First of all: Adland did not pitch ideas to c3. Don't confuse the name of this website with the creative agency who did. It should be easy enough to keep track of as the agency logo was on the pitch deck, too. Clearly, if you don't know the name the agency who pitched you the ideas, then you are in the dark, which suggests a lot of miscommunication.
"C3 either doesn't like them or can't afford them," is interesting too, as the original deck the agency presented was full of ideas that cost a grand total of free, from logo to social media suggestions to leveraging your army of content creator volunteers. Regardless, this "feedback," was never communicated to the agency unless you count an incredibly roundabout way in the form of radio silence. Hardly anything was communicated at all which is why the agency walked away at first.
As for "both sides walk away," that sounds like a mutual decision, rather than one made out of frustration. Regardless after a year, one side (i.e. the agency) was brought back at the behest of Boxer. Were you even aware of that?
This article never mentioned any intention of lawsuits, nor would the agency ever dream of doing so. We knew exactly what we were getting into and joined because we wanted to help, just like your female musicians who wanted to help and ended up writing their medium posts about their less than stellar experience.
There's no "faux political rationale" here either; we weren't equating our volunteerism with google, we were equating your ripping off a ten year old and iconic long-running ad campaign with the same tactics Spotify does when producing sound-alike songs as a way of showing how little you respect content creation. I know it's hard for you to believe but ad agencies have IP and create content. And the only reason it took four years to dis your work is because it took four years for you to make anything.
You might want to get off your high horse and use this as a learning experience before you lose any other volunteers whose talent you are squandering.
Diarrhea, hemorrhoids, vomit and snot are also normal. I don't need to see it in any ad, though.
Out of all the things you could choose to champion, when it comes to women, period blood should be last on the list. Also why is this ad so sexual? Are they encouraging sex while on your period?
And also did the ad need to be as long as the average period?
This ad may be all about blood, but in reality it's a total shit show.
Update According to The New York Post YouTube took down the parody videos and then reposted after a backlash.
The campaign’s lead spot, “Pennies vs. Dollars,” was uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 25 around 11:30 a.m. — and was pulled from the video-sharing site less than 48 hours later, the group, known as
c3, told The Post. YouTube said it pulled the video “due to violation of terms & conditions.” The artist-led coalition, whose members include David Byrne, Roseanne Cash and T Bone Burnett, fired back at the Google unit within an hour.“After two days of widespread press coverage of our artist-driven campaign to pressure Google into treating artists more fairly,” c3 complained, “you suspended and are now censoring our account.”
This so-called censorship lasted all of three hours, by the way. Weird. if I go to YouTube and search something like, oh, I dunno, YouTube Sucks I get nearly 7.4 million search results, and not just from randos but from actual influencers like Casey Neistat, whose video entitled "WTF YouTube? taking away monetization??? has more than 3.6 million views since it aired in September of last year. The YouTube content creators even have a catchy name for YouTube's behavior of demonetizing videos whose content they don't agree with: Adpocalypse.
Some of these videos have more than a million views. And yet, YouTube hasn't seen fit to delete any of them even despite the mountains of press the demonetization issue has received this year. One would think an influencer like the still popular PewDiePie has more than 57 million subscribers should be a bigger threat than the C3 who have 78 subscribers.
If it's any consolation, the ads are back up and maybe they'll get more than thirty thousand views. Who knows? Maybe the fact MIlo Yiannopoulos has written about it will help.
I guess the CCC couldn't invest in proper sound mixing either. Weird since mixing is at least related to music.
Like you said, we already know musicians are getting screwed because they have been yelling about it for at least five years now. This has gone way past music now when even native YouTube stars can't make a living on the platform. The CCC's myopia is one big missed opportunity to partner with the new generation of streamers stars who were weaned on social media.
It begs the question why did they waste time (and maybe even money) creating overly long films that point out the obvious and the offer up a hashtag as a call to action?
Lack of strategy and idea seem to be the key missing factors. First of all, who is the audience for this? The hashtag would suggest listeners/supporters of the arts but the tone and scope is so educational it seems like a primer for new content creators. (Spoiler alert, a primer isn't needed, everyone is aware Google screws content creators. Like literally, everyone.) If they wanted to reach the listener, they should have focused on emotional persuasion to give them a reason to care.
A better campaign would have had a strategy first and an idea which led to a unique execution, not a rip off of a decade-long campaign (for a technology company no less), and a meaningful call to action beyond a hashtag would have worked eons better.
There's always a chance these weren't created in-house but through borrow favors from friends in the industry. If that's the case it explains why there are no credits listed. But if these were done in-house so to speak, well, all I can say is The Content Creators Coalition should learn to about another word that starts with C: Collaboration.
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