Here’s a long entry on Drew “The Rocketboom Guy” Baron’s visit to CaseCamp last Friday, which includes links to the videos I shot of his presentation, why I took them down and then later put them back up, my take on Amanda’s departure and finally, a glamour shot of Drew.
As I said, this one’s long, so grab your favourite beverage and dive on in!
On Friday night, Wendy and I attended our first CaseCamp, a monthly gathering of Accordion City’s marketing types, in which marketers do a “show and tell” presentation of their current project in front of a group of their peers. As such, it’s the marketing analogue of DemoCamp, a similar event in which techies and software developers do presentations of their current projects.
Both CaseCamp and DemoCamp are the children of BarCamp, whose initial inspiration was the invitation-only Foo Camp, both of which are “unconferences” for people interested in computer technologies. I cover the origins of Foo and Bar Camps in a blog entry titled BarCamp Explained.
Friday’s CaseCamp took place at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, the not-quite-completed new museum across the street from the Royal Ontario Museum. The gathering itself took place in the “Jamie Kennedy’s Kitchen” restaurant located on the top floor of the museum, a very open glass-and-wood space that provides a great view of the Royal Ontario Museum, Planetarium, Queen’s Park, the northern end of the University of Toronto and our downtown skyline.
Rocketboom (here’s its Wikipedia entry) is a popular video blog that has a format similar to a television news show and often covers its stories in a satirical style. You could consider it the internet descendant of The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segment. Rocketboom launched in October 2004 and jumped from hundreds to tens of thousands of viewers in less than a year. It’s been featured on both internet news sites (Wired News recently featured it in a piece called The Vlog World’s Greatest Hits) and traditional media (it’s been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, CBS News’ Eye on America and even featured in an episode of CSI).
One key ingredient in the success of Rocketboom is its anchor, Amanda Congdon (see the photo on the left), whose appearance, writing and delivery style have played a large factor in the show’s success.
Rocketboom. That’s Amanda Congdon on the left, and Drew Baron on the right.
The other half of Rocketboom’s creative team is Andrew “Drew” Baron, who posted the New York Craigslist ad for a news anchor which Amanda answered. Drew’s contributions are largely behind-the-camera, ranging from Rocketboom’s original concept to writing to directing.
If you’d rather not plough through all the hoo-hah about what happened, here’s the “executive summary”: on Wednesday, Amanda posted the now-famous video blog entry, Amanda UnBoomed in which she states that she was fired from Rocketboom and now living at her parents’ house while contemplating her next move. Drew’s response, posted on the Rocketboom site, was that Amanda wasn’t fired, but left to pursue her original career goal: becoming an actress in Hollywood.
The story has gone beyond the internet and has been covered by the mainstream press, each with their own pun on “Rocketboom”:
Even distant news organizations such as the Taipei Times deemed the story worthy of their attention.
Drew was booked a few weeks in advance to come to Toronto and present his marketing case at CaseCamp. In light of this week’s happenings, it was expected that he’d cancel his trip to deal with the fallout. I was rather surprised when CaseCamp organizer Eli Singer told me in an email on 4:30 Friday afternoon that Drew was still presenting at CaseCamp that night. Nothing like a little drama to liven up a gathering of marketers!
Prior to leaving for CaseCamp, I was talking about the Rocketboom situation with my co-worker Scott. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Andrew’s problem is that he was behind the camera, and Amanda’s is, well, hot. He could very well be a victim of Andrew Ridgely syndrome.
Scott: Andrew…Ridgely?
Me: You know, the other guy from “Wham”? The two-man band called “Wham, featuring George Michael“?
Scott: [blank stare]
Me: You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?
Adam, another co-worker: He’s too young to remember that.
Scott: You’re old, dude.
Me: Damned whippersnappers. Kids today, they’ve got no sense of history. We need another Vietnam to thin out your ranks.
We arrived at CaseCamp a little bit early and in addition to a number of people I’ve never met before — I presume they’re marketers, a field to which I am new — a number of the local tech scene’s “usual suspects” were there. Bryce Johnson, David Crow and his wife Kristin Heeney were in attendance, as was fellow Crazy Go Nuts University grad Tom Purves, whom we ran into while looking for where the presentations were taking place.
Also present was “Sleepless” Sutha Kamal, who showed me Rocketboom’s rumoured replacement host on his Blackberry.
“It was posted on the Huffington Post not too long ago,” he said. “Some VJ from MTV Europe.”
“Not bad,” I said, “We’ll have to see how the internet fanboys react.”
Drew’s presentation was the last one of the evening. He opened with “I did have a marketing case to present, but I think there’s one that might be a little more interesting,” which got a lot of laughter from the audience.
