Church of the Customer Blog
« Bootlegging is a virtue, not a vice | Main | Cutting off Amex »
June 29, 2006
Bootlegging is a virtue, not a vice
Heather Green from BusinessWeek learns that the two guys responsible for the Diet Coke and Mentos fountains video have had 4.1 million views and earned $25,000 through an ad revenue sharing deal with online video service Revver.
"But that's not what they came in to talk to me about," she writes. "They wanted to talk about copyright abuse and how quickly bootleg copies of their work ended up on YouTube and Google, where they couldn't make money from it." That has them upset.
The two guys, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, created a wonderful video that went viral, but they are rather naïve about marketing. YouTube, Google Video, Revver and other video sharing sites act as fast-moving distribution networks world wide for advertising. With the right content, they are the digital equivalent of dropping Mentos into a liter of Diet Coke. Videos on them are the new 30-second ads. It's content designed toward a marketing means.
Think not "How do I make direct revenue from the video?" but "How can I harness this incredible visibility I have just created?" The Diet Coke and Mentos guys are performance artists. Their video is their ad. If they move quickly, their business model is no longer just a small theater in Maine. It's a worldwide tour of re-creating the Diet Coke and Mentos fountain show at conventions or events. For a handsome fee. Or to create other fun and wacky performances. Come on! That's the money shot.
Fellas: Be happy about the rampant bootlegging. Embrace it. Celebrate it.Get over it. For a brief, shining and sticky moment you defeated the biggest villain of them all: obscurity.
Bonus link: NBC Plugs into YouTube's Viral Growth. (Better late than never : )
Other blogs that reference Bootlegging is a virtue, not a vice:
» YouTube, Mentos, and Money from Manage To Change
Jackie Huba, from Church of the Customer Blog, made a great point about online video sharing today. She was marveling at how Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the creators of the Diet Coke and Mentos videos, were upset that their [Read More]
Jackie
Isn't this the point of business innovation in free markets?
If you produce a great product or service, others are bound (some would say duty-bound) to copy it. Maybe even improve upon it.
The only way to stay ahead is to continuously innovate; to improve the product, to reach out to more customers in the same market, or to enter entirely new markets.
Mentos-catalysed coke fountains hardly ranks as the greatest innovation of recent times. Maybe the two guys should be grateful anyone paid attention to them at all.
Graham Hill
Nice post. I couldn't agree more. The web is not about control. But that doesn't mean you can't benefit from it. Case in point, I saw these guys on Letterman last night, so their visibility is clearly continuing to grow. Now it's up to them get creative and capitalize on it.
For those readers looking for an easy software tool to create, host and deliver Video Advertising, then take a look at the StreamerNet Mobile Video Producer.
The company has released the first “plug-and-play, click-and-stream” software program (WinXP) that lets you create your do-it-yourself sales commercial and upload it to your private StreamerNet video library. Simply place the provided link within web sites or AdBoxes and subsequent click-thrus will stream the video ad to the viewer.
More details at http://www.streamernet.com/html/videoad.html
This product is a swiss-army knife which enables simplified creation and management of all things video, such as video email, live streaming, media conversion, podcasting and more.
