itsasickness was an crossmedia web/TV project honoring the objects of our obsessions. It was a co-branding marketer’s dream.

The Why

That thing you geek out about, the thing you could talk about endlessly – obsessing over the minutia, that’s your sickness. People who are most interested are the most interesting.

Our website featured ecstatic devotion to wonderful things – which were often for sale.

We celebrated the most extraordinary people who we found in our online obsession network with short tribute films on itsasicknessTV; Alan Cumming was the emcee. These shorts became a unscripted roadshow what we brought to Fremantle Media and others.

Basically, the website itself [offline as of 3/14/15] was a proto-Pinterest bookmarking app that the TV production crew used for story leads, episode research, and as a branded-content feedback loop.

The itsasickness project celebrated dedication to anything obsession-worthy in order to sell those things precisely because they were obsession-worthy. IAS was a vehicle for advertisers to directly target their obsessive tribes.

See some of our branded advertisements:

The app featured more community discussion tools than Pinterest. It was a hybrid bookmarking tool and UGC community. Managing this online community website was actually managing several thousand separate active online communities at once and getting everyone to move in the same direction.