Here since the beginning

We’ve been working in online video since it was invented. No one has more experience in this space than we do.

It all started with our network of creative people — the heart and soul of our company. We started working together at Current TV, where we won the 2007 Emmy for “Best Interactive Television Service”. We helped win Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since then, we’ve taken what we’ve learned and, in keeping with our civically-minded purpose, tasked ourselves with proliferating it to well-intentioned people.

Combining local perspectives with the best creatives in a generation is not only cost-effective, it also produces the only thing that works on the internet — something genuine, real, and specific.

Clients

The Next Generation in reliable News and Documentary production at modern day prices has arrived. We call it IB5k.

IB5k Networked News Production: Good News is Here

We know the story, because we’ve lived it along with you. The news business has been in crisis mode for so long, people our age don’t remember a time when it wasn’t. Then the big piano hanging over news rooms finally started to drop.

At IB5k, we bring some rare and welcome good news. We offer some relief for your troubled budgets and we’re actually quite excited about these times!

What We Offer

Lower Cost

We aren’t saddled with legacy costs like old cameras, expensive real estate, and contracts written for a different era, so we pass these savings on to you, while still paying our multimedia producers a fair wage.

Cover More with Less

We have multimedia producers in all sorts of places so you don’t have to travel there.

Authenticity

Our producers provide better coverage of their regions than parachute journalists can because they actually live there.

News You Can Trust

We do all this with a reliable level of quality.

We like to call ourselves the Next Generation in news and documentary production. We are a group of folks who have been doing the DV cam thing long enough to be the most experienced at it. We want honest and fact-based story telling to survive because it's our home too. We’re here to help you make it happen anyway we can.

But like a good journalist, don’t just take our word for it; check out our work.

Video Distribution

Connecting your video to your audience

A video without a distribution strategy is like a tree falling in a forest with no one else around. Only this time, we know no one hears it. learn more →

Strategy: Visualize National Organizations

Employing a national network of video producers takes organizational, campaign, and government video to a new level, allowing for creative solutions that communicate nuanced, micro-targeted messages and visualize the growing potential and momentum of national movements.

The Obama Campaign demonstrated the unique power of video to excite and sustain engagement, enable a movement to compellingly convey its story, and allow a large and diverse organization to visualize its collective momentum. We employ similar Obama campaign video strategies to create effective, micro-targeted, and inspiring video. Not only did we find that video excites online engagement but it legitimizes, enhances, and magnifies the impact of field activities, and increases online and offline engagement metrics. (Small example: The Obama email team found that the word “VIDEO” in an email subject increased the open rate by 5%.)

Tactics: National Creative Reach, Centralized Coordination

IB5k deploys a central team of producers/creatives, working with IB5k’s distributed network of producers, under client direction, in collaboration with client’s other media strategists/consultants.

• Leverage IB5k’s national network to visualize national movements
• Strategically employ organizational and social networks in production and distribution
• Micro-target, capitalizing on distributed characters, story, messaging, and imagery
• Empower and arm regional field organizers with valuable recruitment/inspirational media
• Work closely with client on content and timing to capitalize on news cycles
• Triage rapid response
• Centrally coordinate and converge media, create national narratives, visualize national movements

Video Distribution

Connecting your video to your audience

A video without a distribution strategy is like a tree falling in a forest with no one else around. Only this time, we know no one hears it. learn more →

So much has been tried to market products — what’s left to be explored? How about starting with reality?

At IB5k, we use video to bring out the real connection people have to your products. The best way we know how to do this is the same way we approach all of our documentaries: let the characters tell the story, step back and don’t get in the way.

Specifically, we think we’re different than the other guys for at least the following reasons:

Authenticity

Our Multimedia Producers are real, breathing people — most with a film-making background — who actually live in the places where they’re shooting. They specialize in getting the good stuff out of people — the kind of people who buy products (like them).

Creative Culture

We don’t treat creatives like Kleenex here, because there isn’t a person you will meet at IB5k that doesn’t actually create something themselves. We’ve got good ideas because we invested in our own community of creatives which exists to serve them. You will notice something strange while working with us: since we care about our talent, they will care about you, too.

We Do It All

If we don’t have what you need listed here, it’s probably because we’re trying to save space — there isn’t something we don’t build for the Internet. If you need a website with still photos from 8 different markets next to a new software concept you can’t really explain — all sent out to the right people at a fair price — we’ve done all that. Doing it all together makes it turn out nicely too.

Reliability

User-generated content elicits cringes in many places these days, and IB5k is no exception. Our community is selective and we don’t work with just anyone. Our creatives have been vetted over years, not seconds. We create reliably authentic videos, without the risk that comes with UGC.

Within every organization — big and small, public or private, startup or Fortune 500 company — is the potential to engage your core audiences with the newest tools of our time.

At IB5k, we respect your history, your reputation, your mission, and your goals, which is why we work so hard to solve your problems. We want to help you thrive in the new communications and media landscape, not survive.

If you’re interested in receiving a consultation — please contact us.

Seamless design within your entire media picture

You need to find your audience wherever they are, and mobile apps can be a good way for people to find you, as long as they actually get something out of it. The good news is, IB5k won’t build you a mobile app unless you need one, but if you do, what we build will actually cut through the clutter.

IB5k will build you a mobile application that is not just compatible with a particular mobile device, but with your entire media plan.

IB5k’s network model lets us bring together the right people from all over the world to work on your projects and make something great

IB5k is much more than a web development shop — we can draw on our engineering grade software experience, SEO and marketing know how, info-graphic and data visualization rock stars, advertising expertise, and video production chops to realize your project. Not every project needs all of this diverse expertise, but in our experience every project needs a little bit of it.

IB5k has a great track record of designing and building highly effective content destinations and web applications for a wide range of clients. Drawing on our deep bench of proven talent centered in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, IB5k will build a team that will work with you to realize your vision.

To some, a pile of data can look like the “Smith” section of the white pages: a seemingly alphabetic group of numbers and words that, when read, has no beginning, middle or end. Data drives results, but without a pictorial understanding of these numbers, your audience won’t understand what you’re trying to tell them. Our designers see data much differently: rows of numbers generate pictures; datasets become a story.

Not every designer or statistician can produce a solid infographic — the best infographics are as much about visual storytelling as comprehending data. As Edward Tufte says, the visual display of quantitative information requires the designer to “see profoundly — to develop strategies of seeing and showing”. Infographics require both a special understanding of how data can be displayed graphically and what type of display is most effective. There are many ways to visualize data, and IB5k brings to bear our vast network of designers who specialize in infographics.