Citizen Journalists and Citizen DeMilles

Parody is often a form of flattery. At the very least it is a route to notoriety. 10,000 years ago when I was knee high to a grasshopper, there was a Saturday Night Live TV Ad Skit in which Gilda Radner discussed Autumn Fizz, the first carbonated douche. It was a spoof of those Summer’s Eve commercials in which a Mother and Daughter discussed vaginal freshness while cruising in a rowboat. Parody is nothing new.

But now, Saturday Night Live makes a Clinton/Obama debate spoof and it becomes the topic of a presidential debate for several minutes. I won’t try to read too much into this as evidence of the decay of our political system. There have been, after all, 20 Democratic Presidential debates so they may have said about all they have to say about how ready they are going to be on day one.

What it DOES demonstrate, though, is how important parody has become in our culture. And it has also become a critical part of what drives brand impressions. Go to YouTube and type in commercial parody and see what you find. Well, don’t bother, I’ll show you some of what you’ll find here:



Well, a HUGE portion of the vids are Apple spoofs. And some are critical of the company. But most aren’t. They are really more about the ad campaigns, which are always iconic.

I think it’s great when companies just let this happen. No cease and desists, no quiet efforts to get the messages pulled. They just let what happens happen.
The thing is, by respecting the freedom of expression of others, companies score points. Consider Amazon’s Kindle.

Unquestionably an important initiative for the company, the device attracted competing choruses of believers and detractors when it launch a couple months ago. Like all products on Amazon, Kindle’s pages allow people to make comments, either positive or negative. The result? The device had a score of about three (of five) stars for its first couple of weeks. Now it’s running at 3.5 stars.

I don’t doubt for a moment that Amazon people watched this scoring with some misgivings. But they let the voting and the commenting continue. Because they made a commitment to consumer comments for their whole site. They understood that the implications of such a commitment don’t always go how you want them to.

In my decidedly unscientific sampling of comments, I found that Kindle positives were from people who had the device and liked it. Most pointed out a few issues.

The negatives were more often than not people who had never touched the device but had passionate comments about Kindle’s appearance, the whole DRM issue, and the pricing. In the end, I bought one satisfied that the positives outweighed the negatives for me, and I’m pleased with it. But I am even more pleased with Amazon because they did the right thing, not the easy thing.

Of course, in a way they had no choice. Censorship is easy to spot online. And impeding negative posters on the Amazon site would only enrich their passion for being heard off the site. The message would get out. As would the evidence of censorship. And such evidence would have done far more damage than a thousand or so negative comments about cost and DRM.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.