Mob advertising
: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Dutch Coke is having teen customers create commercials; the winner will appear on TV. (Here’s the Dutch Coke site, half in English so you can navigate to the commercial-creator.) Sure, it’s a gimmick. But there’s still a message here:
The wise marketer/advertiser/PRguy/spinmeister would pay attention to the content the audience has created here, online, with its passion, credibility, and creativity and its ability to capture the galvanic skin response of the people. That wise person would get such consumers to create advertising. You see a piece of that with Apple’s switch commercials, but that’s heavily produced and formatted. So take it to the next level: Have these people create the creative: Imagine a Kottke commercial for the new killer Apple laptop. Imagine Ken Layne writing the commercial for In ‘n’ Out Burgers. Imagine Elizabeth Spiers writing the copy for a Jonathan Franzen book ad.
Of course, it’s not a long road from there to prostitution: I’ll love your product if you pay me to. But I am confident that the people above would not sell out (yet) and that would give their pitching the ring of truth — which is the most effective advertising.
This continues my view that weblogs are an effective farm team for other media teams. Bloggers can become columnists. Vloggers can become TV pundits. Photobloggers can shoot for slick magazines. Any of them can create new marketing….
