James Cherkoff on Modern Marketing blog makes some excellent points about authenticity on the web, discussing Coors new YouTube ads:
People find the social web attractive because it’s a very personal sphere where they can share the reality of their lives – without a key message in sight. And that spontaneous vitality is tough for even the best creative departments to fake. In other words, it’s difficult to craft ‘real’. But that hasn’t stopped some brands trying.
Read the rest of This Message Is Real
I love this kind of existential terror advertising. It seems very Philip K. Dick. No one is who you think they are, and nothing is as it seems.
It reminds me of the kind of marketing where you find out your conversations with friends about cool new gadgets were actually ads. I saw a documentary recently that looked at a UK buzz marketing company that had 7 year old children marketing toys to each other at school. They would work them into school projects. The children were paid in toys. Watch the clip.
Is the Coors ad a super high-realist, YouTube verite fiction that’s happy to be mistaken for the real? Or is it a kind of buzz marketing ‘happening’ where the friends-who-are-not-really-our-friends show up at the BBQ and act obnoxious?
James pinpoints the problem: “In traditional media you can get away with such fictional narrative. But on the social web it just looks contrived.”
But the marketing death spiral doesn’t end there. James’ example of the “imaginative riposte,” turns out to be yet another ad. Since you posted your article, James, the video makers have clarified that *they* were paid – and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just no budget, made-in-a-day internet advertising – which is their business. They say, “Stealth ads are lame.”
Similarly, at least one other response disproving the ad, “in an eccentric, quirky manner” was also paid for by Coors, according to Silicon Alley Insider. Ever get the feeling that consumers are obsolete?
It strikes me that the reason authenticity matters more on the internet is because internet media is conversational. In contrast, TV is monological. Fiction is common with monological media, like TV, movies, books, billboards, magazines, and so on. In contrast, consider fiction on the phone, by email, via instant messaging.
But it’s not so much a problem of fiction. The bigger problem is commercial brands can’t deal with the conversational media of the internet, as they quite simply have nothing to talk about. They can do monologs about products, but when it comes to conversation, they have nothing to contribute. So they either buy contributions, or fake them. And either way, it makes them look bad. People realize they have nothing to say.
Ironically perhaps, one kind of organization has lots to say: charities. They can talk about changing the world. Charities not only have something real to contribute, they give real people something to contribute to.
