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In November of 2005, two dudes in white lab coats and protective glasses dropped pieces of Mentos (the fresh maker!) into bottles of Diet Coke. Geysers of soda erupted from the bottles, video cameras recorded the action and the resulting video of "Experiment #10" was just the start of what can only be described as an internet phenomenon.

By the time they had reached Experiment #137 (above), kids were already buying Mentos by the handful and making their own fountains and rockets the world over.

To their credit, Mentos was thrilled. In spite of early indifference, Coke managed to finally come around to appreciating the new life its brand had found on the web as well. This serves as just one example among many of regular folks using the internet to discuss, evangelize or even criticize brands and products, of their own will. Like anything new and exciting (not to mention cheap or free), advertisers were scrambling to find a way to generate viral successes of their own, sometimes with undesired results. 

When done right though, advertising that comes directly from fans of brands is the very best kind. It's the new media equivalent of a testimonial, but also proof that the creator was dedicated enough to put a considerable amount of time into creating it. To say that this kind of advertising is more genuine and convincing than the status quo would be something of an understatement.

New business models are even springing up as a result of this exciting trend. Take for example Adhack, a local startup based around "people powered advertising," offering advertisers a chance to access the talents of all manners of small creative agencies and home-based media creators for considerably less expense than a traditional mainstream media model. 

To recap some of the more successful examples of User Generated Advertising, we talked to Adhack's Founder, James Sherrett via email, who pointed us to a few successes in this space. 

James' picks:

1. Doritos. (Also currently running a UK contest on YouTube)

Their main web presence is now dedicated to "Snack Strong Productions," which is all about user generated ads, and a conest that could see those ads run during the most expensive airtime on North American network TV. As James notes, "They've bought Super Bowl ad space for 3 consecutive years for user-generated ads." 

2. Heinz. Their "Top This" TV Challenge is now in Round Two, having already chosen a winner from the first round.

3. Utilikilts. Not the biggest brand in this list, and something of a niche product (kilts for everyday wear!) but they've been accepting and running "Mock-u-mercials" since their beginning. As James notes, "It's not trendy for them, it's just the way they roll." They've got loads of them too; a great exmaple of brand affinity among their customers.

4. Apple. Nick Haley's iPod Touch commercial went from fan-generated "for fun" project to being aired on TV, seemingly overnight. Haley explains it best: "I loved the look of the new iPod Touch, found this music, and thought it was perfect for it. I made a commercial using material from apple.com and editing in Apple's Final Cut Pro." 

Watch it in full, complete with YouTubey grey messiness at the front: 

Our thanks to James for these suggestions, and a tip to would-be advertisers thinking of using this model: Make sure that the video player you choose to use for your submissions has an option to embed the commercials on sites other than your own! That is, after all, the point of all of this, is it not? 

If you have more examples of a great fan-built advertising or media submission contests, or if you just want to share your thoughts on the above, feel free to do so in the comments. 

*James Sherrett photo by Kris Krug.

I spotted this on Freyburg.com, a presentation by Micheal Wesch at the Library of Congress about the anthropology of YouTube. 

Wesch created a (positively brilliant, imo) video entitled "The Machine is Us/ing Us" earlier this year that shot to the top of the YouTube charts; it serves as just one of loads of examples that he uses here to illustrate the similarities and differences between life online, on a webcam, and in real life. His students at Kansas State University assisted in a semester long research project, and this speech is the culmination of that work. 

It runs a little long for an online video, but the content is fascinating throughout its 55 min run time: 

Tomorrow, we say "so long" to Mark Freeman, our Diplomatic Relations Manager, as he heads off to the Masters of Digital Media Program.

Mark has already written a very eloquent final post, and now we have to prepare for life without him here in the office. And so in reality show fashion, I thought it would be fitting if we take a look back at Mark's history here at Strutta. 

Remember 5 Questions with Mark Freeman, when we were first getting to know him? 

And then there was of course the now famous lip dub video, ably directed by Mark himself, in which he makes a cameo: 

Office Lip Dub - Blister in the Sun, by Strutta.com from Jordan Behan on Vimeo

Or perhaps you recall the time that he let it all hang out in our happy dance video: 

Mark, already an accomplished documentarian and philanthropist,  originally came to Strutta after to responding to an ad I posted looking for someone to sort through the entire catalog of YouTube videos, hunting for the best stuff in obscure categories. I knew that such a task would require a certain sense of both humor and detachment. While it may have sounded like a fun and easy job on the surface, it was anything but. Pouring through 1000's of often mind-numbing online video content in search of the gems is considerably more daunting than it sounds, but in the face of this difficulty, Mark flourished. He parsed the good from the bad, the popular from the mundane and was able to plot the resulting data onto spreadsheets that help us put everything in context. Along the way, he served as our de facto translator of (seemingly) all of the Asian languages, including all comments and blog coverage from the far east that we have received. And before you ask, yes, he responds in Japanese and Korean. 

But Mark wasn't done. In his second act at Strutta, he served as the single point of accountability for QA on the site, and later embarked on an extensive research project that involved all manners of online promotions, sweepstakes and social media submission contests. Again, he was able to compile his findings into digestible packets that we could make sense of. 

But before he left us, he surprised us with yet another skill. He's been cranking out Photoshop mock-ups for potential clients for the past two weeks, and the feedback from the resulting work has been overwhelmingly positive. 

I don't mean to lay it on TOO thick, but as Mark departs us to pursue higher education (what could be higher education than 8 months of steady YouTube watching? I mean, SRSLY) it seemed only fitting to send him off with a fitting tribute; one that is representative of the anguish we'll feel when we gaze at his empty chair. 

