Rounding out my time on the Verizon Broadband Stories project working with the always excellent R/GA team, I got to head down the Miami Beach to record stories from people who attended the wild ride that was the lead up to the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards. We arrived on Wednesday before the big show, just one day before Katrina decided to pay South Florida a visit. This shuttered Hotel MTV which was to be the primary shooting ground. Of course ever diligent, we were able to get many stories from the people in our hotel through Friday. Friday night the parties began again in ernest with Saturday seeing a triumphant return of Hotel MTV with David Banner being the highlight of the show.

All in all, hours of great footage was captured making the trip a total success despite our hurricane related setbacks. Hopefully, a lot of that footage will be showing up on the site in the near future, so keep checking it out.

Verizon’s Broadband Stories site continues to get press. It’s an interesting feeling to see so many people pay attention to something that only 7 months ago was some rambling idea scribbled out on a napkin. Anyway, the latest to comment was Gawker (of all places) with a posting today on the Reuters Sign portion of the campaign.

Check out Gawker’s They Say the Jumbotrons Are Bright on Broadway to read their take.

Or check out these other postings:
Verizon and the broadband stories
Verizon Wants to Hear Users’ Broadband Stories

On the topic of interest… It seems like Max Harbinger is also making the rounds. Here he is on Room 116 in a post titled New Verizon DSL Campaign (which is a little unfortunate). He also made it to foreign lands here: Save Time, be Fast.

Verizon, like many other large companies out there, is investigating new ways to reach consumers as a result of the prevailing idea that the mass market is being quickly eroded due to increasing consumer control over the many sources of available entertainment. With this central idea as the driving factor, Verizon looked to R/GA to create a compellingly fun concept to herald their newest fiber optic to the premises technology capable of speeds in excess of 10 times current cable data rates.

Enter Max Harbinger, a young boy training to be the fastest human on the Earth! (Oddly enough, he’s played by one of the copy writers who thought him up due to a stellar performance on the original pitch movie clip.)

Anyway, head on over to The Adventures of Superfast Max to check out the video clips in a site designed by me and the great people at R/GA.