While recently researching a review of Steinlager Pure I came across a disturbing practice by one of the biggest alcohol companies in Australia and New Zealand, if not the world. It is certainly one of the coolest television ads on New Zealand television, but Lion Nathan has managed to severely limit it’s reach by not allowing it to be displayed on YouTube. The advertisement I’m talking about is the Steinlager Pure ad where Harvey Keitel talks about how cool New Zealand is and how much he loves Steinlager Pure. Yet through a big company mentality it has been pulled down from YouTube and thus pulled down from a range of websites who would have embedded the ad on their websites. I have contacted Lion Nathan about this asking for their comment, but have not received a reply yet.

Companies nowadays spend vast amounts of time and money trying to get videos to go “viral”, the idea is to get enough people to watch the video that it starts hitting the “most viewed” lists. This becomes self-perpetuating with the high traffic of the featured lists causing more and more people to see it, if the video has become truly viral before long every man and his dog has seen the video. This is the sort of exposure that companies would love, but obviously not Lion Nathan with there Steinlager Pure. I would definitely reccomend they read the ClueTrain manifesto, but maybe they are too cool, that’s certainly what the advertising would have you think.

Tags: Advertising, cluetrain, marketing, web2.0

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.