Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

A few months ago, the inspiring and truly touching video of Paul Pott, an unassuming, mobile phone salesman singing Nesundorma on “Britain’s Got Talent” made the rounds and touched millions (over 27 Million page views to date). It’s the prototypical story of an uncool underdog finding his true calling, and becoming a hero for millions he inspired, by overcoming his insecurities and self-consciousness, and furthermore, overcoming the obvious prejudices of those who never thought he could pull it off, making them aware of their hypocrisy. It’s a great human moment, propagating the belief that anything is possible when you believe in yourself.

Now, the German Telekom usurped this spot to peddle their phones. The spot tries to do a good job of not being tacky by showing credible human reactions to Paul Pott’s singing (I myself got goosebumps and some tears, too), and it does have a nice end thought: “Life presents us with unique moments. It’s great that we can share them”. 

So, one could see the spot as a true human brand act, because a) Paul is seeing money for this b) more people hear his story: those who do not regularly go on youtube.

So in that sense, the brand’s act is to help Paul inspire more people. However, it still left me with stale taste seeing the brand’s products in a phenomenon that the brand nothing to do with. It feels dirty when brands take acts of others and use them to peddle their stuff. It’s definitely better to create your own, especially when it can be said that there are some things in life that are beautiful and bigger the way they are, without companies meddling with it. Apart from that, there is an obvious disconnect between “sharing your experiences” to Paul’s “doing what he was born to do.” It’s clumsy and artifical. They could have helped the phenomenon without butchering it into an ad.

See the original here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA

Tweet This Post