Green Year

You may have heard about Apple’s recent black eye for their green record.

It’s part of Greenpeace campaign out of Europe to Green Apple, which is a lovely idea. Their little smooth white sleek fetish inducing products do, alas, eventually break. And when they do, it should be easy to recycle them.  There’s a good story about it at Inhabitat, which you should be reading, anyway.
C’mon, Jobs–if a Texan like Dell can do it, sure as hell you can. Get them hamsters down in Cupertino spun up, figure it out, expand your value proposition even further, and see if you can’t swab up just a wee bit more market share.

By now you’ve likely seen or heard of the Obama1984 mashup ad, pairing pro-Barack sympathies with the old Apple 1984 ad, with Hillary Clinton standing in for Big Brother. Well done, I must say. Notice–the woman is wearing an iPod, nice touch. North of 1 million views, and counting.
This repurposing of content for political ends reminded me of what happened when GM had the idea of letting customers at the content for their new Chevy Tahoe campaign ( chronicled by Wired Magazine ); they ended up with heaps of clever customer generated ads, many lambasting their gaz guzzling ways.
(For a great analysis, shot by shot as well as historical/social context, of the brilliant, original spot ( directed by Ridley Scott, of Alien and Blade Runner fame) check out this story by Sarah Stein.)

This story is interesting for two reasons. One, to see just how out of touch the mainstream media is with open source content generation ( read how the New York Time refers to it has having “gone viral,” like it’s a disease or something, yet fails to drill down at all on the substantive implications of this kind of new media. Yawn, NYT. You can do better.)
And two, and more germane to our purposes, because it’s one of the first widespread uses of advertising content rejiggered for political aims. My hope: people see this, and start creating more mashups that take the carefully crafted messaging of the corporate consumption overlords, and use them instead to create opportunities to reflect on just what we’re doing to our little world, and how we might yet save it.