Archive for the 'Consumer Created' Category

Another victory for consumer power yesterday. Digg.com, the world’s most popular technology news website and responsible for 1% of US Internet traffic, announced it would no longer edit stories containing a secret code that people can use to hack hi-def DVD discs. Scared of lawsuits from the big ol’ Entertainment Industry, up until yesterday Digg had been removing the offending code from its users posts. But this is content created by The People, for The People and said People didn’t like it when someone told them what they could and couldn’t write, and so revolted. “We are revolting!” they said. They deluged the website with thousands of posts, so much so that it collapsed under the weight.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose, saw the error of his ways and yesterday reversed his decision to edit the posts containg “the code,” and announced the people were more important than the smelly lawyers. He said in his post on the website: “You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.” And what’s more he stuck the code itself in his post. Now that, Kevin, is ballsy. But, really he had no choice. He realized a website that relies on user-generated content is nothing without its users and calculated he could still fend off any legal challenges. And, in doing so, he’s shown (though it took a while) he understands what is important and who has the real power now. Nice one, Kev, we dig that.

Exactly one week after Viacom said it was suing Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, two of Hollywood’s other big TV boys showed that there can be a different approach to tackling the Tube. Today NBC and NewsCorp announced they are joining forces to launch a website of professionally produced video content. What’s more they’re doing it with the distribution power of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. And NewsCorp’s mighty MySpace is there to help with distribution. The partnership crows that they will be able to reach 96% of all US Internet users with this new, yet to be named, website.

A few observations about this deal:
1. Google must be thinking oh shit, there goes all the good stuff from the website we just sunk $1.65billion into.
2. For NBC and NewsCorp to form a partnership I guess they must have been pretty desperate not to have to rely on YouTube to keep the youngsters intersested in their content.
3. They are selling ad space and no doubt are offering it as part of a value-added package to TV advertisers and have a business model that works. They’ll probably be in profit quite quickly while YouTube won’t be for a long long time.
5. All the content will be professionally produced. This doesn’t show they have much faith in the consumer-produced stuff, which soon will be all that will remain on YouTube.
6. Viacom better jump in with NBC and NewsCorp or come up with an alternative plan soon or they’ll be looking like they missed the boat…again.
7. Marketers can experiment with both YouTube and the new website before they invest too heavily in either. That’s good, right.
8. If the content on the new site isn’t great and does not pique the interest of younger consumers in the same way that YouTube content does, they and then the advertisers will quickly say, nah forgeddit and move on. Professionally produced could end up being as bad as the shit on TV. Remember it’s not where the stuff is placed it’s how good it is.
9. Let’s hope they come up with a good name for it soon. Any suggestions? We’ll pass on the ones we like to NBC/NewsCorp. Our favorite so far is ScewYouTube, but see if you can beat it.

Or….Sumner Whine.

Today old man Sumner Redstone’s Viacom announced it was suing Google for $1billion for copyright infringement because of the 160,000 video clips posted “illegally” on YouTube, including shows from Viacom’s VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. According to Viacom’s legal claim, in the last six weeks since they asked YouTube to remove the more than 100,000 illegal clips of Viacom shows, over 50,000 more have popped up. Oops.

If this ever goes to court - Redstone is a grumpy old man with a big ego money to burn, so it just might - Google will be using the “safe harbor” defense from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that basically says if users stick up content illegally and the company takes them down when asked, all is sweet. One commentator has likened the current law to “head shops” getting away with selling weird-shaped smoking pipes because, they say, they didn’t realize that the pipes might be used for smoking illicit substances (”Oh, that’s why the kids with funny beards bought them!”)

Of course it’s really about the fight of Old versus New. Old media conglomerates like Vicaom have been losing the battle for the teen and young adult audience, while those pesky upstarts like MySpace (Redstone is still bitter he missed out on buying that one to his much more tech-savvy rival Rupert Murdoch) and YouTube. Print publishers and authors have also been upset at Google’s quest to put all the information up on the web for free when it’s their content that is being put up there. And who can blame them. TV networks and writers (hell, I’m one!) spend time and money creating content and then Google lets people put it up there for all to see without paying for it.

The question that companies including Viacom have been wrestling with is whether it’s better to let YouTube show bits of its content for free and hope they benefit from the potential increase in viewers to the show it came from on the box; or, whether they the should retain complete control and make people come to the their own sites if they want to see stuff like South Park. There’s no easy answer. In fact since Viacom told youTube to pull all its content from YouTube a few weeks ago indications are that traffic to its own websites, showing clips of Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central for instance, have increased.