Andrew’s presentation, was quite confessional in its tone. It wasn’t a marketing case, but simply a candid, off-the-cuff recounting of his side of the story, told in a straightforward manner, free of spin or acrimony. If there was anyone in the audience who didn’t have any sympathy for him at the start of the evening, his sincere “aw shucks” manner won them over by the end, judging by the crowd that gathered after the presentations were over.
Leesa Barnes — who presented a case study on what not to do when podcasting — summarizes it quite nicely in her blog entry on CaseCamp:
I tell you, Andrew doesn’t have an evil bone in him. He has this child-like innocence that makes you just want to hug him for days. He reminds me of a teddy bear, only way less plump and not at all fuzzy.
Of course, he summed up what happened between him and Amanda. I think it was a therapy session, to be honest. He didn’t paint her in a bad light, on the contrary, he took responsibility for what happened and said it was like a marriage that had gone downhill.
At the end of the day, Andrew has taken the high road in all this. He never once painted Amanda in a bad light, never posted email communications on his blog, nor did he use Rocketboom as an opportunity to make the other party look bad.
After the presentation, I walked over to chat with Drew, who remembered me from the Mesh conference, thanks to a little accordion playing. I introduced him to Wendy, and he introduced me to Elspeth, who also works at Rocketboom.
“Have the fanboys calmed down yet?” I asked.
“Not really,” he replied, pulling out his Blackberry. “Take a look at this,” he said, dialing up some recent email. “I hope you go under and have to flip burgers for the rest of your life,” he said, reading one of his messages. He read a few more nastygrams, all with the resigned bemusement of someone who sees the humour in a bad situation.
“I glad to see it’s not getting you completely down,” I said, “and who knows, if you put on some good shows over the next few weeks, maybe people will turn around and make a Simpsons admission: We’ve given the word ‘mob’ a bad name!“
At the end of our conversation, I asked Drew if I could get a photo of him posing with the accordion and if I could post the videos I shot of his presentation. he said “yes” to both.
I posted my videos on Saturday morning. They were getting a decent number of views when I got an email from Drew asking if I could take them down. he explained that he’d leave the final decision up to me, but that he was feeling a bit iffy about them since he hadn’t seen them yet.
I decided to take them down. He’s taken a lot of heat and undergone a lot of stress over the past couple of days and I thought he deserved a break.
Andrew changed his mind about the videos a little later on that afternoon, but by that point, I’d already left the house to attend a bloggers-only Q&A session with David Cronenberg at the opening for the Andy Warhol “Supernova” exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Drew was there, and he told me that he’d had a chance to see the videos and that Mark Evans had convinced him that they should go up. Hence the previous blog entry, in which the videos make their return to the blog. You can click on either of the two images below or click here to see the videos.
Bryce Johnson also shot some video of the event, which you can see here.
The story of the departure of a popular and attractive host from an internet “fake news show” isn’t the biggest news in the world, and while it’s made quite a splash in the news, it hardly qualifies as a tragedy. While Rocketboom does have a considerable viewer base, I’m certain that the vast majority of people have never seen one of its webcasts. Should Rocketboom collapse and disappear from the internet, there’d be a hue and cry from its fanbase, but we’d all eventually move on.
However…
I make my living off the internet, and so does the company for whom I work. I didn’t fall into this line of work by happenstance; even in high school, I was betting on the hope that technology would advance to the point where an intersection between computers, entertainment, information, education, creativity and shameless self-promotion would exist. The success of projects like Rocketboom means that such an intersection not only exists, but is viable as both a business and a way of life. To use marketroid-speak, it “validates the space”.
Simply put, when Rocketboom succeeds, I succeed. Hence my interest.
What I know of Drew, I know from the limited amount of contact I had with him at the Mesh conference as well as CaseCamp and last night’s gallery opening. I know less about Amanda, other than she was quite congenial in corresponding with Wendy when she was working at Top 10 Sources (here’s Amanda’s “top 10” list on that site). Based on the success of Rocketboom and the offers made to her by internet bigwigs like Jason Calacanis, she can go far, and I hope she does.. As for Andrew, if he can connect to Rocketboom’s fanbase over the next few weeks — a daunting proposition, but one that he can manage — he too can enjoy some success, and I hope he does.
I am inclined to agree with the statement that Drew made at CaseCamp: that he didn’t fire Amanda, but that she was itching to start a Hollywood career and that there were problems with communications and missed expectations between the two of them. This is based primarily on considering this simple question:
In Amanda’s departure, who benefits most?
(I’m donning the flame-proof suit right now.)
One of a gazillion glamour shots of Amanda Congdon.
Poor Drew: although the original concept behind Rocketboom is his, Amanda gets all the glamour shots, thanks to being both an attractive young woman and in front of the camera. Here’s my attempt to balance the scales a little bit: I give you Drew’s glamour shot, with accordion, taken at last night’s party at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Click it to see a larger version (you can also see it on Flickr.
At long last, Drew gets his glamour shot, avec the accordion.
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