Television
Doritos asks users (again) to produce a Super Bowl ad.
Doritos engages its target audience once again to produce TVCs for the superbowl. Their shoutout is “take down the ad pros” / “take the top spot”.
Make it to one of the five finalists and winn $25,000. When voted as the favourite, your ad will get aired during the superbowl. An dif the ad gets to the top spot of the US Today Ad Meter, you win 1,000,000
You can think of any story you like, and should submit a video of not more than 30 secs. In the gallery, there are already 218 spots by now.
On the site, they even provide you with a library of Doritos material, such as product shots, music files and animated logo sequences usually used for the end of a spot by the ad pros. But the story items still need to be shot by the target audience.
While I always liked the idea of consumer generated content, it is stilla cheap means of cutting production costs – in this case to a possible max of $125kfor the finalists plus an undisclosed amount for whoever produced the site and manages the campaign. The 1 million will only be paid out if the spot makes it to number one of the US Today Ad Meter. I don’t know what the chances are in that, but I do know that advertisers can buy insurances for these kind of “risks”. So that the actual sum paid for the insurance premium that pays, in case the 1 million needs to be paid out, can by substantially lower.
When you campaign, don’t stop.
I have written about the notion of campaigning vs commiting and the fact that social media is not about short lived campaigns but more often about building up conversations and long term relationships.
The online part of the election campaign of Barack Obama was one of the most sophisticated social media campaigns I have seen in a long time.
But in politics, everythings is timed. Everything builds up for the election, then there is the big climax, as we have seen last Tuesday, and now the campaign is over, done, dusted. Obama is already busy putting his cabinett together (he must not loose time addressing all the problems that his predecessor caused in the last 8 years!), and there is no involvement of the Obama supporters any longer.
The pressure is gone, and all the most active supporters have nothing to talk about, nothing to live up to any more. Here is a television news report on the sad victims of post election hang over:
Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are
have fun! I am glad the election turned out the way it did!
The fourth screen
It’s an advert, but the message is generic. Any competitor of Nokia, especially Apple with the iPhone could have said the same. The underlying idea, though, is fascinating. And very true, in my opinion. Just give it a few years until a majority owns mobile devices of that kind.
The YouTube Star called Fred.
This guy is amazing. He is only 14 years old, yet he has more than 40m video views in total. His YouTube channel has been viewd almost 6m times and he has more than a quarter of a million subscribers. And all he does (from the little I could cope with watching), is talk incredibly fast in an artificially high pitched (pretending to be 6 years old) voice about stuff that matters to kids. It’s a show by kids for kids. Not suitable for anyone over 16. But the kids love him. They
“…just think he’s the funniest thing ever [...] fall on the floor hysterically laughing. They’re just mesmerized” (source)
This is what you get, when you let the crowd do their stuff. Would any CEO of a TV station or production company have signed this concept off or given any budget for it? And how much budget would a professional production company have spent to produce these?
It is surprising, to say the least, what gets popular these days and what doesn’t. Never underestimated user generated content!
Joost focuses on the US.
Just a quick one: Joost shuts down its global operations and focuses on the US only. Shame, I liked the idea of Joost. But in the end, it was brought down by two main factors that even a technologically smart way of streaming videos can’t solve: first: trying to buy global rights for content that studios could probably sell much more profitable on a country-by-country basis. second: having exclusive, compelling content that users won’t find anywhere else (nevermind that they’re overloaded with too much online video anyway.
And for me: I always felt like the joost interface just wasn’t right somehow. I don’t watch fullscreen video on my PC. Still, I was always hoping for it to evolve (globally), so that one day I could enjoy watching videos via joost. But not any more, I guess.
