Jaffe Juice: Human Skateboarding

February 26, 2007

Human Skateboarding - who knew?

I'm really proud to share a work-in-progress program which crayon has been working in association with the folks over at Sneaux Shoes.

We were tasked with helping to seed a terrific video, created by PES, for Sneaux Shoes (darn good shoes I might add!) The video is called "Human Skateboarding"

crayon's task was to help seed and stream the video throughout the blogosphere and social mediasphere and to influencers and communities of interest. To date, we've seen over 400,000 views on Break.com, 69,000 views on YouTube, 20,000 views on misc. sites including Daily Motion, 11,000 views on iFilm and the list continues to grow. Most telling is the first video response, a spoof titled "Sub-human skateboarding"

It's terrific to be in a position to effect and implement on behalf of a client and to put our talk into walk as "proof of concept" of the power of new marketing!

Comment Total: (17)

SPONSORSHIP

Jaffe Juice – brings a fresh new marketing perspective and commentary from industry thought leader and author Joseph Jaffe. Click here to find out more about sponsorship opportunities.

Jaffe Juice continues below...

follow jaffejuice at http://twitter.com

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/307546/16393176

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Human Skateboarding - who knew?:

Comments

Reminded me of the Tony vs. Paul video that caught on so big on Youtube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AJzU3NjDikY

Posted by: Griner

This looks like an unrepurposed TV ad to me. And 30 seconds long to boot (or should that be shoe...)

Posted by: Alan Cheevers

Good job. Can you tell any thing on the seeding strategy and execution? So what was you approach and how did you do it?

Posted by: Maarten Lens-FitzGerald

I love you Joe. But it's a blatant ripoff. Tony vs. Paul has more than 2.6 million views on YouTube alone.

Posted by: KFad

I don't think you can say its a ripoff - Pes has been making stopmotion for years - look at his site. And I don't think Crayon did the creative work anyway. I wouldn't have come across Human Skateboarding unless I read this blog - I would be interested to know what you did beyond putting it on all the usual sharing sites and telling your friends in the blogosphere ...

Posted by: Kevin O'Dowd

More insight into the spot can be found at The Ranch. It took them three days to shoot it!

Posted by: David Wen

As Joe is traveling, a few responses from me, just to keep the conversation going. As I'm overseeing this project at crayon, I am happy to give you some insight without breaking any client confidentiality.

Alan, it is indeed a TV spot, but is yet to run on TV (paid, that is - it was shown on Attack of the Show the other night after they saw it on YouTube, with more TV appearances to follow).

Griner & Kfad - crayon only got involved after the spot was in the can, so we can take no credit for how brilliantly it turned out - kudos to the client, to the Director and it's ad agency. I don't think it was modelled on the video you both reference though. Check out the Director's site, eatpes.com, which features some fantastic shorts, including one called Roof Sex that predates Tony vs Paul by some months and hit the blogosphere back in August. There was also a Human Skateboard animation on YTMND in 2005 that along with some others, provided inspiration, and which are featured on Sneaux's Human Skateboarding microsite.

Kevin & Maarten, without going into too much detail, crayon helped Sneaux Shoes select social media tools, develop the consumer generated portion of the program, carry out staged seeding to video hosting sites, did some blog & podcaster outreach to let key influencers know about it, and conversation monitoring to gauge community reaction and respond where appropriate.

Without stating the obvious, the key factor in whether or not a video hits a nerve is down to its content almost completely. No strategy (apart from a large lumbering media buy) can make a poor uninteresting video travel widely. But sometimes great pieces also don't make the big time, because they never hit a tipping point. Our aim is only to help an already brilliant video hit a tipping point a little more quickly in an effort to extend the campaign as far as it can go.

Posted by: Steve Coulson

I know you guys weren't in on the creative and I apologize if my comments came off as indicting to Crayon. I've got nothing but love for you guys.

Posted by: KFad

reminds me of so many like this here and in Somalia, Iraq etc.:

CASTLE ROCK, Colo. -- A woman's body was found after it had been
dragged behind a car for more than a mile, with a rope still tied around
her neck. The grisly blood trail started on interstate 25 just north of
Denver, and lasted for a little more than a mile. Autopsy reports showed
that the woman died from head injuries and strangulation that resulted
from being dragged behind a vehicle. Her face was so torn apart that
she was not recognizable.

Posted by: Shocked at this ad

This is brilliant. I believe this whole method of advertising is due to really grow over the next year or two.

I added some thoughts and highlighted a couple of other advert-as-content videos as well over at my site. Specifically Smirnoff's Tea Partay and Reebok's Terry Tate (who in retrospect appears to be way ahead of its time).

http://www.techrivet.com/Viral+Advertising+As+Content.aspx

Posted by: Greg O'Byrne

this actually was a blatant rip-off, but not of tony vs. paul.

A good buddy and former co-worker of mine (erik erling, www.myspace.com/aphexflip , www.indyskate.com) came up with the idea for 'human skateboarding' well over a year ago while we were working at an indianapolis skatepark.

Erik shot this http://www.woostercollective.com/2007/03/02/1471272627_m_VIC.gif that same day and it has been floating around his computer for awhile. A company out of new zealand paid him to use the idea mooooonths ago, before he even won some photobucket contest for his 'picture'.

Sneaux shoes wrote an email to the owner of the park and basically said they would fly out the two kids who were in eriks clip and one adult since they were not 18. never happened. instead, erik go zero credit for his idea and up to this point still has not gotten any credit for his idea from sneaux.

emails to sneaux seem to fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. erik tried to contact them and all they did was forward the email to the owner of the skatepark.

sneaux is a sketchy company, though i am in no way accusing the artists involved with stealing the idea, i entirely belive it was the 'creatives' over in their advertising department.

thanks for listening

Posted by: Doug G

More viral advertising as content here: http://www.jaffejuice.com/2007/02/human_skateboar.html

Blendtec: "Will it Blend" series.

Posted by: Greg O'Byrne

I love you Joe. But it's a blatant ripoff
http://www.spotesya.com/

Posted by: kevin

Kevin - we never created the video; we helped seed it on behalf of our client.

Posted by: jJ