Thanks Powerade.

When Fleishman Hillard offered me the summer internship in April, they told me that I was going to be on the digital team. Being that one of the digital team supervisors was on the internship committee, she went through most of the my job duties in the interview. So coming in, I already knew what to expect.

But when my boss, Paul, came over to my cube last week and asked me to blog for ChaosScenario, it really caught me by surprise. He wanted my perspective of advertising, marketing and the media in general because I grew up in this digital world. Apparently being young enough to never have used an 8 track and old enough to have played the old school Oregon Trail on those 5 inch floppies has its perks.

Ever since that dancing baby from the end of the last century blew my mind, I have been interested in digital development from websites to pictures and to videos. As the world has become more and more digital, authenticity and realness has been called into question. Now more than ever, anyone can be as tall as Yao Ming, strong as the Hulk, and all at the same time, be just as good looking as Brad Pitt/Jessica Alba (whomever you prefer). So when Powerade launched their videos with LeBron nailing 80 foot jumpers, Roddick literally burying the tennis ball, and Vick chugging his dog, I mean football, into the upperdeck, it without a doubt confused people.

Powerade certainly didn't try to keep their brand in those commercials a secret but this video of a ball girl making a spectacular "catch" is a different story.

The video itself went viral a couple of weeks ago, but Gatorade wasn't attached to it until very recently. Yet in the actual video, I don't see any mention of Gatorade. No sign, no banner, no drunk dude wearing a Gatorade shirt. So what's in it for Gatorade?

I don't claim to be any sort of marketing, advertising or PR expert but in my opinion, Gatorade's mission was and is exactly what everyone has been doing. Talk about it.

Of course everyone knows not many human beings are capable of performing that type of Neo-like move, and even Neo would need the Matrix to accomplish something like that (and that's a completely different topic), but just the fact people are sending it to their friends has I'm sure made the Gatorade folks very happy.

And of course who can forget Kobe's "jump" over an Aston Martin. There is no Nike swoosh at the end of the commercial, but obviously Nike is responsible for these new kicks that give human beings an ability to jump over automobiles.

Most recently, Shaun Suisham of the Washington Redskins has deemed himself the world's strongest kicker in his attempt to go viral with his 110 yd field goal.

We'll just have to see which company decides to clean this video up and make a kicker the poster child of their online campaign. I'm going to guess no one.

So readers beware, anything you see online can be fake. In fact, this entire entry could've been written by a monkey at a typewriter. I'm joking...or am I...?

-Terry

Comments

[Cam Beck]

Hi Terry - Welcome to ChaosScenario. Don't believe what Paul tells you about me.

Okay. You can probably believe it.

Say, I'm a bit confused... you started talking about Powerade's superhuman feat campaign, and then when you introduce the video you switched to Gatorade.

Was that intentional?

Did Gatorade really steal Powerade's idea, or did you mean to say "Powerade?"

[Terry]

The whole point of entry was to talk about how anything online can be fake. Powerade was just an example and so was the Gatorade viral ad. No where in the entry did I compare the two or suggest that one was "stealing" from the other.

First of all, the Powerade ads were TV commercials. They just happen to have landed on Youtube (like everything else nowadays). The Gatorade ad was a complete Internet/viral thing and like I mentioned in the entry, no where in the video did they post their brand while the Powerade commercials ended with the drink and the word "POWERADE" was plastered across the TV screen.

These were two completely different marketing/advertising strategies. One was pretty much a traditional "if you use/drink/eat our product, you may be able to do this too!" (They also have videos of amateurs doing superhuman things such as catch a homer in the stands and chucking the ball all the way to home plate.)The other was probably just an attempt to have everyone say "hey, check out what Gatorade made" to their buddies.

Really, I was just pointing out that online marketing can and are usually over the top. Hope that clears things up.

[Cam Beck]

I'm just trying to understand the source of the ad, regardless of the tactics used. Is it user-generated or was it created for Gatorade by Gatorade?

Because if it WAS created for Gatorade by Gatorade, it's obviously a ripoff of a competitor's campaign idea, which, to me at least, is a much bigger story than the fact that one was a TV commercial and one was designed to be "viral."