A short story about „death by search“

James Cherkoff tells us a nice little story about how tight marketing programs, the nice shop in a nice part of town, well trained sales people, the glossy leaflets and the good reputation of certain type of kitchen brand has been made obsolete by one single search on the web about what other customers of this brand had to say. The opinions were mostly negative and James ended up cancelling his order.

Of course, you would always have consulted other sources – most of all your closest peers – about opinions on any high involvement product or service. But the chances that you find many sources with the same brand of kitchen (car, dishwasher, etc.) in your closest range of peers was and is rather limited.

With todays possibilities to find opinions on anything on the web (even stuff you didn’t want to know about), it is ever more important for brands to keep their promises. People are fearing the moment of the totally transparent consumer, but hey, brands already face this complete transparency!

Another fan created iPod ad

Do you remember the iPod ad the school teacher George Masters produced a few years ago? Well, there is a new fan-created ad, this time by an 19-year old from the midlands in the UK. And while Apple never even made a single statement about the ad Mr. Masters produced in 2004, they now asked their agency TBWA/Chiat/Day to fly the boy to LA and professionally produce the ad.

At the time of writing this, the ad had been viewed more than 440.000 times, 388 comments, and 569 favourites.

This success is probably also due to the case that big shots like the NY Times, Wired, Gizmodo, and MacRumous picked up on the story… And the fact that „User Generated Content“ has become a rather familiar concept since 2004 – apparently even for „divas“ like Apple.

(But if you ask me: it’s a horrible ad, especially the music!)