User-generated Content
Written on August 31, 2007
Over at Worship Worthy, there is a post on Christiania Vodka launching an online campaign to get art work submissions (illustrations, paintings and yes, photography) from the public at large, focusing on the theme of nudity.
They are using Richard Avedon’s iconic photo of Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent as the inspiration for this campaign.
I’m not entirely sure what to think of this. I, for one, am a little tired of two things 1) the proliferation of brands and agencies taking user-generated content to create marketing ideas and 2) yet another ‘premium-level’ vodka.
You know it’s reaching a nadir when you have leading presidential candidates asking voters to create their campaign ads, or when Time magazine named ‘You’ (Us?) as their Person of the Year.
I looked at the online gallery and the work is pretty decent, if it is truely user submitted. And the board of judges they named are an impressive group. I just think that if you’re going to use someone like Richard Avedon as inspiration for a campaign you really better bring it!
At the very least the images they choose will probably be nowhere near as bad as the completely nonsensical, amazingly poorly art directed and kind-of-a-rip-off Svedka Vodka ad campaigns. (pithy comments courtesy of the Copyranter.)
Filed in: Advertising.
I’m kinda tired of hearing/reading the words “user generated” relating to anything but this exploitation gets me thinking….. though it’s not directly related imho useful art info isn’t easily accessible online it often seems like “web 2.0″ (another over used slogan” missed most of the art/creative world. I can think of a bunch of tech, business, health, car, and web blogs, sites what have you, to check out on any given day but few focused on creative matters that seem accessible. When I say accesible I mean in design, adoption of new useful web tech and in language. I follow photo news more than anything else but sometimes I hit design blogs or blogs focused and sculpture and the seem almost esoteric and lost in themselves…. it kinda sux. Just saying piece.
[…] Photo rep + the mind behind A Visual Society blog has smart post on user generated content and, yet, another premium vodka. See it here. […]
Oh, and they want your image to promote their product worldwide… for free! Not only do they want you to design their ad so that they can make a buck, and not pay you anything for it, you also cannot resell your work in a way that competes with them. Of course, at that point, it isn’t “yours” any more.
Reading their fine print… They may have bought rights to Avedon’s image, but he would never have given it away for free!