Your commercial on TV: $50

[cosmicity]

This is pretty fascinating. Want to directly affect the outcome of the next primaries? This new website called saysme.tv just launched, and for about $50 a pop, you can run a political TV commercial in any market. So, for example, if you want Obama to win in Indiana, you could buy an ad and run it on CNN for $50 to help him out. Choose from

Comments

[cosmicity]

I don't know... I think agencies still have a place in there. I mean, if you take a random sampling of You Tube, the mass majority of the content is complete garbage. Most people just can't make a good ad on their own. That's why there will always be agencies. People need the help of others who are naturally creative. Now, will you see the most successful viral video makers launch their own very profitable agencies? Hell yeah you will. And in that capacity, I'm excited about it. I'd love to be producing that kind of content as opposed to only stiff corporate stuff.

Now, as for your comment about your boss's lack of viral understanding, we have the exact same problem with our Chrysler clients (and even some of the bosses within my agency). They don't actually understand what makes a viral a viral. Just because you make a commercial and shove it on YouTube and whatnot, doesn't mean it's going to do anything. Virals work only when people love them so much that they HAVE to show their friends, which generally means edgy/gutsy/different content... the type of content large car companies are way too frightened to create. (Only a precious few large companies have ever really pulled a viral off in any kind of big way... Burger King comes to mind though.)

It's tough, 'cause you don't want to tell your client or your boss you can't do it, but to do it right, they'd pretty much have to throw caution to the wind (and fire all of their lawyers).

-m

[cosmicity]

Totally. I mean, the future of the internet probably IS more video and motion, but as you said, the internet is first and foremost about getting information easily and quickly. If you're going to integrate video, it needs to somehow be faster or far more helpful than just reading the content, otherwise people will ignore it. We make that mistake at Chrysler a lot, too. Their new thing is to put up these 10 minute demonstration videos for their new vehicles, but who would sit through a cheesy 10 minute infomercial when they can just read the car's crucial specs in about :30 seconds and look at a 360 photo of it? That's what people really want from a car website. (Which leads me to yet another common web problem: Most people go to company websites looking for those kinds of quick stats about a product, and the information is always completely buried in the site. Dumb.)

-m