Hot of the press, the NY Times has an article about the whole Chevy incident, quoting a spokesperson from Chevy:
A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the anti-S.U.V. ads.
„We anticipated that there would be critical submissions,“ Ms. Tezanos said. „You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it’s part of playing in this space.“
And further down they quote Drew Neisser of Renegade Marketing:
companies had such a strong desire for user-generated advertising that they were willing to accept the risks. „There’s this gold rush fever about consumer-generated content,“ he said. „Everybody wants to have consumer-generated content, and Chevy Tahoe doesn’t want to be left behind.“
Hey, it’s the new fad amongst marketeers! Not bad, this trend. I like these kind of campaigns anyway!
(Even though I can’t be moved to participate – yet!)
I hadn’t blogged about the new campaign of Chevy yet, in which they ask users to compile their own ads and put it up on their website. (There is a lot of interesting stuff out there in the „consumer generated media“ space and I am currently just collecting everything on delicious.)
Adjab and Adpulp now mention something that will always happen when you start a campaign like that and don’t check the ads before they go live on the website: There are a couple of spots that contain messages that Chevy is, most likely, not in favour of. These kind of spots will always appear in all sorts of places – even more so in the future, now that we have sites like YouTube and mobile phones that can film videos. But these happen to be part of the Chevy challenge, and they’re live on their website.
But there is one spot that could pose a problem to Chevy. Not only regarding their image, but also legally:
Like Snow? Beautiful landscapes? Be sure to take it all in now because…
Tomorrow this asshole’s SUV will change the world
Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad
It’s a frightening reality
ExxposeExxon.org
Tahoe� An American Revolution (source)
Now this one spot I am sure they’ll delete. I don’t think they want to get into trouble with Exxon. And they can without loosing their face, because in the rules it says:
or which might subject Sponsors or its licensees to unfavorable regulatory action, violate any law, infringe the rights of any person, or subject Sponsors or its Licensees to liability for any reason.
I also think it’s OK. It’s about Chevy and it’s target group. It’s not about any other brands.
Should they, however, pull the other ads that are negative about Chevy or SUVs, it will most likely have a negative PR effect on them. If they let people upload anything without prior control, they should stick to it.
I agree with Steve Hall: let’s hope the reason they left the videos online is their sense for the rules of the new media – and not just the fact that this happened over a weekend.
By now I also heard from some friends who actually do watch television regularly, that the Eric Cantona Spot appears on a view German stations – mainly the sports channels, of course. Sofar, I haven’t seen it myself, though.
Viacom Starts Playing With Video Mashups reports business2blog. You can create mashups of clips from different show of their teen channel „the N“.
And of course you can email these clips to your friends. Smart as they are, they insert a little ad in the beginning.
So what could this podcast potentially be about?
Of course, one of my favourite topics – consumer (or citizen) generated media (or content). They aren’t so sure about the exact term either. This was episode Nr. 1, with episode Nr. 2 following next week.
I just wonder – why putting it live like broadcasting, in two chunks, one this week, the second next week? Why not upload all of it in one go and let us have the content „on demand“? As far as I understood, that second chunk is already sitting on Joes harddrive, waiting for publication until next week…!
Any way, it’s definitely worth checking out nevertheless.
Wo ich sonst so bin...