One of the first lessons some companies learned (or not) when playing with new media is that this is a different kind of beast where, instead of a monologue, you have a conversation (ok, I heard it som many times that this phrase annoys me). Even when you don’t want to.

A few years ago, GM launched a campaign asking internet users to make video ads about one of its cars, the Chevy Tahoe. Oh, you can imagine how excited they were. How modern to make such a campaign.

The, hum, “problem” with these kind of ideas is that when you give power to the people, it is difficult to take it back. The users started making ads about how the Chevy was a terrible car that was bad for the environment. L-o-t-s of ads. If you want to give control away. Give it and go with the flow. If you do it the wrong way, backlash is coming certainly. This was one history for the books about do’s and dont’s of the new era of advertising.

But it seems that some people don’t read these books. Or don’t have a good memory at all. Skol, a beer brand from INBEV in Brazil, launched a campaign that was supposed to be hip, modern, smart and oh! so cool. They hired two of the best comedians of the new generation in Brazil and made videos where these guys told jokes about Carnaval and made a call to everyone: send your jokes and stories and we will tell the best ones here.

One guy liked the idea and developed his videos. But not exactly what Skol’s marketing people had in mind. He made a video telling sad stories about drunk people driving and killing bystanders or just beating their relatives. But he told all of that as they were really funny stories, copying the aesthetic of Skol’s videos.

It became a huge hit instantly. And it didn’t take long before he was “gently” asked to take the videos out. He told the story in his blog and changed the video. He took off all the graphics linking his video to Skol but kept the text. The result is even stronger, if you have the context.

Even though you don’t understand portuguese, just take a look at the three videos and get the spirit of the story.

Here is the video from Rafinha Bastos.

This other one is from Danilo Gentili.

This is the video from Ronald Rios that talks about how drunk people can do bad things. He tells terrible stories as if they were really funny. Notice that he took all the graphics off, to break the visual link to Skol’s campaign.

What Skol’s guys didn’t seem to understand  (like GM’s marketing guys didn’t see in 2006) is that the internet and social media doesn’t work their way. This is the first stop in our journey about knowing what game you are playing.

In the metaphor I am trying to develop in this research, you need to know if you are playing Game of Life, Risk or Monopoly. If you are playing with Legos or woodblocks. If you are painting together with a group in a room, or just looking at a naked model.

You need to understand the game you are playing, the play and then develop or read the rules. With that in mind, the next step is to call the right people, to the right place to play. When you start to understand that, things become more and more clear.

But you still have a long way to go.

(With thanks to Trabalho Sujo)