Those crazy folks over at Phillips are at it again.

Remember the “Shave Everywhere” campaign?

Of course you do, it was an amazing initiative (and very relevant ) Well, Phillips is milking that concept for everything it is worth with a new extension of the campaign. Phillips is asking people to submit there own tales of pubic terror, and in my opinion, they are doing a pretty good job.

• Everyone is not funny
  • Rather than mistaking themselves for content creators, or relying solely on their agency, Phillips has teamed up with comedy site Funny or Die (they are pretty damn funny).
  • We have moved from an era of pure User generated content to one of co-creation and collaboration
  • More and more brands are finding strategic partners to work with, along with consumers, to create relevant content.  While some consumers are creative, there is a reason that certain people get paid for their creativity (at least most of the time). Working together is the ideal!
• Same campaign, entirely new extensions
  • We all loved the “Got Milk” campaign (I mean, I guess we did) but it was fairly one dimensional.
    • This campaign has the same underlying premise, but the many iterations of it look entirely different.

There is one minor thing that really pisses my off about the implementation of this campaign. Why does this microsite have to be built in a way that does not take web standards into consideration! There is a promotional video for this contest, and I really wanted to embed it on my site. The problem however is that this site is built in a heavy flash site. No data portability.

Ratings for this initiatve:

A for creative

B for execution

D for web strategy

• Where there is content, there can be conversation
• When there is conversation, there is engagement
  • Most great live presenters ask questions of their audience. They generally don’t do so because they want to know the answer, they do so to keep the audience on their toes
• When there is engagement, there is the potential for increased ad revenue (this is not always the case, but creative sales planners can, more easily, find ways to monetize content when users are engaged)

The questions then becomes, who will lead the charge in making the entire web truly social-

1. Perhaps it will be a current social network that makes it capabilities extensible and lends its audience/tools to content providers
2. Perhaps it will be new/open standards that drive the social web
3. The last, least desirable option would be for every content provider to provide their own, proprietary social tool

Over the next few weeks Facebook Connect will be expanding to various content sites, making them more social. In the short term I think that this will be great. I think that new life with be injected into the partner sites. In the long term I worry about the fact that Facebook does not adhere to web standards, their platform is not truly open, and all of my data lives on the Facebook servers, with no way to get it out. This could be an issue.

On the other hand, Google is setting up a set of open standards that takes on these concerns. It will be interesting to see what happens first; will Open Social win the battle, or will Facebook open up more?

I can’t wait to find out! What do you think will happen first?

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