TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

youtube

Attribution in advertising…

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I’ve just been reading a great post on the Creative Review blog which covers a growing issue in advertising at the moment.

Namely, the increasing crossover between videos on Youtube, and mainstream advertising which may or may not have been inspired by the original.

Honda’s Let It Shine commercial led to similar thoughts from Carl and Dave.

And then there’s T-Mobile commercials, or Silent Discos?

Now, I’m not going to suggest that there’s a right or wrong answer for every instance. After all, ‘Bad artists copy, Great artists steal’, to quote Picasso. But it is important to keep in mind that the wrong decision is going to be increasingly messy – after all the sharing networked world feeds as much on negativity (perhaps moreso!) than positivity.

And the flipside is a mainstream adoption of the remix and mash-up which mainstream media is often fighting against. But the generally accepted online culture tends towards attribution in the majority of cases, whereas the professionals seem more reluctant in general to acknowledge the sources of inspiration.

Maybe it’s the tradition of seeing creativity as moments of divine inspiration, as eloquently discussed by Elizabeth Gilbert in a TED talk.

When data can take your breath away

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Wow.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZwoRSSpOoPU

It’s a 24 hour observation of large airline flights condensed into just over a minute, found via Musings of an Opinionated Sod. And his closing sentence beautiful sums up how the ways we produce great content can, will, and has changed, whether it’s editorial, advertising or marketing, by making so much more information and so many more tools available:

‘If we open our eyes enough, we can see there’s real beauty in information, not to mention the fact we can make information, beautiful.’

The enduring power of a good mash-up…

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I dashed out in my car at lunchtime to run some errands, and while I was rushing around, this famous song was being played on the radio (it’s not the official video due to all the Youtube, PRS, music industry and other licensing restrictions.

But the lyrics forming in my head, and the video being pictured in my mind as I drove along was actually:

There’s probably a lot you could imply about original creations, payment mechanisms, and music industry copyrights etc…

I’ll just sit here chuckling and thinking about the quote on a T-shirt I bought from the National Gallery (is it just me that thinks their website is shocking?) recently – ‘Bad artists copy, Good artists steal’ – Picaso.

Share Youtube videos on Twitter with Tweetube

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Twitter users have long been able to share images via Twitpic, but video generally relied on using a URL shortening service to link to the content in question.

New service Tweetube aims to solve this problem, for Youtube videos at least.

You can either use the url of the video/page, or keyword search from the main Tweetube page.  Edit the message as your wish, and then submit using your Twitter username and password.

If you then visit Tweetube and log in, you can view all shared videos, with the time submitted, and the total cumulative visits.  It also has a Public Timeline of all videos submitted via the service, which is quite handy for seeing what is being shared, and a Popular Videos stream (which doesn’t include publicly-viewable figures sadly).

The ability to post and track visits is something that could be accomplished fairly easily via a URL shortening service – but the Public Timeline is definitely interesting as a method of identifying popular content, what is going viral, and people who might be interested in similar content etc.

In some ways, it’s almost a very lightweight Blip.fm for video, with the sole weakness that you have to post a public Tweet for it to register your video – whereas Blip exists seperately, so you can choose whether or not you need to share each song you listen to.

Definitely a service worth using if you’ve got an interest in producing or sharing video.

Pizza Hut’s viral campaign could go either way…

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Pizza Hut has released a new viral campaign via Youtube.

But it’s getting mixed reviews. AdAge has the background, including that it was placed through Zadby for a comparable fee to the $25,000 paid for Wendy’s first viral video.

The video itself on Youtube by MediocreFilms has been seen almost 200,000 times as I write, and 2852 comments and 3807 ratings. Most are positive and it’s got 4.5 stars.

But the style of the video, and almost all the comments, focus on the video as an example of Jackass style comedy. There’s no mention of Pizza Hut in the comments, or in the video itself. (I had to check the Adage link to make sure it actually was related to Pizza Hut).

And it’s also receiving negative comments. I found out about the video via Ian Schafer who writes: ‘Pizza Hut, what the heck were you thinking?

As Ian points out, the Pizza Hut brand is essentially mocking small ‘mom and pop’ pizza joints. Not the best method for promoting a brand which essentially produces a homogenised version of the product and has economies of scale on it’s side already.

It will be interesting to see whether the comments on Youtube would change it someone posted where the video came from – and whether the video does any more for Pizza hut than giving them lots of views of something with no link to them or their product at all.’

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