Omakase Crime Stoppers!

Bandon's dad, one of the Omakase developers, sent me this link this morning. Who knew that an adserver could help uncover something like this!

Exposure or Exploitation? Mark Cuban's HDNet releases performance DVDs without telling local and national artists -- Is it the price of promotion or an abuse of creative rights?

From the article, here's how this all was uncovered:

In fact, we only found out about the existence of the DVD’s by sheer chance. Mike was testing a new contextual ad unit from Amazon on TexasGigs, and it pulled up ads for the video of the Cunniff benefit. And then, in the course of searching around for more information, we found episodes of True Music available as paid downloads on Google Video.

Based on the heavy use of local bands, we then sought to get some info on the series from HDNet and the bands involved for what we thought was a simple story about cool DVDs of local bands hitting the market.

The problem was that when we contacted bands for information, we got one of two answers:

“What?

or

“What the hell?”