In a time when a company’s brand is seemingly more important than its products, there’s emerged an ugly trend where advertisers slap together a stock footage highlight reel designed to emotionally connect consumers to a giant corporation. It feels kind of icky, and this wonderful parody by stock footage company Dissolve perfectly illustrates why.
Based on Kendra Eash’s brilliant McSweeney’s piece of the same name, This Is a Generic Brand Video is a perfect moving collage of everything that makes brand videos so terrible. Random shots of scientists at work, time lapse clips of busy cities, and overly happy workers in all walks of life are strung together as reasons for consumers to love and embrace a given company.
And while Dissolve and Kendra are actually trying to poke fun at these types of videos, at the same time they have basically created an instruction manual for other corporations to make their own. So prepare for things to get worse before they get better. [YouTube via FastCo Create]