I love it when I hear stories of brand’s who embrace their consumer advocates. In this example, a young English kid, Nick Haley, decided that the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cansei de Ser Sexy (meaning “tired of being sexy” in Portugese) was the perfect sound track for how he felt about his iPod touch. So, for a bit of fun, he made a mock commercial and uploaded it to YouTube.
The cool part about this story, which I read about in Frank Rose’s (the Editor of Wired Magazine) book, The Art of Immersion, is that within a few days someone at Apple saw Nick Haley’s iPod touch commercial on YouTube and contacted Nick about creating a professional version for an Apple campaign. The knock on effect of this is that Cansei de Ser Sexy’s song also got a boost making it into the American music charts.
Seeing brand’s embrace their brand advocates and involve them in the story is impressive. In this case, Nick Haley’s iPod touch commercial was actually a quite impressive result – some other customer sourced, or crowd sourced creative endeavours, have not come off so polished – see here for Hungry Jack’s crowd sourced TV commercial.
But back to the main attraction. This is Apple’s professional version
All Nick Haley used to make his iPod touch mock commercial was his Macbook’s standard software. Technology empowered him to express himself creatively and distribution channels like YouTube now make it possible for anyone to share their work with the world. Frank Rose took a much more in depth look at this example of consumer brand advocacy and has quoted Bogusky’s view that the current generation of kids are extremely media-savvy, “this generation knows you’re trying to sell them something, and you know they know, so let’s just drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible”.
I reckon Nick Haley had a lot of fun with his iPod touch experiment – and he probably made a career for himself too.