Ryan MacMillan

Last week’s Club lecture at the ICA was slightly misleadingly titled ‘The Democratisation of Advertising’. I went along expecting a session of user generated, subverted and perverted adverts and instead I was treated to an evening of user-distributed adverts. What would you call it? “The democratisation of distribution?”

The speakers included Joel Veitch (he of dancing kittens fame), Will Jeffrey of Maverick film productions, John Hassay of Colonel Blimp and Mat Tucker, head of The Dark Room at Partizan

Spot the connection? All producers of video content, or as some would have us believe ‘virals’. (I won’t get into it here, suffice to say it’s an adjective not a noun). And while the speakers only touched lightly on user created brand messages we did see some very good pieces of video and learn a lot about how cheap and easy it is to create; the overall message from all the speakers was every encouragement to get a hand held video or HD cam and get out there. But reading between the enthusiasm for creating kewl content for the kids there were also some little alarm bells tinkling that should get us all thinking a bit harder about this area.

One of the examples shown was the video at the top of this posting, a really clever music video that had been created by Colonel Blimp to promote ‘Hitchhikers Choice’, a new track from techno artists Minilogue. An extraordinary feat of animation it had been created for a few hundred pounds. I had actually seen the video before but it had been passed on to me as an example of great animation. Watching it originally I had barely noticed the music other than to think absent mindedly ‘nice track, I wonder if they paid for it?’ I had no idea who the recording artist was or indeed that I was supposed to be actively listening to the music. Looking at the comments posted under the video on YouTube, this seems to have been the experience of most of the audience. In a fairly typical response Fernandotorres2007 sums it up nicely, “you are awesome that is great no one can do that it takes a lot of time and many drawings. perfect.” Enthusiastic, but with no mention of the track.

Which raises one of the central questions around user distributed video; what do they actually achieve? If the primary reason a clip is passed on is because of its inherent entertainment value, is it actually getting a brand message across? (I’m pretty sure that this is a different question to ‘does broadcast advertising work?’ because broadcast is interruptive (push not pull) and has a whole range of other characteristics). And I’m as guilty as anyone, the Sony BRAVIA ‘Balls‘ campaign I was involved with last year resulted in over 7 million user distributed views of the advert. But until we do some brand tracking against that - it’s just a Very Big Number.

My suspicion is that creating and distributing virals is just broadcast by another name. But in this version of broadcast the advertiser is dependent on the user passing it on, rather than paying the media owner to push it out. In order to achieve this certain characteristics need to be dialled up. According to recent research from Millward Brown the factors most likely to result in a user forwarding a video are not the level of product or brand information but a rather a terrible acronym of LEGS. (Laugh out loud, Edgy, Griping or Sex).
A telling observation was made by Maverick’s Will Jeffrey, “Viral is losing its novelty”. He went on to explain that it is getting increasingly difficult to get the same kind of pick up and pass along rates because he believes the consumer is over the novelty of virals. Does that sound a bit like what has happened to click through rates on banners to anyone?

I’ll leave the last word to Joel Veitch who was recently caught up in a controversy after an Argentinean ad agency was accused of ripping of one of his animations to use in a Coke advert. When asked about why he thought Coke decided play nicely rather that crush him in court his view was that it was the court of public opinion that mattered more to big brands than anything else. Which possibly does represent the democratisation of advertising or at least justice.