Not that Google’s made any money from having the illegal clips up on YouTube. But every one of the big media companies know that that will soon change. Google paid such a hefty price for YT last November ($1.65billion) because they saw where the eyeballs were going - to short online video clips - and know they should be able to monetize that interest through sponsored searches, the method that has made them the giant they now are.

There’s no telling how the battle will pan out. For sure Google will tighten up its technology so it’s easier for them and the media companies to track illegally posted content and pull it down. Meanwhile the big G will be scrambling to do some big deals with content owners before they, seeing Viacom’s move today, build their own sites to compete with YouTube.

But the end result will not be determined by big media deals and court cases, but by the consumers. They will seek out the content they want, and turn on companies - Google, Viacom or whoever - who don’t give it to them in the form they want it. The winners will be those that work out how to do this in the least bullshit way.

Meanwhile, I bet Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - the founders of YouTube - are glad they sold when they did, before the law suits started flooding in. Here’s to ya, boys!

The Super Bowl represents the last watercooler moment for TV advertising. With the splintering of the media into a million different pieces across the airwaves, online, in games (video, that is) and everywhere else that will sell space to marketers, the Bowl is still a place where millions of young guys gather around their 70 inch plasmas and LCDs to share an entertainment experience. And advertisers know they have a chance to reach this precious demographic with gold old-fashioned TV commercials. Who can say TV advertsing is dead when an advertiser like Anheuser-Busch spends $25 million on Super Bowl commercials? Right? Right…?

And the agencies had better come up with the goods to prove that they can still woo the consumers with their fare.

Over the last 10 or 15 years the big lumbering agencies have become specialists in creating big lumbering TV-centric campaigns and are smarting from the blasphemy spoken by many with data to back it up that commercials are no longer reaching the people they need to reach, and those that they do reach, fast forward through them on TiVo or their cable operators own brand of DVR.

The Super Bowl is the agencies’ chance to prove that TV advertising can be great, that sponsored online search, branded entertainment, viral marketing and the like are no more than flashes in the pan and will crawol back from whence they came before too long.

But even this one last great advertising showcase - the Super Bowl - shows the case for TV comercials is far from proven. The advertising on display in the multiple breaks is not uninimously great. In fact, for the most part, the fare served up for the 41st Bowl was pretty damned poor given what’s at stake.

For one, there was an unhealthy a celebration of violence as a mode of humor. Not just slapstick, although there was plenty of that too, but people hitting each other or fighting or committing mass suicide. Isn’t the Super Bowl supposed to be a family show? I mean wasn’t that the problem with Janet Jackson’s nipple popping out a couple of years ago? But I guess violence is OK for young kids to see (my son is three and I had to turn the TV off when the ads came on) and to model their behavior on. Nice example Mad Ave.

And then there were the “consumer-generated ads” from Chevy, Doritos and the NFL. The Chevy one had a bunch of guys in the street taking their clothes of because they couldn’t resist the new Chevy car SUV hybrid thing in vile orange. It was lame. The Doritos one had a guy driving a car and a girl passerby smacking their heads because they were (a)distraced by Doritos, and (b)nerds. Lame AND violent. The NFL one was a great concept about the end of the season, poorly executed by the ad agency (and shot by commercial director legend Joe Pytca). But the idea actually came from an ad guy, Gino Bona, who works in a New England ad agency (Garrand Marketing Communications), just not from one working at Doritos agency of record, Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein and Partners. Goodby must have hated having to produce an ad wriiten by a guy from another agency. Maybe that’s why they screwed it up. But, the point is, it ain’t really consumer-geberated if the consumer works in advertising. Right?

There was some great work, demonstating a good strategy and a big creative idea well-executed (and that, after all, is all advertising can hope to be), notably from E*trade, Revlon, Emerald Nuts and Toyota. They each showed that TV advertsing can still be a powerful way of getting a point about a product across.

But my award for the best commercials of the Bowl goes to Coca-Cola for two excellent ads from the “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life” campaign, created by Wieden and Kennedy. Coca-Cola has not been known for great ads in the past few years, producing a bunch of vapid, happy, slappy, crappy commercials that offended no-one and appealed to exactly the same number, but it really seems to have turned the corner with this work and I tip my caps to the marketer and its agency. W+K remain one of the great agencies around, developing stellar work consistently across their clients.