2009-09-04

Corporate failures in the new media world

Hey, do you remember that Gibson's commercial from a couple-three years ago? The one where a really really faggy looking tennis player kept bouncing the ball and being a poseur rather than serving, and after about 20 seconds of that a little piece of text shows up reminding you "Gibson's Finest is not the official whiskey of tennis" just before a linebacker creams the little French-looking shit and the graphic switches to the logo and "Gibson's Finest - Official Whiskey of the CFL". It was a great commercial, really fun and absolutely hilarious.

They don't play it anymore though. It's seemingly lost forever. And that, today, got me thinking. Isn't there this whole YouTube thing still around?

It would seem to me that this constitutes a massive mistake on behalf of the corporations who (presumably) maintain copyright of these ad campaigns. Posting defunct ads on YouTube seems to be the sort of thing that would take almost no time or energy to do, and would come with potentially infinite benefits. You aren't even using up your own corporate server! YouTube is taking care of all the details while you kick back. Now its obvious that some ads wouldn't really be appropriate to keep up (say, the Alexander Keith's ads where the angry Scottish guy turns out to be a kiddie porn collector) but meanwhile, other ads would be seemingly perfect.

I earlier posted the Jason Alexander McDLT commercial from the 80s, and its a shame that we can't see, for example, the old Kokanee commercials featuring "Peter Luft: dude or dud", or the guy who lives in the blue house across from the brewery in Creston.

I mean, there should be better commercials out there than dude you're getting a Dell. And even that was put out by a fan. A few weeks ago I popped in an old video featuring some Babylon 5 episodes I taped around 1993, and it was awesome seeing the weird old commercials on something called "ITV". It was a great bit of nostalgia, and it should be available en masse.