You Mean People Don't WANT To Watch Our Commercials?

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Wendy Davis writes a good Just an Online Minute today for Mediapost. She describes the online effort of the ONDCP in placing a bunch of old commercials on YouTube in an attempt to make them 'go viral.' Missing the point was Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer:

The unpopularity of the PSAs shouldn't be surprising. Earlier this week, Ian Schafer, CEO of the agency Deep Focus, told OnlineMediaDaily that the spots weren't edgy enough to get far with YouTube users. "They're not especially jarring, since they're designed for television, so they're not the kind of things that work as viral video," he said. "They're very professionally produced, and there's nothing subversive about the descriptions, which give away exactly what the clips are."

Leave it to the agency folks to tell us that the problem is that things weren't "edgy" enough. How about the fact that they're commercials, simply dumped there to talk at YouTube users instead of engaging them? The problem is that advertisers still view the Internet as a broadcast medium, and they cluelessly scratch their heads over and over when people ignore their shouting in a medium that was designed for two-way communication. Edginess has nothing to do with it.

MySpace Over?

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Brad Berens from iMedia e-mailed me a link to this piece on PSFK by Jeff Squires that proclaims an end to MySpace.

MySpace’s hay-day might be over, because we’ve been noticing a surge of generic profiles circulating with no artistic, entertaining, or interactive elements whatsoever. It was almost assumed that the porn industry would get involved, but when the cheap pharmaceuticals, the refinance your mortgage, and the work-from-home schemes all entered MySpace, the fat lady started screaming.

When companies make profiles on MySpace, it’s only cool if they conform to the “local language.” They need to play by the same socially accepted rules as normal people. Friends don’t meticulously track down anyone and everyone within their network to show them some crap. Their needs to be an exchange between parties, so they both benefit from each other. When that rule is broken, it becomes spam, and no one likes spam (except Hawaii).

And that, my friends, is how "buy my crap" marketers destroy perfectly good online communities by bringing top-down marketing into bottom-up environments.

Yet another vote of support for the MySpace Has Jumped The Shark point of view.

Ford Agent on Fark? You Be The Judge

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Someone posted a link to Fark today under the "Cool" tag that links to a video of Bill Ford talking about innovation. File this under "things that make you go hmmm..." Here's the link (which will work only for Farkers and TotalFarkers).

My handle on TotalFark is "FriendlyFungus" (my old hacker handle from my Commodore 64 days). Of course, I logged in to ask the submitter which of Ford's ad agencies he/she works for.

Of course, I could be wrong, but it's not often you see a corporate video posted to Fark unless people are actively making fun of it. I'll update if the submitter posts something in response.