Folksy male voice over? Check. Scientists looking at beakers in a lab? Check. Farmers in China and blue collar American workers? Check and check. Animals and women? Double check. Words like “innovation” and “honesty,” check.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because these are all ingredients for a generic brand video, and they’ve all come together in one glorious viral clip by royalty-free stock footage company Dissolve. Inspired by Kendra Eash’s artfully satirical piece “This is a Generic Brand Video,” which originally ran in McSweeney’s, the Dissolve team decided to actually create the generic, cliche-riddled video to illustrate Eash’s copy.
According to Sheldon Popiel, creative director at Dissolve, he and his team contacted both Eash and McSweeney’s to get their permission to create the video.
“We wanted to do this because the reason Dissolve got into this game is to help people tell better stories by providing better footage — and we know stock isn’t always people’s first choice,” said Sheldon.
The video took about a week to make and was produced by Drew Ng-How-Tseung, graphic designer at Dissolve. In the six days since the video has been up on Vimeo its gotten 191,000 plays and 2,125 likes. Maybe this will make brands think twice before they make their next piece of video content.
Watch it for yourself here:
This Is a Generic Brand Video from Dissolve on Vimeo.
More in Marketing
Marketers strain to juggle media budgets, AI and high expectations from CEOs
A new survey reveals sustained pressure on budgets as CMOs struggle to deliver on marketing goals and AI objectives.
Digiday+ Research: Marketers optimize GEO strategies amid the effects of zero-click search
While AI-generated search results are still relatively new compared to traditional search results, marketers are deeply feeling the effects.
‘Google doesn’t care that it’s terrible’: Brand, agency execs air frustrations with The Trade Desk, Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+
Think transparency is hard to come by in programmatic advertising? Well, get a bunch of brand and agency executives in a room, and they’ll get super transparent about how opaque the digital ad market has become.