Just caught this on the TV. I had no idea what it was for, but it had an intriguing coolness about it. As I had my laptop on my knee I tried out the URL just to see…
Turns out it’s a pretty smart thing that C4 are doing to get youngsters interested in other languages. Once you get to the site the language stuff is quite knocked back. But there are some very cool little films in there (although they’re non-embeddable, doh!). Not sure how well it’s work, but s’quite nice.
It’s actually a government campaign on behalf of DCSF & COI, for MFL (modern foreign languages, although you might think that three letter acronyms / TLAs were a foreign language in and of themselves!) . Naked developed the strategy, at the heart of which is the fact that languages as they’re taught in schools aren’t cool, but music, film, dance etc are cool the world over, and they could help British kids find more reasons to engage with foreign languages. At the heart of the recommendation was to make a TV programme rather than simply an ad campaign – which is where the partnership with C4, for ‘Je suis un rockstar’, comes in – and all the content hosted on the C4 site. As with campaigns like Frank, it’s really important that they don’t come across as looking like they’re from the government, cos the government really isn’t cool….but C4 has more yoof credibility, hence why you hopefully didn’t know it was a government campaign to begin with ;)