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.
There is a new myspace-linkedin-like site up called zaadz They are still in pre-Beta mode. Honestly: pre-Beta? What exactly does that mean for me?
And this what that site is all about:
Our Mission. That’s easy. We’re gonna change the world. […] The quick version of what we’re gonna do: build THE most inspired community of people in the world… Imagine social networking with a purpose, a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs circulating wisdom and inspiration and wealth and all that good stuff. Fun fun fun.
Somehow all of this sounds very ambitious. Almost too big. And like they’re playing in a competition where many other communities already gained ground.
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.
Another campaign utilizing Google Maps: Heineken hooks up with Google Maps for Tapvat World Tour 2006.
In this microsite visitors are supposed to search the world for gigs from Dutch live band Voicst using Google’s satellite images. All within a certain timeframe while a radio signal leads you to the right spot.
The game is intuitive enough, which is good as I don’t speak any dutch. At the end I found the spot (why would the want to have a gig there?), but I didn’t understand what they wanted my address details for – surely it was for some kind of sweepstake, but who knows what else I might have signed up for?
Try it out, it’s interesting and kept me busy for quite a few minutes (I had to try twice to find the spot – and it’s of course in a different place every time).
boakes.org apparently broke the news: Steve Jobs, the incredible Steve, won an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia during a poker game – and has nothing better to do than to build a giant iPod ad on it.
An ad that can be seen from outer space, as even adrants reports (err, quotes). If you look on technorati, you can find lots of posts on thismatter – it’s the new Apple story, apparently. OK, it’s for the 30th birthday of Apple, fair enough. They might as well go big.
Yet, according to all the blogs I read sofar, I was probably the only one not zooming in on to the iPod, but zooming out to check out the area around it.
And while I like this story a lot, I couldn’t help myself noticing, that Steve Jobs is indeed building two iPod ads rather close to each other!! I suppose one is for the iPod video while the other one is for, well, any of the other iPods. It’s not finished yet, so it’s difficult to tell.
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.