We wanted the 4pelagatos journal to reinforce their freedom of speech positioning in Ecuador, that's why we created MashiMachine, a website application that lets people create and share videos with words from the footage and audio that the Ecuadorian president has said in his official statements. This action would boost awareness for the journal and the platform itself.

With this web app, an on-demand video editing platform, Ecuadorians create and share unique videos that use President Correa´s voice, the only voice they are officially allowed to hear. This way, The President speaks the things people of Ecuador need him to say. The platform allows the making of standalone and new videos easy and fast, and the new content produced by users is virally and socially shareable.

MashiMachine uses Ecuador's only official speaker, to allow users to become creators and curators of the President's new found voice.

MashiMachine lives on mashimachine.4pelagatos.com website, with an interactive desktop/mobile deployment that allows the platform to be experienced anywhere. We used the hashtag #mashimachine in every shared post to viralize and track the user's interactions.

The website implementation works with custom made servers that provide service to an on-demand video editing platform, living on the amazon cloud that exposes a REST api which is consumed by the client application.

It took 2 months of development and video database population. New words are added daily to the database. It is placed as a standalone subdomain of the 4pelagatos journal which supports the platform by spreading social network awareness and daily blog posts about the MashiMachine.

Every video is unique and generated per user's request, the video editing is fast and seamless, returning new content within 10 seconds after the request has been made. Thousands of videos can be created by the hour.

In just 72 hrs:

+110K Videos created by the people, enough to make 256 feature films.

+1.8M pageviews, one of the most visited sites in Ecuador.

+156M Social Media Impressions, the largest organic viral campaign in the history of Ecuador.

+4M USD in Earned Media, the world became aware of the problem.

+The MashiMachine became a platform of free expression where Ecuadorians regained a public voice.

A new digital journal, 4 pelagatos, was born in January 2016 out of the need for a free and independent media outlet in Ecuador. Press and Society fear the consequences their government takes when criticized.

As a new and innovative activation for the 4pelagatos site we strived to create a loud and strong action inside a platform that would incite interaction with a broader audience, engagement with social media and boost awareness to the website.

Our target was the Ecuadorian Civil Society regardless of their political views, people who are tired of not being able to freely speak offline and specially online. Indirectly, we appealed to all Ecuadorians, International audiences and the Ecuadorian government itself.

President Correa uploads 4 hours of video and audio of weekly updates to Youtube. We gathered material from them and separated each word to populate the video database.

The website (fully functional in both desktop and mobile devices) has a prompt where people can write whatever they want and click a button. The president then says exactly that. The app returns a stitched-up shareable video and a website link that can be distributed easily and freely over social networks.

Creativity within the platform is endless as every user has the power to generate as many videos as they want with the MashiMachine and partake in the creation of new discourses.

In Ecuador there is only one voice that says it all, the voice of President Rafael "Mashi" Correa, he broadcasts publicly more than any other world leader (over a year long of footage in his term). His “Communication Law” monitors and clamps the opinion of journalists who oppose the government. Today they control the largest media group in the country, from one National media in 2008 to owning 22 in 2016. The New York Times called his attacks against the press "An Assault on Democracy".

In this context, Three top journalists, who were forced out of their jobs because of their opinions, got together in 2016 to open the online journal “4pelagatos” (the same word Correa used to insult them). They hired us to come up with an idea that would give Ecuadorians the opportunity to express their public opinions, boosting awareness for their platform at the same time.