Most people still underestimate the dangers of net transparency. As one can read in this article of the Guardian, some students of the University of Oxford were caught by proctors who found the relevant evidence on facebook.
Students now face fines of up to £100 after proctors collected evidence of students celebrating the end of exams by „trashing“ their friends, covering them with champagne, confetti, flour, and even foodstuffs including raw meat and octopus. […] „Somehow the proctors have accessed my photos on Facebook and cited them as evidence of my misconduct, and I am being summoned to a disciplinary hearing.“ „I don’t know how this happened, especially as my privacy settings were such that only my friends and students in my networks could view my photos“.
I keep telling everyone to be really careful with what they put on the web. Don’t put up pictures or videos of friends who didn’t agree – and also don’t put up pictures of your kids – they might not like that in 20 years time.
You never know, whether things like the abovementioned might be possible. Or for how long your content will stay in the Google archive. Or whether or not a site will end up in the archives of archive.org and possibly stay there forever. Web content is more permanent than most people realize.
OK, I am echoeing others here, but this one I have to mention – let alone for my own records. You might have seen this video:
Joe Jaffe found it in 2006 already and I remember thinking back then: what kind of nonsense of „user generated content“ brands will have to deal with in the future. And I was thinking about how brands could properly respond to this kind of stuff. But I never thought about what they did now: it has apparently been sold to McDonalds by their agency Arnold. It just doesn’t say anywhere for how much. Now it constantly runs on US television, probably costing lots of media money…
Joe now feels a bit stale. For one, because he found it already such a long time ago, but also because of the tagline in the beginning which says: „user generated content“.
So here it is. Another „make your own advertising“ by Axe. This time Axe offers a platform for user generated advertising, the briefing for these clips should be fairly clear. At the end of the day, this is a campaign, with a globally comprehensible idea.
However, I am not sure if this campaign really is an international campaign. (This site is in German). But you get the picture, and the videos are, well, boom chicka wah wah. What more need I say?
There is a Businessweek article about Honeyshed, which seems to be a new site for branded content. Apparently, this was launched by agencies in the Publicis Network (Droga5 and Digitas). From what I gathered, it is supposed to provide a platform for clients for offering branded content, be it videos, text, audio, whatever, I don’t know.
Honeyshed intends to erase the line between branding and entertainment altogether. But its content won’t be traditional online advertising. No banners. No rollovers. No 30-second spots. Instead, it will provide a mix of live programming and character-driven sketch shows paid for by—and promoting—sponsors, which will collaborate with Honeyshed to come up with suitably entertaining concepts aimed at the ever-capricious but nonetheless influential demographic of 18- to 35-year-olds.
(I am glad they chose this age bracked – it means I am *just* still part of it!)
„There’s a lot of so-called branded content out there, but it doesn’t have many places to live,“ he says. „It gets lost on YouTube or it’s like bud.tv, a brand in isolation. In contrast, this is totally transparent and completely entertaining. It’s overt advertising based on the idea that people love brands. They just don’t necessarily love it when brands interrupt or deceive them. This will make brands the life of the party rather than the uninvited guest.“
Seems to be an interesting concept. Some launch they’re own channel (Bud TV and Audi TV), and some launch things on YouTube. Which will get more attention? Umair from the Collectivegeneration Blog doesn’t quite agree with the approach of honeyshed…
Wo ich sonst so bin...