In search of brand imagination
Here’s a clever YouTube video that’s making the rounds. A guy (in Norway) can’t play the drums, or the piano, yet he crafts an amazing video
where he’s a whiz at both. He makes it happen through stop motion and a massive number of video and audio edits, using his home PC. Quite fun, and eminently watchable.
His YouTube video was posted in November and has been visited over 1.5 million times, referenced by the Wall St. Journal and discussed to the Nth degree on Slashdot. Don’t be surprised if you soon see ad agencies copying the look and feel. (They know where their future lies.)
Creativity from the bottom up
While YouTube has its share of self-indulgent debris, it also hosts some fairly creative video productions (like the one above), generated at the grassroots level. These shouldn’t be arbitrarily dismissed as low-end, “user generated content.” They’re creative works from creative people now freed from a system once geared to big budgets.
The result will be more creativity, not less.
A creative challenge for brands
So what does all this mean for brands? Where’s the brand imagination to carry these new formats to the next level? What can brands do to make them better? (Please, please, please, not that ultimate kiss of mediocrity: product placement.)
It’s time for brands to move beyond the broadcast advertising paradigm and to reshape themselves as a creative force in their own right. In the world of online everywhere, there’s no reason brands can’t be allied with customers in creating and promulgating new forms of expression.
Waiting for the next Absolut
Thus, if you wanted your brand to be the next Absolut, you might tie it, ever so subtly, to the creation of a whole series of quirky/clever/charming and recursively over-the-top videos made by people with a fresh slant on life. Forget product placements. Just place the videos in the hearts and minds of hip people like you.
And yes, that also means your brand is the new network.
