Traditional TV may soon be overgrown with Vines.
Big players like Dunkin' Donuts, Nissan and Virgin Mobile have all either aired TV spots created on the Twitter-owned six-second video platform or plan to do so. The ad business is all about bandwagons, so expect just about every other marketer to hop on soon.
Trident launched a Vine spot on Fuse last night that will air 100 times in the next two weeks. The clip stars 24-year-old Brooklyn musicians Nicholas Megalis and his partner Rudy Mancuso (the David Ogilvys of Vine!) performing a jaunty jingle: "Layers of flavor, that's how the world gets paid. Strawberry, citrus, grape, lemonade!" (The Stephen Sondheims of Vine they're not.)
It's basically two dudes goofing around, singin' about gum. Nothing wrong with that. And Vine is so condensed, there's no time to waste. It's a quick burst of sound and motion, an image or two, some keywords, a social call to action … BAM! That's all you get. (Of course, this is really just a millennial spin on old-school advertising, complete with a catchy tune and the hashtag standing in for the tagline. But let the babies think they've discovered something new.)
Brevity usually raises the bar for creativity, forcing artists to finely hone their ideas, so Vine's transition into the mainstream could herald a super-short-form commercial renaissance, with lots of experimentation and mind-blowing approaches to come. Then again, I could see this trend going in an anti-creative direction, which is, in fact, hinted at in the Trident spot. Two of its four seconds simply show packages of gum and the #paymeinlayers hashtag.
Will marketers at some point just start tossing up six-second still product shots, perhaps with snatches of music and some lighting effects, and trumpet these unmoving video billboards as the next step in Vines? Will they create clips with bikini babes cradling their products while hashtags flash incessantly? Or pose the babes atop muscle cars, pickup trucks, home electronics and who-knows-what-else in six-second distillations of every shlocky commercial ever made? Will they run six brain-dead Vines in a row to fill traditional 30-second slots?
Marketers always stress creativity, foster innovation and take the high road, so I'm sure we've got nothing to worry about. Right?
Via Mashable.