A boy lies on his back on a boardroom table in a high-rise office block in Toyko. He pulls out his Nokia, takes a photo of the setting sun – upside down – and sends it to his girlfriend in New York, where dawn is breaking. “Now I know we share the same horizon,” says the voiceover. “My sunset is your sunrise.”
It’s a brilliant Nokia ad – the sort of simple, well-executed idea that agencies charge six-figure sums for. Only this one wasn’t made by an ad agency – it was made by Hiroki Ono, a 23-year-old film student from Yokohama, Japan, who’d never made an ad before. The film, “Feel the globe”, took just two days to make.
Hiroki’s 30-second video was the winner of a competition run by Mofilm – a group working with film schools and YouTube addicts to find the best in user-generated content. Mofilm convinced companies such as Visa, HP, Best Buy and AT&T to “put their brands in the hands of consumers”, as Nokia’s head of brand engagement, Fiona Bosman, put it at yesterday’s press conference at the Cannes Lions advertising festival.
Judging this contest was Spike Lee, director of Malcolm X and Inside Man and an enthusiastic supporter of user-generated content and DIY filmmaking.
“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.”
In a climate where clients are putting pressure on agency fees and demanding more for less, the last thing advertising companies need is free competition from YouTube addicts.
Mofilm have put proper contracts in place to ensure that advertisers don’t make off with the content developed in this contest without proper compensation, but not all crowdsourcing efforts reward their contributors.
But in spite of the risk of exploitation – and to his own agency, Spike DDB – Lee will continue to support such ventures.
“Anything that gives young people the chance to show what they can do is important,” he said. “Historically, institutions try to keep everything on lockdown.”
Lee reckons the UGC revolution has further to run, too.
“We’re going to come to a time very soon where … I’ll be paying whatever it costs to go to a theatre and see a film that was shot on a regular digital phone,” he predicted.
Rather than seeing this as a threat, Lee says that agencies should embrace the mass of untapped talent out there – not least in this time of budget cuts.
“The economy is down the toilets. Everybody is affected by this. To be able to survive, we have to turn negatives into positives. Maybe you don’t hire me because I cost a lot of money and you give some young talented and hungry guy a shot. I just talked myself out of some jobs [but] that’s the reality.”
Hear more from Spike Lee in this Audioboo interview from Cannes.
