I guess what’s less clever is that the site this ad is supposed to drive traffic to appears to be down. I suspect is has something to do with the localised redirection they have in place. Poor implementation of a great concept – a common issue with digital ad campaigns.

The site is the work of, in the words of ReadWriteWeb, “Marketing consultant and web connoisseur” Noah Brier. It only went live on Friday and yesterday (Monday) he reported having received over 77,000 tags already – quite a sample of data for one weekend.

Results for familiar brands

This all seemed a bit arbitrary until I started surfing through the results pages.

Here’s the feedback for Volkswagen so far. If you’re seeing what I’m seeing, the beetle is still the main product they’re known for, and a certain genocidal maniac is still casting quite a large shadow over the public brand perception.

Toyota seems more consistent but not particularly exciting

BMW, Audi (whose logo seems to trigger some confusion around the Olympics) and Mercedes are some more German car brands, all with similar yet varying associations.

Here’s Wikipedia
Netflix and
Starbucks.

Generally the online brands seem to be fairing better than the offline ones (note: I do not include Microsoft or AOL in this), not sure if thats because of the people who’re using this thing or if there’s just a bit of a halo around online services at the moment.. probably a combination of both of those factors. Judging by the slanguage used most of the users are from the US, with some british contributions coming through (quite a few “wankers” thrown around).

Interestingly Yahoo have quite a bit of negative feedback.

Personally I associate Yahoo more with their cooler online community acquisitions than with their admittedly boring portal heritage, but that seems to be where most of the feedback is coming from.

I wonder what the potential for gaming this is and how long it will take the brand managers and PR people to catch on to it?

Here’s where you can contribute to the data.