Nokia Goes with User Created Spot, Spike Lee Declares Death to Agencies

By Kyle Austin

For ad agencies feeling the squeeze of the “media meltdown,” there’s more bad news on Madison Ave. Amateur film makers are getting into the ad creation business and Spike Lee is declaring “who needs agencies?”

This ad embedded above, is something you’d expect from a big house ad agency like Omnicom, but in fact it was created by Hiroki Ono, a 23-year-old film student from Yokohama, Japan. Ono was the winner of a contest put on by Mofilm, a pioneer of short films for mobile and on-line distribution.

Spike Lee, the award-winning filmmaker who served as a judge for the contest sees the user created approach as part of the global innovation shift, which he noted to the Financial Times:

“I watched the final 12 films, the quality is amazing,” he said. “I think that this demonstrates that you can’t dictate where talent is. The same way I feel you don’t have to go to film school to be a filmmaker, you don’t have to be an employee of an advertising agency to make advertising also.”

User created ads and contests have become popular tools for brands and agencies in recent years, given the viral impact they create pre and post-spot, along with the production savings they provide. Doritos, for example,  has been extremely successful in using user created ads for the Super Bowl. The transition has also opened the door to advertising focused social networks – like AdHack, which have become open markets for user created ideas and unpolished videos.

However, this move towards consumer friendly, viral videos may not be bad news for all agencies (especially if they have insight in new media). Nokia, itself, recently used London-based enterThe7thChamber, a viral marketing (and seeding) agency, to create this spot below.

4 comments June 26th, 2009