In one of these mails about a year and a half ago, I mentioned an ambitious project that was being undertaken via the internet. The project, called ‘Life in a Day‘ was an attempt to capture a normal day in the life of the world. Rather like a digital time capsule.

Participants who wanted to enter were asked to film themselves on 24 July 2010 and in particular, respond to three questions: “who do you love?”, “what is in your pocket/handbag/purse?” and “what do you fear?” The resultant footage would be edited by The Scott Brothers (of Alien fame) and produced by Kevin Macdonald.

In one of the most successful crowdsourcing exercises of its time, over 80,000 people from 140 countries submitted responses and 4,500 hours were selected to be edited into a 94 minute film, which was premiered at Cannes earlier this year.

The result, which was aired on BBC2 last night is an utterly compelling insight into modern life and I would recommend that everyone takes the time to watch it.

Aside from being impressed at the quality of some of the submissions (the role of consumer as content producer is a conversation for another day) it also got me to thinking about how we articulate what it is like working for companies and whether this style of approach would be worth considering as both an employee engagement exercise and as recruitment material. Food for thought…

Facebook vs the Internet
There were numerous themes being discussed and debated at yesterday’s IAB Engage conference, but for me one of the most interesting was an off the cuff conversation around Facebook. The question being debated was whether Facebook was trying to become the Internet.

Think about it – the Internet, whilst effectively controlled by the companies that maintain the infrastructure (carbon fibre pipes, connections etc.) is an open source mechanism; anyone can use it in a (reasonably) unregulated manner free from traditional constraints. Whilst this has often caused issues for governments, businesses and advertisers, as they try to find some way to regulate how it is used, it has also presented some great opportunities, as normal people have collaborated to come up with innovative and life-chaning new products, services and concepts. Facebook, on the other hand, is a closed ecosystem, meaning that one company has complete control on how it is used, managed and what is done with the information that it gleans.

Whilst the ramifications of this continue to be mulled over by far more intelligent people than me, my thought was simple. When presenting any media plan, should we treat Facebook as a channel in its own right? In other words, should FB activity be on every media plan, distinctly separate from press, out of home, digital etc.? It makes sense – 20% of the worlds population is using it, any activity on FB gives us direct access to a mobile audience (over 50% of smartphone usage in the UK is on Facebook) and we can be incredibly specific in our targeting. Hodes is using Facebook in increasingly inventive ways (see our latest work for Gazprom) and have some successful examples that we can showcase.

I suppose the other way of looking at the same question is, given its size and scale, why haven’t we been treating it as a separate channel?