According to Collective Intellect, which tracked brand lift for advertisers before and after the Academy Awards, Dove outdid 10 other major advertisers, elevating its position 500 percent with pre-show buzz.
Consistency, and refining an old model, were probably key. Dove rehashed last year's campaign strategy: appealing to audience members to produce and rate ads for its Cream Oil product. The winner was a woman named Celeste Wouden, whose spot lacks the slapstick, paging-Cartoon-Network! feel we've come to expect from UGC efforts. In fact, it looks like a stock Dove commercial (and for WAY less money).
Watch the ad at DoveCreamOil.com. Runners-up can be seen in the gallery.
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Havas' BLM Quantum has unleashed a make-your-own-video (remember when we had simpler names for things?) contest on MySpace in the United Kingdom called Think Outside the Box which urges people to "get green" and recycle their pizza boxes into ingenious new uses.
Have at it CGM (oops, we mean make-your-own-video) fans.
If you're bummed about your creative inability to contribute a musical mash-up to Obama's viral war chest, we're found your solution.
Become part of the fabric of "Yes We Can"! Yeah, the video looks all screwed up and snowy for a reason. Mouse over the images and you'll see snapshots of upload-happy Obama worker bees. Just hope they vote, Obama!
The site was put together by Syrup for will.i.am, according to A Source of Inspiration.
To win the youth vote Obama stole like a thief in the night, Hillary further strains our suspension of disbelief with "the playlist for YOUR future."
It's a UGC support site! (We like how when you mouse over the videos, the bottom right-hand corner says "Posted by Americans!")
Does Hillary speak for you?
Oh God. It's that damn song again. About a month after the Super Bowl, we'd almost rid it from head bobbing around inside your head. Anyway, because some think two Super Bowl spots are better than one, we have this mashup up of Justin Timberlake's Pepsi commercial and the What is Love Diet Pepsi Max commercial. It's been up since February 7 but it's only been seen by 3,300 people. I'm sure we can increase that a bit.
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HP is looking for the world's most talented hands.
Entrants to the Idolhands contest could win $10,000 or one of four TouchSmart PCs. Contest ends February 28.
Having sat through five or six of these, we don't imagine the expectations are super-ambitious. If you're Vera Wang or Jay-Z, that is.
Other brands have have relegated talent to fancy fingertips include Guinness, Elle MacPherson (in panties, no less!), and Phaeton.
Oh, and Campusfood, if soliciting handouts counts.
According to The New York Times, Subway is inexplicably (as in pending lawsuit) pissed at Quiznos because of some "derogatory" user-generated videos that depict Subway unfavorably. Must see to believe (scroll down to view the big offender).
Some actual Quiznos ads, depicting people on the street choosing between the two brands, also made it into the lawsuit, but the big stars are the UGC entries from some contest Quiznos ran. Subway is also suing iFilm for running the contest.
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If you've ever fantasized about a trip to Scotland, now may be the time to enter what may be the mother of all UGC contests: the Current and T-Mobile VCAM ("viewer-created ad messages") Assignment. We just watched an entry called "Leader of the Pack," which bored us stupid. But it did have bagpipe music.
Entries are accepted 'til Feb 25. If your video is worthy of Current airtime, you could win $1,000 -- slave wages in the ad industry, but who are we to judge.
If the sponsors want to air your ad elsewhere, you could get anywhere between $5,000 to $50,000. And yeah, somewhere in there is a free trip to Scotland. So start recording, squares.
While brands certainly don't want people using their products, logos and other related imagery to create products of their, own, the hammer that Ford legal dropped on the Black Mustang Club seems a bit heavy handed. Recently the club created a calendar which contained images of club members' cars photographed by the members themselves. Ford didn't take kindly to this and asked CafePress, the service the group had chosen to print the calendars, to kill the project claiming all the images in the calendar are the property of Ford...including the Black Mustang Club logo (this has been clarified in the update below. in actuality, it was CafePress which, based on past Ford trademark dealings, initially refused to print the calendar).
It's understandable that a brand would and should do everything it can to protect itself from any kind of potential negative effect but to attack a group of people who, clearly, love the product in question simply for showing their love of that product is, well, idiotic and more harmful to the brand had they done nothing at all.
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Sometimes an innocent instance of "sticking it to the man" is not just sticking it to the man. It might be sticking it to women. Literally. Blood and all.
Words & Pictures takes a closer look at the activities of the East London Decapitator and observes the lauded ad-manipulator targets women five-to-one.
Considering the female half of Adrants is the Queen's Country right now, that's a ratio that literally hurts our necks.
Read the analysis, if only for the accompanying "DIE, BITCH" comic.
What do you think? Is this all in good fun, or the makings of a carte blanche psycho?
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