In order to fully understand this post, you will need to watch a few examples of videos that are either parodies, or just idea replications. For example, this Muppets video parody of Old Spice Guy (http://bit.ly/bkC4UK), or this Parody of the Dove Beauty video (http://bit.ly/dsJTZm) I guess after I saw the 97th version of the Evolution of Dance, I started thinking about the fine line between crowd accelerated innovation, and concept theft. Parodies are all in good fun, right up until they are done with commerce in mind. For example, is it OK for Cisco to parody Old Spice Guy in order to sell routers? (http://bit.ly/9fLiqe) When is this just plan laziness of the Cisco marketing people?
Now, I am all about mashing up ideas and concepts into new unique forms. I am also the first one to laugh at a good parody. The problem I have is when people really just vampire others ideas because the original work is very clever, and the follow on people are just too lazy to innovate something on their own. I guess you could debate that vampiring ideas is the sincerest form of flattery, or that it simply gives a boost to the original work. Or, that any new adaption of the original has some level of creativity in it so could be honored for that. I get all that. Yet certainly there must be a line drawn where we say it is just plain thievery to leech onto the original work as a source of quick visibility.
I suspect that with the advent of social networking, and free tools to create artistic digital parodies in either video, or graphic forms, we will see a continued explosion of semi talented users finding ways to leverage an original work. And maybe that is OK. Maybe this is just a new societal way of leveraging good ideas into an explosion of variations that within that line of thinking can be as, or more, entertaining than the original. Old Spice Guy is certainly spawning many different variations of the original concept, some funny, some amateurish, and some just plain stupid. Maybe Old Spice is laughing all the way to the bank on this one. Maybe they love all the attention. Sales are certainly up from what the press says. Yet I wonder if they realize that the fast diffusion of the concept by others has shortened the public’s attention span for this concept. It will quickly be overhyped, and then fade rapidly as the cool factor gets sucked right out of it.
I love the concept of crowd accelerated innovation, yet I somehow worry that we might end up in a place where we have 99.95 percent of the world simply creating offshoots of the .05% of the world that actually works to create something new and clever. This kind of math concerns me because it means we will be leaving a huge amount of innovation left undone because it is just too easy to suck the life out of someone else’s creativity. Already, the researchers say that the number of people who actually create interesting content and upload it on the Web are a paltry 3% to 5% of the overall population. That means that the vast majority are strictly consumers and not creators. I guess what I am saying is that I hope the Internet eventually births a new concept – crowd EXPANDED innovation. That more people upload completely new creative concepts instead of just retooling someone elses work…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com