Un-Innocent

A while ago on PSFK we posted on a new Innocent ad which we thought was ‘rather odd’. Well it turns out it wasn’t actually an Innocent ad at all. Dan Germain the Innocent creative director picks up the story:

“A little while ago, a Swedish agency called Peacock visited our office in Copenhagen to offer their services. They’d even made an advert, which has since been named ‘suicidal orange’. It’s really good, but maybe not quite us.

“After we met them, they posted it on youtube. We posted it on our own blog too, seeing as we liked it. We wanted to see what people thought of it. Some of our readers liked it and some didn’t. Then the other day I noticed that the clip had gradually started to appear on advertising blogs (some links at the bottom of this post), some of which falsely credited us with producing it, which of course is unfair on the people at Peacock (can’t find a URL for them anywhere).”

The interesting thing about this is the potential for well produced consumer content to appear as if it’s actually from a brand. Jeremy Bullmore once compared a brand to being like a bird’s nest – it’s built up of lots of little bits of random pieces that come together and form a coherent whole. But what happens when you’re no longer in control of those little pieces and instead communications which appear to come from you but actually don’t start to change people’s perceptions of your brand? Do you run with it or do you fight it?

Dan’s answers to Innocent’s problem is:

“The more stuff you make, the more chance there is of something turning out to be good. And then people will watch it. So in 2007 we will be making more stuff, writing more stuff, posting more stuff and filming more stuff. Some of it will be rubbish and some of it might work. And seeing as we don’t know which bits will work until we’ve done them, I guess we’d better get cracking.”