It’s a fact well known to the average person that #brands should never give the public creative control over anything they do online. This conventional wisdom, however, has never trickled down to marketers or the suits who sign off on their work. Since the early days of Twitter, brands like Skittles have been naïvely inviting users to distort their messaging and vandalize their websites. It’s always a lot of fun for human people! (Not for corporations.)
The latest corporate marketing mistake to be released into the wild and transmogrified into art is this Coca-Cola GIF-maker. “GIF the feeling,” it beckons to you. Twitter savant and internet humorist Henry Birdseye, a.k.a. TehAwesome, heard the call, and he answered it. Boy, did he answer it.
Here are some of the singular feelings that Henry GIF(f)ed.
Truly, the Coca-Cola Company should present him with an award for his creative labor on their behalf. Certainly, tens of customers felt compelled to buy a Coke after seeing this. Or jump into a pool while still holding their phones. Whatever! Who cares? This is brilliant marketing!
You can’t pay for marketing like this — you can only inflict it on yourself for free, through a series of mistakes that could have been avoided at any of several points in your corporate organizational chart.
But they weren’t, and now that’s our gain.
