Yesterday I got a cool opportunity to be in a national commercial for Coke Zero put together by our good friends at Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Obviously I was a lowly extra, but it was fun to observe how these Hollywoodesque things work.

About 90 people spent all day in Allen Fieldhouse in magical Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas (a.k.a. 2008 NCAA Basketball and Orange Bowl champs). I wore the first t-shirt I bought after Bill Self became KU’s coach my sophomore year. It’s blue and says “Self Respect” with a Jayhawk on the front. After six years, it’s showing it’s age, but it’s still my favorite.

The costume lady asked me to wear some red, sparkly sunglasses… so I wore those, too.

They placed me just behind the “principles,” so hopefully I won’t end up on the cutting room floor!

I got to scream the Rock Chalk chant and perform a few other KU basketball traditions for the camera. When the commercial starts airing nationwide around the time of conference play (Jan/Feb), I’ll be sure to track it’s impact and show you the results!

So ready for my close up right now.

Here is the audio from our “universe” video. This is going to be an all-in-one piece that helps people understand Spiral16, Spark and our company goals.

Listen to the track below.

I’m so glad that Current TV was part of the CM Summit. As a former multimedia journalist (well, can you ever really give it up?), I’m excited about their constant innovation with UGC (that’s User Generated Content in case my parents are reading this).

Most recently, they teamed up with Twitter for Hack The Debate - a project that lets viewers watch near real-time Tweets as a lower-third over the presidential debates. It’s the ultimate no-spin zone.

Joel Hyatt, Current co-founder, talked a lot about VCAMs (Viewer Created Ad Messages). View one of my favs to the right.

According to Hyatt, VCAMs are preferred 9-1 over regular advertising by the Current audience - an audience comprised of mostly 20-somethings.

The VCAMs are creative, funny, innovative and they go viral.

Hyatt emphasized that Current’s competitive advantage comes from their willingness to experiment. They aren’t afraid to fail when it comes to UGC initiatives. It’s a risk big news organizations aren’t willing to take… despite their financial cushion.

“What they have is money. Tons of it,” Hyatt said. “The bigger they get the harder it is to have entrepreneurial activity internally.”

The Current community keeps their news free of major corporate influence by giving users the ability to call out transparency and bias.

Though it is a budding cable channel, I think it’s a group of the most innovative people in the business… a group of people who have successfully figured out how to incorporate advertising into their UGC format.

Listen to Hyatt’s session and tell us what you think - the podcast is just below the Prius VCAM.

Attendees at the CMSummit Tweet their thoughts.

On Thursday morning, John Battelle moderated a conversation with Evan Williams (founder of Twitter) at the CM Summit. I was definitely excited about this one, because I use Twitter to communicate both personally and with S16 (are you following us?)

I recorded the entire session with our REALLY POWERFUL audio recorder. I’m glad it picked up the squeaky chair and some of the beepy noises around me…

As I listened to Williams speak, I noticed parallels between Twitter and Spark. Ultimately, we share the same goal: Selling the value of discovery.

That means discovering relationships. Discovering content and conversations you didn’t know existed. Near real-time information sources. Marketers need to realize the value of those uncovering those connections: priceless.

Another similarity I noticed is building relationships.

“The relationship is what’s going to create value over time,” Williams said during the session. We notice clients using the “campaign mentality” with Spark, and they do the same with Twitter.

Like I said yesterday, to be successful you should enter a LTR, not a stop-and-start relationship based on marketing campaigns.

Listen to Battelle’s conversation with Williams and let us know what you think about building LTRs with audiences.