Leveraging consumer generated content, or whatever silly buzzword you want to throw at the notion of people creating stuff - as if that were something new, ViTrue Inc., following its acquisition of video sharing site Sharkle, is formalizing the process of random people created ads for specific brands. ViTrue, which has been playing in the people-powered ad space for some time, will introduce a process where marketers and their agencies can post a creative brief, solicit work, review and approve the work which will then appear on Sharkle and, perhaps on television.
On one hand, one could say it's just dumb to outside the industry to find new creative because no one outside the industry could possibly understand what makes a great ad. On the other hand, one could say our industry is an insular, ego-infested closet full of whack jobs who have been following the same lame formulas and creating the same boring ads for so long simply to win awards rather than sell product, anything would be an improvement. We're kinda thinking the other hand has the right idea here.
A couple years ago, UK telephone company Talk Talk ran a commercial that used people to form words. This month, a commercial for Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad did the same thing? Some would calls this a form of plagiarism. Others would call it an effective visual element. After all, British Airways did it. Countless others have including out all-time favorite, Carlton Draught's Big Ad, itself, a knock off of the British Airways ad. Certainly these two ads are very similar but are there really any new ideas left? Does it really matter if one ad uses the same visual element as another? Does anyone care?
In February of this year, a blog called Spacecadetz launched. The purpose of the blog is to highlight some of the best MySpace content from profiles to videos to new features to events. Currently, the blog has an interview with Al Cabino, the man behind a petition that asks Nike to bring back McFlys, the sneakers featured in the Michael J. Fox movie Back to the Future II. Cabino, who's coined the term "sneaker activism" doesn't want to wait until 2015, the year rumor has it Nike will, perhaps, introduce McFlys to the public. Cabino wants the kicks now and has launched a vigorous campaign to get Nike's attention.
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Here's Jessica Alba doing the Asian commercial thing. Like all kinds of other celebs who go to Japan and other far away (from America) places to make a little extra cash without suffering overexposure in America, Alba, her handlers and the handlers of other celebs seem to have forgotten about these things called the Internet and YouTube where geography is a non-issue. Sure, a commercial airing on TV is still more glamorous and far reaching than a commercial on the web but that won't be the case for much longer. The practice of celebrities "hiding" while making money won't last. If you want to see more American celebrities doing the foreign commercial thing, you should go visit Japander, a site whose sole purpose is to catalog American celebrities appearing in Japanese commercials. Some are hilariously goofy.
