Hot of the press, the NY Times has an article about the whole Chevy incident, quoting a spokesperson from Chevy:
A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the anti-S.U.V. ads.
„We anticipated that there would be critical submissions,“ Ms. Tezanos said. „You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it’s part of playing in this space.“
And further down they quote Drew Neisser of Renegade Marketing:
companies had such a strong desire for user-generated advertising that they were willing to accept the risks. „There’s this gold rush fever about consumer-generated content,“ he said. „Everybody wants to have consumer-generated content, and Chevy Tahoe doesn’t want to be left behind.“
Hey, it’s the new fad amongst marketeers! Not bad, this trend. I like these kind of campaigns anyway!
(Even though I can’t be moved to participate – yet!)
I hadn’t blogged about the new campaign of Chevy yet, in which they ask users to compile their own ads and put it up on their website. (There is a lot of interesting stuff out there in the „consumer generated media“ space and I am currently just collecting everything on delicious.)
Adjab and Adpulp now mention something that will always happen when you start a campaign like that and don’t check the ads before they go live on the website: There are a couple of spots that contain messages that Chevy is, most likely, not in favour of. These kind of spots will always appear in all sorts of places – even more so in the future, now that we have sites like YouTube and mobile phones that can film videos. But these happen to be part of the Chevy challenge, and they’re live on their website.
But there is one spot that could pose a problem to Chevy. Not only regarding their image, but also legally:
Like Snow? Beautiful landscapes? Be sure to take it all in now because…
Tomorrow this asshole’s SUV will change the world
Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad
It’s a frightening reality
ExxposeExxon.org
Tahoe� An American Revolution (source)
Now this one spot I am sure they’ll delete. I don’t think they want to get into trouble with Exxon. And they can without loosing their face, because in the rules it says:
or which might subject Sponsors or its licensees to unfavorable regulatory action, violate any law, infringe the rights of any person, or subject Sponsors or its Licensees to liability for any reason.
I also think it’s OK. It’s about Chevy and it’s target group. It’s not about any other brands.
Should they, however, pull the other ads that are negative about Chevy or SUVs, it will most likely have a negative PR effect on them. If they let people upload anything without prior control, they should stick to it.
I agree with Steve Hall: let’s hope the reason they left the videos online is their sense for the rules of the new media – and not just the fact that this happened over a weekend.
By now I also heard from some friends who actually do watch television regularly, that the Eric Cantona Spot appears on a view German stations – mainly the sports channels, of course. Sofar, I haven’t seen it myself, though.
Another campaign utilizing Google Maps: Heineken hooks up with Google Maps for Tapvat World Tour 2006.
In this microsite visitors are supposed to search the world for gigs from Dutch live band Voicst using Google’s satellite images. All within a certain timeframe while a radio signal leads you to the right spot.
The game is intuitive enough, which is good as I don’t speak any dutch. At the end I found the spot (why would the want to have a gig there?), but I didn’t understand what they wanted my address details for – surely it was for some kind of sweepstake, but who knows what else I might have signed up for?
Try it out, it’s interesting and kept me busy for quite a few minutes (I had to try twice to find the spot – and it’s of course in a different place every time).
So what could this podcast potentially be about?
Of course, one of my favourite topics – consumer (or citizen) generated media (or content). They aren’t so sure about the exact term either. This was episode Nr. 1, with episode Nr. 2 following next week.
I just wonder – why putting it live like broadcasting, in two chunks, one this week, the second next week? Why not upload all of it in one go and let us have the content „on demand“? As far as I understood, that second chunk is already sitting on Joes harddrive, waiting for publication until next week…!
Any way, it’s definitely worth checking out nevertheless.
Wo ich sonst so bin...