Oh. No wait. I see Maura has already gone over and staked a claim on his desk and chair, and has even started some sketches to decorate what will be her new space. I think she likes the view from there. 

Stiil, Mark, you'll be missed.  

It's time to reflect on marketing, the meaning of life and YouTube. I learned a lot from online video, not so much from watching online video but more so from watching what people watch online.

Over the past couple of months I've kept a spreadsheet of the daily top 100 YouTube videos. Crunching the numbers reveals an incredible number of consistencies and human habits, to the extent that if an alien were to only watch the top 100 videos on YouTube to understand our species, they could convincingly argue that our only interests are: pain, breasts, paranoia, soccer, cartoons, soap operas, Obama.

These interests are cross-cultural, although some are more popular in certain languages than others, which is important because a popular video in one language has a halo-effect that increases the popularity of other videos in that language. Soap operas are most popular in Mandarin and Arabic (19% of the top 100 videos today are clips from Arabic soap operas) and the Taiwanese soap opera Fated to Love You (命中注定我愛你) can take up 35% of the top videos on the Monday following a new episode. Cartoons, however, are only in Japanese, which is consistently the second most popular language after English, possibly because videos with breasts are always in English or Japanese. Political videos are usually in English, Mandarin or Italian. Soccer comes in every language, as does pain.

I shouldn't've been so surprised, but I hadn't anticipated to what extent people like to see other people get hurt. From the Japanese newscaster that broke his neck jumping into a rice paddie on live television, to the Cuban athlete that kicked a ref in the face at the Olympics (6 of today's top 100, four days after it happened), pain is popular. Almost getting hurt is equally popular (see Kobe's jumping over the car commercial) and learning about what could hurt you is immensely popular no matter how unlikely (see 9-11 conspiracy videos and those cellphone popping popcorn videos (EVERYBODY PANIC!)).

The cellphone popcorn videos worked well because they remind me about how my cousin's wife read an article that said a doctor read an article that said cellphone's give you brain cancer--the videos fit into an established cultural meme and a basic emotional instinct: fear. Not that all marketing campaigns have to do this, but trying to make people do things and think things they don't already do and think is very difficult. Creative takes on established norms work best, online and off.

Bell recently tried to launch a real-world viral marketing campaign in cities across Canada for the Samsung Instinct phone by posting billboards and bus ads with nothing but a blue mark and the letters "er". I'm sure some marketing genius sold Bell on the idea that everyone in Canada would be chatting at the water cooler about what the "er er er" on the side of the bus might mean. But why would they?

Besides, every morning, on my way to work, I ride a full bus past a heroin shooting gallery, a pack of crack dealers in an alley and a superbuff woman voluntarily directing traffic wearing pink sneakers and turquoise shortshorts. A billboard with an "er" on it doesn't even register.

I don't want to suggest there's a magic formula to viral marketing but I do think the Bell campaign failed because it didn't play into a human emotional need. Online video sites allow us to easily track what people want to watch, and with so much media available that does fit viewer interests, there's failure and mediocrity in store for marketers that ignore what people want to see.

And what do they want to see? Well, if we combined all of the most popular videos from the last 8 months, theoretically, I think the most popular video of all time would be Japanese-language news footage of four women wearing bikinis, driving golf carts, trying to run over Ronaldinho while shouting, "Yes, we can!"

That's it for me here at Strutta. It's been great. Thanks to the Strutta crew and everyone I've met while working here!

The newest version of Strutta, with an entirely brand new feature-set, is set to launch early this Fall.

While we ramp up to that release, I though it would be fitting if I shared a few of the details about how we arrived at this point, and share some of the user feedback that drove these changes.

While we were tracking the feedback that we received from the beta contact form (link only available in logged-in view), and the actions of users on the site, we also began to notice trends in the "in-person" feedback that we received from our friends and the local tech community.

Players, Voters and Viewers, "Oh My!" 

Most people's first question was "What do you win?" People wanted to know whether there was more at stake than just the bragging rights that come with staking one's claim as the best in the world at (insert category that previosuly had no forum for competition here). We are delighted to find that with just exposure and a little online rivalry as motivation, people were quite willing to put their talents on diplay, and let the community decide a favorite.

But that momentum was hindered some, and after a while we discovered a few trends in our stats that helped explain why that is. Some of the more popular games and videos on the site got plenty of views, but voting was proportionately low. Bragging rights were up for grabs for the folks that came out on top in any given game, but voters weren't flocking to those games en masse in support of these players.

We had always known that Strutta had to have an incentive plan for voters as well, and we embarked on building a points system that bring voters as much into the competition as the players themselves. The initial launch tracked voter scores, but we were well aware that the voting currency needed to have more emphasis, and had always planned to build it out; it was only a matter of how. 

While we pondered this challenge, we started to notice another trend in the feedback we received about the site. Companies started enquiring about how they might be able to access our technology to decide the winners of their own competitions. From day one, we had a plan about how to incorporate sponsorship of games while remaining true to the community we were building, but these questions really got us to thinking about the needs of those companies, and how we could help them. 

And thus we began work on this new concept, which as you've probably already heard, will combine all of the elements that people enjoy about Strutta, and enable companies to offer prizing in their own competitions. Our goal os to provide the tools that allow personal users, companies, ad agencies and marketers the ability to structure their own user-generated content contests, with their own rules.

Over the next few weeks leading up to our launch, we'll share a few contest case studies like the one Mark has already blogged. By exploring the current online contest space, we're helping ourselves better understand what works and what doesn't- and why not share our findings with you, the reader? Stay tuned...