Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

Years ago, Photoshop’s ease of use in editing software led to a huge explosion of advertising parodies. Marketers would release a new advertising image and then someone would slightly change the image to create something funny. The following are a couple of examples I quickly found on Flickr.

Windows Vista Product Parody

iPhone Commercial Parody

The YouTube Generation

Today, YouTube (along with the availability of video editing software) is aiding in a similar explosion of parodic items: videos. A while back, when I was doing some research for my Sonic Drive-In article I found that the number of parodic videos seemed to outnumber the originals by at least 2-to-1. That is huge! Think about how many more videos are now available on YouTube showing the Sonic brand in one form or another. Those videos provide additional marketing benefits companies just cannot buy.

A Mac Parody

In sticking with the computer theme from the images above, here is a video parodying the current set of Mac commercials.

From a marketing standpoint, parodies are great. People create videos that others will watch that are also based on branding you originally created. When I see these parodies I almost always think of the original commercial, and I believe I am not the only one who does this.

So, what is the lesson to take away from this? Create marketing materials that people find interesting. Some will then create parodies of your marketing material. This spreads the word about your company even further. The end result is that the parodies end up aiding your branding and marketing efforts.

Note: No computers or operating systems were harmed in the making of this blog post.

The photos are courtesy of re-ality and P/\UL.

Tags: branding, commercials, parodies, web marketing