Who needs an advertising agency when you’ve got F*cking Kelly Slater?

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• Creative: HOST
• Production: The Conscience Organisation
• Activation & Director: Maverick
• Media: IKON
• PR: One Green Bean
• Strategy: NAKED Communications

No wonder advertising is expensive.

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So some friends and I made The Meaning of Mate two weeks ago. David Gillespie emailed Matty n I with an idea he wanted to execute for a while: To make a ‘shrine’ for the most treasured and flexible of Australian English words; “mate”. We loved it. Sounded fun. And with Australia Day 2 weeks away we thought, perfect.

So with David at the helm setting up a basecamp for comms, and pulling together a designer and developer whom he knew had the goods, we asked a good friend Davros if he’d like to direct, edit and do post on the clips, in his spare time between the hours of 2 - 5 am.

Incredibly he said yes.

We had a week for design and development, a Sunday arv pegged for the shoot, and a Monday-Tuesday night for the edit and post, so we could launch on the Wednesday before Australia Day.

And we did.

And it was marvelous. Believing in an idea to commit spare time to is a special bond. I’m not sure if the others felt it, but I knew in the talents of the team, that we would produce something worthwhile. 

And we did.

At last look, #1 had over 50,000 views on YT, with #2-#17 each garnering between 15,000 - 20,000 views each too. So a collective, conservative 300,000 views all up.

We were stoked. We contacted a number of blogs to hopefully have it shared but the response of 1 made me write this post.

Our contact responded that quote “”Hey so my editor at the Vine loved this but she won’t run it because they can’t have the product placement of if they’re not getting paid! Bloody fairfax media!”

What that means is, during the outro of some of the clips, there is close up shot of a beer can and you can just see the rim of a green can. Any Australian beer drinker knows it’s a VB. The Vine’s perspective of this, was that we are giving free promotion to a brand who should be otherwise paying for it, therefore, even though the content created is great and worthy of sharing, we won’t because it’s free advertising.

Cue crestfallen Josh.

Now in case you’re wondering, we did the Meaning of Mate for the love of it. No brand, no agency. The idea is actually perfect for a VB AND for Australia Day, and if it had been otherwise created by an agency and I saw it, I would have loved it and thought it brilliant. Further, it may have been entered into award shows, been critiqued and ended up in print. Who knows.

There’s two things for me in this.

1. Good content should be shared because it’s good.

The Vine’s response means any persons and products appearing in any high quality user-generated content will need to be wearing blank white sheets and drinking from paper wrapped beer cans.

2. What is advertising?

Does a consumer like a brand in a “free” ad any less than in a paid ad? With paid advertising, we’re conditioned to be asked whether to feel good about a product/brand due to the quality of the ad. In a user generated ad, we’re either thinking “is this an ad?” or we’re happy to watch because it’s usually either funny or moving or just plain stupid.

Nothing is stopping people making ‘ads’ for the products they love or hate. For us, the product was irrelevant. It could have been Carlton, Fourex or Cider. Actually no, it couldn’t have been cider… We just wanted to execute an idea that we believed would look awesome and be well received.

That sounds like the effort of most ads.

The alternative was approaching a beer brand, being politely told No and placing the idea on the Projects that Never Happened shelf. 

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Heritage: something more valuable than a pretty face.