Smooth…

Nice viral as part of the Stella Artois 4% campaign. French nonchalance at its best.

Awesome interactive Trueblood billboard

Because, deep down, everyone wants to hunt vampires.

A few more pictures here.

Incredible Purchase Brothers Coke Viral

Absolutely floored by this Coke viral that’s been floating across the internet for the past few days (my only little peeve is with the male voice-over that mentions global warming so explicitly, it would have been so much nicer if they’d just left the previous comment about them consuming CO2 hanging there subtly instead of smashing the dots together with a sledgehammer). As far as I can tell the video itself is portfolio work – details on the Purchase Brothers website are sketchy at best, and considering their iPod work, I really doubt anyone from Coke had anything to do with it whatsoever.

With that in mind though, I have a few questions that I can’t really resolve in my head. The video is spreading across the net like lightning – it’s only been up since the 9th and already it’s had almost 120,000 hits – awesome news for Coke (in this case). But what if the message behind the spot had been negative, and reflected badly on Coke, rather than being a fan homage? Sure, there are probably loads of videos all over YouTube preaching the evils of Coke, but at the end of the day they don’t look like they could have been made by Coke themselves (and it’s not just the quality of the video, but the use of the ‘Coke side of life’ animation at the end of the roll). What I’m trying to say is, is there a point at which this kind of fan-created content could become copyright infringement under the law? And could that point be somehow defined by quality? Let’s say the spot had misrepresented Coke, would they have had a leg to stand on if they had gone after Purchase Brothers based on the fact that the quality of the spot is so akin to their own ads and could therefore be easily construed as their own? And where would YouTube stand on this, and could they get embroiled in this sort of fiasco?

Any thoughts?

Found via ADivertido

What can a viral do?

I’ve been reading a lot of Faris Yakob’s stuff recently, and his latest post on futurecasting throws up some key questions about how viral advertising works, and more specifically what it does rather than what it is. In the Boards discussion between himself, David Pescovitz and Rishad Tobaccowala, Faris says that:

I’ve been talking recently about shifting away from the idea of virality, which is really unhelpful, to “spreadability”, as Henry Jenkins, the director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, coins it. When we talk about making a viral in my industry, we mean, “Let’s make something that self-propagates and hope it gets free impressions and saves money.” That idea of self-propagation is ridiculous because it requires people to pass things along, so we have to ask why people do that. What’s the social emphatic function of pushing content to my networks and why would I do that? You can do that a lot easier by sending a video clip to five people than a postcard-style letter saying, “How’s things?”

This makes really good sense. Comparing an online video to a virus is disingenuous because the video itself does not possess its own agency – natural viruses need to spread to survive, and will…

Where my buddies at?

Despite the rather annoying voice over harping on about what her “buddies” are up to, this demonstration of Google Latitude shows it to be a pretty cool application. When Phil first told me about it, my initial reaction was complete aversion to the idea that I could be tracked 24 hrs a day 7 days a week, Jack Bauer style, but the fact of the matter is, you can switch it off when you need to. This does fit in pretty nicely with our predictions for this year – a furthering of the “never be alone” mentality.

Happy Christmas!

This should definitely be a viral – Homebase maybe? Focus Do it All? Someone’s missing a trick…