Amateur Advertising: Chevy Tahoe

MIT Ad Lab has a good review of the Chevy Tahoe buzz that kicked up last week. Go there to see the rest of the screen grabs. Chevy, in partnership with The Apprentice, has a site where you can use clips from Tahoe ads to create your own ad. Somebody got a bright idea to mock the whole concept. That created a viral push and many commercials were made that might not have been "on message" for Chevy. Daily Kos has a collection here.


From the post:

"It turned out to be a bigger deal, actually. Ad Age mentions it, and Daily Kos has discovered and captured more of the off-strategy videos. Very handy, because the original file on the Chevy site linked above doen't work any longer. Who is surprised?"

USA Today article:

"Other using DIY include:

•Converse. An early adopter of consumer-generated ads, Nike-owned Converse has received more than 1,500 commercial entries since it launched its program two years ago.

So far, about 50 entries have made it onto TV channels, such as MTV, while more than 80 are viewable on a Converse Gallery on the Web.

Consumers whose ads air on TV are paid $10,000, while those whose ads are selected for the Web earn $1,000. The company, which created the campaign with ad agency Butler Shine Stern & Partners, touches up the color and sound on the ads it receives, but other than that, they run as is, says Erick Soderstrom, Converse's senior director of global marketing.

•Ban. The Kao-owned deodorant brand recruited teen girls to upload a photo, along with a corresponding expression, about something they would like to ban. For instance, one person submitted a picture of an exit sign along with the phrase "ban the easy way out."

Ban received more than 4,600 submissions through its website, narrowed that pool to 50, and asked the girls to go online and vote for their favorite nine.

The winning entries became a print ad that ran in last week's US Weekly magazine. "This campaign is about giving the girls control," says Steve Thibodeau, managing partner at Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, the advertising agency that created the campaign.

•MasterCard. The company asked consumers to play the role of advertising copywriter in the next evolution of its "Priceless" campaign, which names a product or service, along with its corresponding price.

This time around, MasterCard shows two different vague storylines — including one in which a man is sitting at a desk in a field with a typewriter — and asks consumers to complete the ad by filling in blanks that appear on the screen.

Consumers are directed to Priceless.com to fill in the missing phrases.

The winning submission will run as a TV spot in the third quarter of this year.

Since its March 5 launch, MasterCard has received more than 32,000 entries. In the first 10 days of the contest, its website had 14 times the typical traffic, says Amy Fuller, MasterCard's head of marketing for the Americas.

"Consumer fragmentation of media has been a grueling reality for the last several years," Fuller says. "Increasingly, as a marketer, you must find ways to connect more strongly and be more engaging than your competitors."