The future of advertising is uncertain, you must connect with your consumers. But how do you do this?

Example #1: SneauxShoes.com - Human Skateboard - It's brilliant and works on so many levels.

First of all it's just dang entertaining. The whole concept is original. The craftmanship is just right.

But after getting over the entertainment value you have to admire the targeting here. This is an advertisment for shoes. For slacker shoes, (i.e. skateborder). Let's take a look at this in a check list format.

1. Entertaining - check.
2. leverages viral network (youtube) - check
3. Let's consumers have an impact on the brand - check
4. You get what they are trying to sell - and it ain't just the shoes ( it's also the image) - check

...and on top of that it is very cheap, and probably reaches its demographic better than a traditional media ad would be able to do. Anectdotally, just me showing it to a couple of friends here...they all sent it off to there friends, whom I would assume would send it off to theirs and so on and so on...

Lesson. You can save money AND have a more targetted reach by leveraging the "free" viral network available to you in Youtube and like minded video sharing sites. A pre-requisite is an ENTERTAINING piece of content. The value of the entertainment must be high to be viral

Example #2: Smirnoff's Tea Partay! - Keeping it Real in Cape Cod y'all!

Beautiful. This video actually contains commentary on two separate cultures within the U.S. There is a fairly deep thesis buried inside this comedic advertisment video. Concerning who has the power, who has cool, who REALLY has cool, and who REEALY REEAAAALLY has cool. I'll leave it for you to figure it out because this post is about how the ad-as-content works not about any societal commentary.

But back to the check list

1. Entertaining - check.
2. leverages viral network (youtube) - you bet
3. Let's consumers have an impact on the brand - check
4. You get what they are trying to sell - all the image - it is just a mid range vodka after all. - check

After looking at the Tea Partay website I would actually argue that Smirnoff devoted too much effort into the site. The value of viral advertising is the ability for people to take your video (or other piece of entertaining ad content) and send it around the net. Email it, put it on their myspace page, put it in their blog, send their friends to it, etc. Having a webpage where people can go is not the priority.

I believe that Smirnoff's money would have been better spent by making a $50k (me guessing) brochure type website instead of the $250k+ (me guessing again) pretty flash based website and invest the difference into a sequel video.

It isn't about the home base anymore. It's about the distributed ad. The distributed piece of content.

Reebok needs to bring back Terry Tate: sniff, sniff, I miss him

Hat tip: www.jaffejuice.com