Coors Perfect Pour Vid - Cool or Crass?
Viral video success “The Perfect Pour” looks at first glance like so many other amateurish YouTube videos. The shaky camerawork and bad lighting all spell “cameraphone,” as does the setting–a house party that a guy shows up to and starts doing wild and crazy tricks with cans of Coors Light, such as pouring two of them into glasses while hanging upside-down from a rooftop. But a closer look reveals that this is a clever marketing stunt, bought and paid for by Coors itself.
The folks at Gawker sniffed it out immediately, because of the video’s striking similarity to similar stealth videos by RayBan and Levis. Sure enough, the New York Times eventually discovered that the Coors “perfect pour” video is the work of ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish (owned by Microsoft). Silicon Alley Insider then revealed that the ad agency also paid several others to post “response” videos illustrating various beer pouring tricks of their own. Hot on the trail of the story, SAI later reported that one of these videos–featuring a sexy woman opening a can of Coors Light– was deemed too risque and pulled from YouTube. (It’s posted on the blog, as well as on Blip.tv.)
All of this raises the question–is it okay to use YouTube in this way, or this kind of thing overly sneaky and just a little bit sleazy? My first thought is: what exactly will happen to the “real” amateur videos on YouTube? Already, signs indicate that for the most part, what people watch online isn’t all that different than what they watch on TV. Perhaps professionalization is inevitable. But it makes me just a little bit sad, especially when the occasional true UGC “gem” comes out on YouTube, such as the laughing baby. (Oh no, wait, that became an AIG commercial. Oh well, at least it started out amateur.)
My second thought is, what’s all the fuss about? This is just like product placement was in the 70s. People didn’t always notice it, and if they did, they weren’t necessarily aware that they were being targeted with advertising. Eventually they figured it out, at which point product placement hardly went away–it got bigger than ever! Which indicates that viewers not only tolerated it, but they kind of liked it. I know that for me, watching ET on the big screen and seeing real brands at the breakfast tables struck me immediately as far more realistic than other movies I’d seen.
However, this isn’t the 70s, and audiences have gotten savvier. In this way, such stunts represent a step backwards. Nowadays, with product placement, audiences are quite often let in on the joke. Marketers treat them as equals and rather than sneaking the ads by them, they make sure they’re noticed. MTV does this with its overtly advertorial Dove tie-in, as do edgy online-only video producers like Revision3, where the guys on Diggnation crack jokes about their sponsors while nodding and winking to audiences about it. And to my mind, this is the way it should be. In the long run, this approach will make audiences into partners rather than unwitting victims. Still, I have to admit I’m impressed–I never would have thought to suggest that even the response videos should be part of the marketing push.
Update June 6: NewTeeVee has sniffed out a great example of a viral video that works without resorting to sneakiness of any kind:
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