Unilever | Hoipolloireport

Johnson & Johnson learned the painful way how a social media could be used against you. See previous post and the YouTube video by angry Motrin mom.

This is not exactly a new approach. It was only last November that someone called out Unilever on it’s Axe positioning, mashing up the brilliant Dove commercial about ‘real beauty’ and the same company’s sex-ridden ads for Axe —below.

These videos tell a different kind of story. The Motrin video is vary basic, the anti-Axe quite slick. Yet they achieve a few important things:

They assemble and summarize supporting evidence against the offending brand
They make the problem seem big enough to recruit new supporters of the cause
They provoke the marketer to react

To think, not too long ago, the only tool at one’s disposal when offended, was a letter to the editor of your local paper!

Video sharing sites are often held in low esteem because of the Lonelygirls, but there are also the use of video as a form of social cultural criticism, a la the anti-Axe commercial. But there have been some unconventional uses of video sharing and activism.

Some of you may recall a recent story about how the owner of a cigar store in Mesa, angered by the fact that he was burglarized, put up his surveillance video on YouTube. Within weeks there was a tip off and the burglar was arrested –whether of not as a result of it is debatable.

Keeping watch on the neighborhood seems to have taken off. I came across a video vigilante site called JohnTV as a way of attacking human trafficking and prostitution in Oklahoma. No different perhaps from the format used by NBC Dateline‘s, in the “To Catch a Predator.”

Whether you call them citizen journalists or video vigilantes, it takes video sharing to a new level of activism.