge the whole Dutch web community for embedding musicclips. Let’s try to push the limits of this law. The web and the new economy are about multiplying information. Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail it, upgrade it.

Let’s see how far freedom of information goes. Please film the copy of the copy of the Bubbles video above and post the video on your blog with this text underneath it. Your blogreaders should do the same and together we form a chain of information. Let’s create a loophole of information and find out when copyright gets killed because you cannot hear which song is in the video anymore.

Let’s resist the new law that would kill new forms of creativity. Let’s question the question of public space and fair use. Technologic. Technologic!

via Incubate Blog.

Today Dutch copyright organization Buma launched the Fair Play license. They charge blogs for embedding. It’s like calling Vinnie Jones an elegant soccer star. Read more on it here. This new law would mean the death of blogs like this. Of blogs that promote culture and don’t make any money out of it. We hope Buma won’t send us a bill. We’ve posted 30 clips of loonwerkbedrijf Buma. Just because it’s stupid. Let’s all post 30 posts of this stupid video. Just to say this kind of Fair Play deserves a red card.

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Bijgespijkerd posted the first two videos about the Incubate Innovation Lecture with the keynote speech by Andrew Keen. If you want to see the discussion that happened afterwards, just see the other three vids here.

Keynote speech Andrew Keen at Incubate 2009 (part 1 of 5) from Incubate Tilburg on Vimeo.

Keynote speech Andrew Keen at Incubate 2009 (part 2 of 5) from Incubate Tilburg on Vimeo.