#KittenCamp first kicked off 6 months ago back in May – on the same night David Cameron became Prime Minister I first donned my cat suit and curated our first meme-fest.  Since then #KittenCamp’s gained some great momentum, as we’ve toured the country (London, Bristol, Manchester) cat suit and bags of memes in tow.

Our event last Monday was particularly fun.  We delivered our usual mix of the month’s *awesome* memes, however it was the contributions by our special guests that particularly made the event.  Huge thanks to Will from BBC Comedyfor curating the BBC’s work in the space of online comedy + also thanks to Jamesfor doing a first reading of his #KittenCamp-inspired short story about meme called “The Day the memes ran out”.

Thanks everyone who came, and if you’d like to keep up to date with future #KittenCamp shenanigans check out our Facebook page.  Our last #KittenCamp of the year will be taking place in Manchester next Tuesday (7th December) – sosign-up for a ticket if you’re around!

For anyone who doesn’t know, KittenCamp is a meet-up for web-loving, media types to chat about some of the latest internet memes, have a chuckle over a few recent YouTube virals and generally share the kitten goodness. As it turned out the promise of an evening of free drinks hosted by a guy dressed as a giant cat seemed to capture people’s curiosity and the event was packed out!

Among the host of cat clips, which included the ominous inception cat, a cat bullying feisty tortoise and the talented DJ Kitty, was the Herding Cats experiment for Ikea.

You’ve probably all come across the furniture store’s  “Happy Inside” ad already and I have to admit that when it first crossed my TV screen it elicited the predictable amount of squeaky aaaaah’s that could be expected from any cat lover. The fact of the matter is that people love to watch ads featuring cute animals, just look at the crazy number of hits on YouTube kitty clips, and if one cat is good how much better would 100 cats be?

Well, this seems to be the reasoning of the advertising firm behind the commercial, Mother London, who also released the ‘Making of’ video Herding Cats which has generated over 2 million views and counting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The clever thing about this clip is that it functions almost as a covert advert. Building on the success of other large campaigns like Sony Bravia’s Playdough Bunnies or the recent Toyota Prius ad, that focus less on producing informative adverts about their products and instead work on the rational that if they do something ‘awesome’ and film it, the public will do the marketing for them and they will have an instant internet viral success.

And of course any successful viral can expect to become fodder for a series of parody remakes and this hilarious Ikea remix does not disappoint!

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my other favorite videos of the evening was the Google Wave Cinema clip that popped up on YouTube a little while back. Created by two guys in America and made in just a few hours it’s a really interesting demonstration of the power of Google Wave to streamline human interaction with organized snippets of online media and quite likely provided the inspiration for the recent advert for Google Instant.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another winning ingredient for instant Internet success is ‘cute kids’. Here’s a sweet little advert made for Samsung that begins like one of the many home movie clips littering YouTube but turns into a clever little advert that generated over 4 million views online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anyone who has been following KittenCamp for a while will be familiar with the Auto Tune guys by now, we think they are awesome so here’s one of their latest remixes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One video that’s set tongues wagging and sparked debate raging across internet message boards recently is the Federer Trick Shot video that Rubber Republic produced for Gillette. Featuring a William Tell style brilliant serve by Federer that managed to knock a bottle right off a man’s head, not once but twice! Too good to be true? People love a good  ‘real or fake’ debate, with the likes of GMTV and Maori TV trying to replicate the stunt and Federer even being quizzed by a Sky Sport’s journalist as to how he did it ; “A magician never reveals his tricks” was Federer’s cool response and that’s as much as we are going to say. And of course the mark of any strong meme is re-mixing – one of our favorites being this gruesome re-mix.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now just for fun, a couple of retro themed games clips…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And because we wouldn’t want to be accused of animal favoritism, some effective use of pandas…

Click here to view the embedded video.

And finally the Dickhead Finale, just because we always used to end our show with a unicorn clip but we ran out of good ones so we found this instead, which made us laugh, A LOT!

Click here to view the embedded video.

P.S. Join the KittenCamp face book group to keep up to date on future events and cat related News!

Come along if you work / study social media, advertising, the interwebs or you’re a YouTube junky.

Don’t come along if you’re a kitten (or talking cat).

Next Kitten camp (London) details

Date: Tuesday 27th April
Time: 6.30 onwards
Venue: John Snow

**FREE BEER FOR THE FIRST 25 KITTEN CAMPERS**

Twitter: #KittenCamp

Kittens anonymous

Two talking cats:

Talking cat, translation

Talking cat