The Crier

Can YouTube Bring Out the Art in Advertising?

Entertainment, art and advertising are irrevocably intertwined. (Insert Walter Benjamin reference here.)

Alex Dziadosz · The Exchange · Feb 05, 2007

By now, you’ve heard of YouTube. You may have even heard of its $1.65 billion Google buyout, its oft-derided business model, and its potential to transform popular entertainment.

If you haven’t, please leave your terrorist shelter or vegetative state for a moment and check it out. It’s important.

YouTube is the most significant of the modern torchbearers in the TiVo-inspired movement to give viewers control over what they watch. The whole thing is a wonderfully populist approach to entertainment: Shift control from massive conglomerates to the masses. It’s a bit like what Napster did for music — complete with the requisite legal woes.

For viewers, this is a liberating development. For advertisers, it’s a dangerous one.

But danger and opportunity often intersect. New media has always necessitated adaptation. When a new channel of communication opens, marketers rush to develop innovative techniques to get people to spend more. These techniques breed new aesthetics. When audiences migrated from radio to television, marketers had to develop skills like editing and cinematography.

New media has always necessitated adaptation. When a new channel of communication opens, marketers rush to develop innovative techniques to get people to spend more.

But as time passes, novelty fades and advertisers become complacent. Watching a black and white Alka-Seltzer tablet plop and fizz doesn’t seem quite as cool when you have high-definition cable. Waiting until Super Bowl season to develop entertaining material no longer cuts it. If consumers don’t want to watch a commercial, they’ll simply fast forward or click a different link.

This is how it should be. The same craving for drama, comedy and action that inspires us to spend ten dollars seeing “Borat,” or two hours watching USC battle Notre Dame can also inspire us to buy Cuisinarts, Diet Coke and Volkswagens. A good commercial recognizes and exploits this.

A good example? BMW films. About four years before YouTube’s launch, several of the automaker’s executives decided they needed a fresh approach to marketing. The idea they devised was a novel one: a hybrid of entertainment and advertisement.

They roped some of the industry’s most respected talents, including David Fincher, Guy Ritchie and Ang Lee. They gave each director a huge budget and complete creative license, on one condition — the plots had to involve BMW.

The results were inspired. The short films transcended traditional product placement to an unprecedented degree. BMW aired a few theater-style previews during the 2003 Super Bowl and referred viewers to their website for the full films.

As Rich Gannon and the Raiders were sweating in the locker room, thousands were logging on to BMW.com, hungry for the rest of the films. By the end of the campaign, the site had accrued over 100 million views.

BMW succeeded in crafting commercials that people not only wanted to watch, but that they actively sought out. The lines between advertisement and entertainment were already hazy. Suddenly, they were invisible.

As I’ve noted in this column, America has a knack for commercializing nearly everything. If advertisement and entertainment are so easily merged, is art the next step?

Has a Pepsi billboard ever sent the same shivers through you as a Pollock?

If so, it’s not that simple. Art and entertainment may frequently overlap, but art is a more principled concept. If it happens to entertain, that’s wonderful, but that’s not necessarily its point. As close as HeadOn’s ads come to a modern theater of the absurd, it’s unlikely that the Museum of Modern Art will be broadcasting its YouTube clips next to Dali’s Persistence of Memory anytime soon.

Still, watching the BMW films, it’s hard to deny that they are art. “Powder Keg,” directed by Alejandro Iñárritu (“Babel”), makes dark commentary on Latin American political violence. A more recent Volkswagen ad has more creative vitality than some Cannes entries. Spike Jonze has crafted astonishing ads for both Adidas and Ikea.

You can probably remember the last time a commercial annoyed you or made you chuckle. But when was the last time one made you feel more closely aligned with the universality of human experience? Has a Pepsi billboard ever sent the same shivers through you as a Pollock?

Probably not. Yet commercials have the potential to do just that.

In the end, everything in a society as steadfastly capitalist as the United States is, to some degree, either a product or trying to sell one. Galleries and auction houses are packed with wealthy trend-hoppers. A Gustav Klimt painting recently sold for $135 million. And chances are, Warhol inadvertently helped move more than a few cans of soup.

In some senses, art and commerce are already irrevocably intertwined. New media may simply be speeding an inevitable process along.