Marketers are users after all
I find this news completly fascinating:
The popularity of user-generated video sites like YouTube has given rise to deceptive videos created for self-promotion, advertising, or even smearing rival brands. This latter format, dubbed the ‘smear video,’ depicts a rival brand’s product exhibiting fictitious faults.
After the studios complaining about consumers perturbing their “content sphere” the trend is now inverting: street people get mad because corporations “misrepresent commercial content as user-generated content”.
What was sure to happen has arrived: marketers have infiltrated the people’s republic of user generated media and the whole meaning of home movie gets redefined. Now when you will see someone putting mentos in a coke bottle you better check if he is really your neighbor, or just another Atlanta exec.
Is this the turning point? Is it the moment where the web 2.0 values come back to haunt us? Was it really wise to allow anybody to make the headlines on youtube? Is it a fair game, the creativity of the masses versus the unlimited budgets of procter and gamble? Can user-generated content survive this simple truth: marketers are users after all.
September 26th, 2006 at 5:04 am
This is core to the roots of internet as a medium to change everything. In simple terms I believe people are intuitivley smart and will gravitate to the right answer. It was really hard when all we had was TV and direct mail. But internet provides tools and alternatives. So when for example myspace gets polluted by marketers, the cool people will already have migrated to the next ‘space’.
September 26th, 2006 at 5:04 am
This is core to the roots of internet as a medium to change everything. In simple terms I believe people are intuitivley smart and will gravitate to the right answer. It was really hard when all we had was TV and direct mail. But internet provides tools and alternatives. So when for example myspace gets polluted by marketers, the cool people will already have migrated to the next ‘space’.
September 26th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
exact title
September 26th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
exact title