Friday, September 5, 2008

This fucking contest is ON, motherfuckers!


Time for another Shirt Logo Contest! Just use the above logo on a shirt design 6 times and you will fucking WIN!! For details and necessary materials, see Brand Ambassadors Elle's comment on this post.
Posted by Mr. Pony
Labels: , , , ,

6 comments:

odori said...

Nothing personal here against any posters on this blog, but it amazes me that companies are asking members of the public (their potential customers) to design their advertising for them! For free!

But Mr. Pony, I hope you win so you can get a new console. We can use it to fight each other with muscular avatars.

September 6, 2008 at 6:54 PM
Mr. Pony said...

I hear you, Odori. That's Everything 2.0, I guess. Like Friedman says, when you fly Continental, and you print out your own ticket and use their check-in kiosk, you're WORKING for Continental. For free! And you like it, for some reason! I think contests and things like this have been around for a while, from write-your-own-jingle contests of yore to that sweet McDonalds Mural painted by kids on Waialae Avenue in Palolo. Also, YouTube and Flickr have somehow tricked everyone in the world to making their content for them--and Flickr gets you to pay them to do it. It's a symbiotic thing. The public offers a giant pool of possible talent, and corporations offer visibility. And Xboxes.

On a slightly tangential note, I'm trying to figure out if the term "Brand Ambassador" is more or less uncompelling than that thing you used to see a lot more of--random dudes coming into a forum and saying, "Hey, you guys are talking about kittens? Well, I was just surfing the internet, and I completely by accident ran across this site called http://www.kittensforsale.com, where you can buy and sell kittens to your heart's content! I felt so lucky to find it and now I go there and use it every day! You can sign up for a free trial, and I hear they are waiving their sign-up fee during the month of October, an offer they probably won't repeat! Okay, thanks, just thought I'd jump in and offer my $0.02! Love your site, by the way! Peace out!"

At which point someone on the forum would invariably trace the comment back to the owner of kittensforsale.com, then someone would post the commenter's email address, then their email address password, then pictures of their family, then something about their internet porn habits, then something usually combining their porn habits with the pictures of their family.

I guess the "Brand Ambassador" concept is designed to be honest and straightforward, while still somehow maintaining a street-level and grassroots credibility ("Grassroots" being in the top ten words I wish Corporate America had never learned, along with "Messaging" and Synergy".) Still, I wonder if it's a transitional thing, like Corporate Grafitti (which Gothamist ran an interesting opinion piece on a couple of years back.

September 8, 2008 at 10:39 PM
Galspanic said...

TLDR!!! I got so damn bored reading your fucking post.
I'm not sure Youtube or Flickr ever planned on being so devious as to consider themselves content providers. I think a more accurate term might be a quasi-middleman, which I prefer. After all if Youtube or Flickr wasn't there, all those people would technically still be doing what they are doing, just with no audience other than the one they gather for themselves. I guess that's providing content, in the same way an agent, manager, or rep is a content provider. It's basically introducing the box store supermarket to hunter-gatherers. More than making people do the footwork themselves, it's providing a more direct access to your(and possibly not your) audience, which interestingly allows visual and audio artists the chance to receive their audience/criticism unedited, and unrestricted, simultaneously allowing to meet the entire world's host of fuckworths. Pretty awesome.
I think it would be pretty great if they started making corproate blogs that appear to be underground and cutting edge to sneakily undercut competition for niche market brands of things like EVE Online, Spore, and LEGO!





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September 9, 2008 at 3:40 AM
Mr. Pony said...

You misunderstand! As a Flickr Uploadr, you're providing the content, not Flickr. Anyway, what you're saying about the benefits of Flickr to the end-user makes perfect sense--when restricted to your point of view. To Flickr, however; you are a slave.

As for the corporate blogs, maybe we could do one on spec for LEGO... Imagine us, having an open and frank conversation about the real-world comparisons between LEGO and... Mega... Bloks... ahahah. haha. ahhah. Never mind.

September 9, 2008 at 9:30 AM
Galspanic said...

cough

September 9, 2008 at 10:37 AM
odori said...

At least those who post on YouTube - and get lots of views - can earn a little money for their labor, right? Flickr doesn't give its users/content makers any money does it?

I think brand ambassador is a pretty smart title. It's unusual and catchy. I bet it facilitates blog ambushing.

September 9, 2008 at 7:20 PM

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