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South Park meets WebSphere at IBM’s Impact2009

Successful marketing is often a little edgy. Throughout the late 1990s IBM was good at using humour to drive conversations around the brand, particularly in its advertising.  But the firm lost its Madison Avenue mojo somewhere along the line, culminating in the recent “What The Hell is the Other IBM And What Is This Ad About?” series

But social media and the youtube revolution seems to be pepping things up again. Anything Tim Washer is associated with, for example,  is laugh out loud funny – even mainframe sales.

But while mocking yourself is one thing, using South Park to mock yourself is quite another. So I have to salute my friend Sandy Carter, promoted just this week from vp of SOA and WebSphere Marketing to vp of worldwide business partner sales, for being brave enough to pull the trigger on the video embedded above.

“SOA? What the hell is that crap?”

I will be at Impact in Las Vegas next week and I am looking forward to learning more about Smart Planet. I will be presenting on SOA for Sustainability on Wednesday afternoon.  For more context Sandy interviews me about Impact here.


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This entry was written by James Governor and posted on May 1, 2009 at 3:51 pm and filed under . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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18 Comments

  1. Andy Piper
    Posted May 1, 2009 at 3:56 pm | Permalink

    Well that’s a sobering lesson in why I shouldn’t spend time blogging internally, and should put it outside the firewall instead – I posted about this on my blog inside IBM 2 days ago, but it seems to be hitting the internets via Twitter etc today.

    It made me smile, for sure – speaking for myself, I think they did a great job with this one. And I’m looking forward to collecting my own pieces of purple crap next week ;-)

  2. Donald Smith
    Posted May 1, 2009 at 4:39 pm | Permalink

    Maybe just me — but video is not showing in FF — had to hit this page in IE.

  3. Roo Reynolds
    Posted May 4, 2009 at 8:48 am | Permalink

    Am I the only one calling bullshit here?

    Not to question the hilarity of the video, and not to sound like the ex-IBMer or anything, but was it really edgy marketing commissioned by IBM? This does almost look and sound good enough to have been done by Parker and Stone, and it would be brilliant if IBM had been brave enough to do this, but the final 10 seconds of this video makes make me question whether IBM actually had anything to do with it, while the voices and animation (especially the lack of range in the mouths) makes me think it’s an unofficial ‘parody’ rather than a sanctioned use of those characters.

    In fact, it looks to me like iRise and Ascendant have done another in a series of funny “parody of a few well known characters” videos. Take a look over those older ones, and while the voices have improved greatly over time, it’s clearly iRise and Ascendant who deserve the credit. Lotusphere and Impact are the settings, not the subjects.

    If IBM had actually been brave enough to ask the makers of South Park to mock them (as I thought they had, initially), that would have been edgy and funny. A business partner mocking itself and IBM using an unofficial parody of the South Park characters is still funny, but it’s quite a different thing.

    Are you sure Sandy Carter, or anyone at IBM, knew anything about this?

  4. James Governor
    Posted May 4, 2009 at 1:52 pm | Permalink

    Roo – turns out you could well be right. i chatted to some people here at Impact last night, and it looks like the video was created by a business partner. So yes it is very funny, but no, IBM and Sandy may well not be responsible. The way you pose the question raises some interesting issues around South Park. If it wasn’t sanctioned by Parker and Stone chances are they’d be rather unhappy about it from a copyright perspective. Probably better I don’t drill into these issues any more.

  5. Roo Reynolds
    Posted May 4, 2009 at 5:53 pm | Permalink

    Yes, I was thinking that it’s on shaky copyright ground too. There is protection under copyright law for parodies, but I think the line being walked by this video is pretty fine. The average person probably wouldn’t interpret it as a parody of Parker and Stone’s work, but rather as an official South Park creation being used to endorse iRise and Ascendant (and perhaps IBM). Hmm.

One Trackback/Pingback

  1. By People Over Process » IT Management & Cloud Podcast #42 - Good Old Fashioned IT Management on 07 May 2009 at 11:50 pm

    [...] IBM Impact has been going on this week in Las Vegas. After explaining what that is and skirting around our light coverage of it (neither of us was there, though RedMonker James Governor has been there all week) we discuss how IBM acquisitions have been generalizing the conferences. This also leads us into a discussion about conferences in general I’ve been having a lot recently: large vendors are looking to get into doing more, smaller conferences. John reports on hearing about how the crowds went wild at the prospect of “never having to install WebSphere again.” [...]

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