Reebok's naked workout video: just a bare attempt to create buzz?

Is it fake, like the infamous fake Puma ads simulating oral sex back in 2003? Or is the Reebok video featuring a naked Chuck Liddell and his girlfriend, Heidi Northcutt, working out in nothing but Reeboks an off-color joke produced by the company itself.

The goal of this type of advertising is to find a way to get people to talk about your brand in today's mind-bogglingly crowded media landscape. The usual next step in the game (dubbed sub-viral marketing way back in 2002) is for the company to demand that those who spread the word cease and desist.

Sub-viral strategy: risky at best
It's a risky strategy at best because it can result in millions of dollars worth of free publicity or it can backfire. Frankly, the new Reebok ad, doesn't seem interesting enough to have much, umm, staying power.

Brands including Budweiser, Ford, Levi's and Mastercard have been accused of producing their own sub-viral ad campaigns and unleashing their PR firms to spread the word about them. Sometimes, the ads are carefully shot to look like they were done by amateurs, sometimes they are painstakingly made to look like the company's real ads.

Engineering a fake
Online parody ads about Victoria's Secret, Honda, General Motors and many other companies have gained overnight buzz. How the companies react to these ads presents a new media PR challenge.

Back in 2003, ads appeared online showing a woman wearing Puma trainers while offering oral gratification to her standing boyfriend. The man was also wearing Pumas, and a Puma bag was in the foreground. The woman's photo is cropped at the shoulders, but what is going on was abundantly obvious.

Puma - then represented by Peter Kim, reacted by sending out cease and desist letters and calls to sites that ran the ads. That, as it turned out, is about the same as trying to convince a pack of laughing hyenas to get serious. All that did was force the spoof to be shown and discussed more and to become a permanent fixture in every major search engine and on thousands of Web sites.

Gawker ran the cease and desist letter, as did Adrants, noting "Thousands of people are circulating images emblazoned with your brand and you didn't even pay for product placement."

The campaign was risque enough to appeal to their target audience of 20 -24 year-olds, who are constantly online and wild about this type of controversy.

Mastercard's risque ruse
Naturally, companies don't openly admit that they created a sub-viral campaign because that would defeat the purpose and spoil the fun, but Mastercard has publicly alluded that they engineered their own off-color parody ad through their advertising agency. The video clip parodies Mastercard's "priceless" campaign.

The clip features a boy walking his girlfriend to her door after a drunken night out and asking her for oral sex. The voiceover interrupts his plea with Mastercard-parodying quips like, "Getting the nerve to ask such a question: $12 bottle of wine," several times before the girl's sister appears with a message from dad. "Go ahead and give him a blowjob - but for God's sake tell him to take his hand off the intercom."

Not all fun and games
Of course not all viral campaigns work out in the company's favor. Two years ago, Brad Templeton's netfunny.com published a sick satire of the Mastercard "Priceless" ads based around the Columbine tragedy.

Mastercard reacted with a "cease and desist" letter from their lawyers demanding that the parody be removed from the Web site, claiming it violated their trademarks and copyrights, in spite of the well established rules protecting satire and parody from such attacks. Netfunny posted the response:

Web site hosting for anybody: $10/month and up
Threatening letters to people who satirize you, hoping they won't know the law: $500
Reputation as giant corporation required to intimidate small publishers: $billions
Supreme court decisions protecting parody and satire from accusations of copyright and trademark infringement... Priceless
There are some rights money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard's lawyers.

Bonus link: Tons of parody ads here Organique.com
Hat tip to Adrants

I think it's okay to create ads but to create ones that defies terms and rights of a company or individual is definitely a no. Thanks for sharing the post.