Ad Produced by Student
The Actual Ad Aired on TV
(Article from New York Times)
A Consumer’s Spot for Apple Grows Up
By STUART ELLIOTT Published: October 31, 2007
THE idea that you do not have to be a professional to create a good commercial is becoming widespread, in a trend known as consumer-generated content. Leave it to Apple to — paraphrasing the company’s old slogan a bit — think differently.
A television commercial for the new iPod Touch from Apple, which began running on Sunday, was created by the longtime Apple agency TBWA/Chiat/Day. But it is based on a commercial that an 18-year-old student in Britain — an Apple devotee named Nick Haley, who says he got his first Macintosh when he was 3 — created on his own one day last month.
His spot offers a fast-paced tour of the abilities of the iPod Touch, set to a song titled “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by a Brazilian band, CSS.
Mr. Haley said he had been inspired to make the commercial by a lyric in the song, “My music is where I’d like you to touch.”
He based the visual elements on video clips about the iPod Touch and other new products, he said, which can be seen on the Apple Web site (apple.com). He uploaded his commercial to YouTube, where it received four stars out of a possible five and comments that ranged from “That’s awesome,” followed by 16 exclamation points, to “Makes me want to buy one and hack it.”
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Late last week, Mr. Haley’s spot had been viewed 2,131 times on youtube.com. Among the viewers, Apple executives said, were marketing employees at Apple in Cupertino, Calif., who asked staff members on the Apple account at TBWA/Chiat/Day to get in touch with Mr. Haley about producing a professional version of the commercial (which, truth be told, had the same look and feel as many of Apple’s other ads).
“I was sitting on the bus and I got this e-mail on my phone,” Mr. Haley, a native of Warwick, England, said in an interview last week from the University of Leeds, where he is a “fresher,” or first-year student.
The message said, “‘We represent Apple and we’ve seen what you have produced and we’d like a chat with you,’” Mr. Haley recalled, adding: “This seemed ridiculous and far-fetched. My initial reaction was, someone wanted to steal it.”
He was soon persuaded that the message was real and traveled to Los Angeles in October, in his first visit to the United States, to work on a broadcast-ready version of his spot with creative executives at TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.
Consumers creating commercials “is part of this brave new world we live in,” said Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide, based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa del Rey.
“It’s an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audiences,” Mr. Clow said. “People’s relationship with a brand is becoming a dialogue, not a monologue.”
The commercial based on Mr. Haley’s spot was seen on football games Sunday afternoon and on shows that night, including “Desperate Housewives” and Game 4 of the World Series. It is also to be shown in Europe and Japan.
Apple paid for Mr. Haley’s expenses while he stayed in Los Angeles, said an Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, and also “compensated him like any creative professional, for his idea and his contributions to the creative process.”
Although Mr. Dowling declined to say how much Mr. Haley had been paid, he said the company would also be “making a significant financial contribution toward his education at Leeds” and — at Mr. Haley’s request — giving him Apple products like a MacBook Pro laptop.
YouTube visitors have flocked to watch Mr. Haley’s original spot (youtube.com/watch?v=KKQUZPqDZb0) since the professional version began running on TV. As of yesterday, viewings had grown to more than 490,000.
As for how faithful the professional spot is to Mr. Haley’s amateur version, Mr. Clow said, “we didn’t mess with his content” because “it has a charm to it, a youthful fun.”
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The changes include more polished editing and filming the new version in high definition.
“My input was totally respected,” Mr. Haley said, adding that he considered the agency’s commercial “pretty similar” to the original.
The experience of working with the agency executives was “overwhelming, surreal and fantastic, all in one,” said Mr. Haley, who is studying politics at Leeds.
“This is my first taste” of advertising, he added, but offered a thoughtful response when asked what it means if consumers like him are willing to make commercials.
“That’s the whole point of advertising; it needs to get to the user,” Mr. Haley said. “If you get the user to make the ads, who better?”
As heartily as Mr. Clow endorsed the concept of user-generated content, he suggested that turnabout is fair play.
At TBWA, “we’re producing films we put on YouTube that we make in a day and a half in the parking lot,” he said, laughing.
