Metue.com

Look out ESPN, forget baseball tonight….I’m making my own highlight reel.

Marketers are increasingly embracing new internet technologies and experimenting with new ways to build brands.  Today, to coincide with the All Star Game in San Francisco, Major League Baseball is set to expand on marketers use of Internet video with the launch of a new interactive marketing campaign.  The Internet home for the multimedia campaign will be a website called  Actober.com, which is tagged with the slogan “You’re a fan, Act like one.” On the site, fans will be able use easy embedded tools to create their own highlight films.

Focused on October, more than 60 historical clips will be available.  The footage will span decades but be focused only on playoff games (which baseball is trying to build a very early buzz for).

Taking a page from iTunes, to help publicize the campaign and create interest, celebrities are being solicited to create the equivalent of their own playlists (highlight reels in this case).  Grays Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo and CSI star William Peterson are among the first to agree to participate.  Others are reported in discussion.

The move into user-generated content by a sports league is a first, and clearly an experiment. Marketers will be watching closely to see how it works out. Whether homerun or strikeout, the experiment is noteworthy as a demonstration of how widespread the acceptance of new-media technologies is.

Update/Correction:

Initial pre-launch reports, including that here on Metue, were off on the nature of the interactive video offering being presented on www.actober.com. The offering was incorrectly described as including embedded tools for making a video. Actober.com, which is now live, includes a collection of historic clips (which is expanded each week). The user-generated content component of the site is not built around stringing those clips together into a custom “mash up” as originally thought. Instead, the site is home for a recurring contest in which users create and submit their own video re-enactments of one of the historic clips (the fan chooses which historic moment to re-enact). Actober.com is somewhat similar to contests run around a create-your-own commercial concept that marketers experimented with for the Superbowl.