Links & News, 09.11.08

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Doritos asks users (again) to produce a Super Bowl ad.

Doritos engages its target audience once again to produce TVCs for the superbowl. Their shoutout is „take down the ad pros“ / „take the top spot“.

Make it to one of the five finalists and winn $25,000. When voted as the favourite, your ad will get aired during the superbowl. An dif the ad gets to the top spot of the US Today Ad Meter, you win 1,000,000

You can think of any story you like, and should submit a video of not more than 30 secs. In the gallery, there are already 218 spots by now.

On the site, they even provide you with a library of Doritos material, such as product shots, music files and animated logo sequences usually used for the end of a spot by the ad pros. But the story items still need to be shot by the target audience.

While I always liked the idea of consumer generated content, it is stilla cheap means of cutting production costs – in this case to a possible max of $125kfor the finalists plus an undisclosed amount for whoever produced the site and manages the campaign. The 1 million will only be paid out if the spot makes it to number one of the US Today Ad Meter. I don’t know what the chances are in that, but I do know that advertisers can buy insurances for these kind of „risks“. So that the actual sum paid for the insurance premium that pays, in case the 1 million needs to be paid out, can by substantially lower.

(via ad rants)

Tiger Woods answers and walks on water

This is a fantastic response of a brand (EA Games) and a sportsman (Tiger Woods) to a piece of user generated content. In the video, someone claims to have found a glitch in a golf game by EA games – i.e. how he can make the computer animated Tiger woods run on water.
In the next video below EA games and Tiger Woods show, that it wasn’t a glitch at all. Tiger Woods is indeed capable of doing „Jesus Shots“. Great stuff. Mind you, it took them nearly a year to find the video and post the answer – but nevertheless, very funny!

The report on the „glitch“

Tiger proving the Jesus Shot:

The YouTube Star called Fred.

This guy is amazing. He is only 14 years old, yet he has more than 40m video views in total. His YouTube channel has been viewd almost 6m times and he has more than a quarter of a million subscribers. And all he does (from the little I could cope with watching), is talk incredibly fast in an artificially high pitched (pretending to be 6 years old) voice about stuff that matters to kids. It’s a show by kids for kids. Not suitable for anyone over 16. But the kids love him. They

„…just think he’s the funniest thing ever […] fall on the floor hysterically laughing. They’re just mesmerized“ (source)

This is what you get, when you let the crowd do their stuff. Would any CEO of a TV station or production company have signed this concept off or given any budget for it? And how much budget would a professional production company have spent to produce these?

It is surprising, to say the least, what gets popular these days and what doesn’t. Never underestimated user generated content!

New Pringles spiderman III promo with user generated advertising

Doritos has already made some experiences with user generated content – asking users to submit their homemade ads with the chance of having it aired during the superbowl. We all know how the story ended: a $13 video was put infront of an audience of 90 million people.

Pringles now sponsors Spiderman III and aks people from across Europe
to shoot short films with Pringles as the star of the film.

pringles spiderman promo

In true 2.0 fashion, people can then rate the videos. And of course the videos are hosted on Google Video (why not YouTube?), so they can be spread. Like I am spreading this one here which really looks user generated, yet it is one of the highest ranking videos on the site (no video got more than three stars sofar):


The music is actually the same as in Carltons „Big Ad“. Was that chosen on purpose?