Super Bad Ads
by Michael HoffmanMonday, February 5th, 2007
The Super Bowl was a real disappointment, and not only because the Colts won. I thought the commercials were pretty bad as well. Stuart Eliot in The Times made an interesting connection between all the violence in the ads and the Iraq War. I think the most interesting story on the ad front was the continued popularity of user-generated content. My brother’s theory is that everyone is trying to be cool like YouTube, but I think that’s only part of it. The Doritos commercial was the result of a user generated ad contest - a tactic we have seen nonprofits use successfully (though not at this level). The ad received more than 140 million impressions BEFORE the Super Bowl. Given that the Super Bowl will give you 90 million impressions, it was a home run before it even ran. I also thought this ad was one of the most clever of the night, and it cost about $12 to make.
February 6th, 2007 at 11:37 am
I wondered if the increased frequency of user generated ads would mean no one would worry about image quality any more. Bad quality would come to mean ‘reality’ less and mean ‘user generated’ more. It might become fashionable.
Then I realized I’d have to see this spot on TV to know what the actual quality was like, since all YouTube (Flash) videos look terrible. So - what does it really look like on TV? Like YouTube?
While I appreciate the strengths of the YouTube/Flash system - easy to put online, no bandwidth costs, easy to share on web pages, (useless for anything else) - it seems audacious of Flash to get away with using such a crappy old codec. (Or is it not just the codec and one-size-fits-all compression template?)
It seems madly ironic: users now have the tools to create startlingly high resolution video (HD), to publish relatively tiny files with a big canvas that are sharp and lush (H.264) - yet crappy looking video could become fashionable as it signifies user generated content.
It’s as if at the very moment the technology is democratized and everyone has access to professional level broadcast TV resolution, we decide that it isn’t really all that important anymore, and reduce the level of all output to something resembling a mobile phone video.
February 9th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Great comment. At the Make Your Documentary Matter conference there was clearly a tension between those making high quality broadcast video and the cell phone video that we see on YouTube. Both things are happening at the same time — a move toward quick and dirty and super high quality on super big TVs.