Mercedes: “Old Woman and the Mercedes-Benz”

Mercedes: “Old Woman and the Mercedes-Benz”


Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 - 2:16pm

 

Name: Mercedes: "Old Woman and the Mercedes-Benz"
Stats: 273,824 views, 262 comments. (previous posts had millions of viewers before being taken down)
What you see: First, you hear screeching brakes, and the camera pans to show a yuppie, male Mercedes convertible driver inches away from an old woman trying to navigate a crosswalk. As she inches across the road, the impatient Merc driver honks his horn repeatedly until the old woman smashes the front grill of the car with her handbag, causing the airbag to deploy in the man’s face. Is this a typical Merc driver? you are meant to wonder.
Takeout/Takeaway: As with many viral-video successes, viewers are left questioning and then debating whether the video footage is real or faked.
Social Media Effect: What started as a piece of suburban ephemera has become a YouTube classic.

YouTube BrandWatch is The Big Money's exploration into how the world's best-known businesses, so adept at managing their images offline, are being perceived online, where control is harder to come by. Every week, The Big Money features a corporate-themed video that's had significant viewership on YouTube: some approved, some unapproved, some mashed-up combinations of the two. And we'll ask our readers to vote on how the video affects the brands. We think the responses will surprise you, and provide a window onto what is fast becoming the most important playground for corporate games. (Note: This feature has no official relationship to YouTube or its owner, Google.)

 

Radar DDB logo

  • Bernhard Warner is editorial director of Social Media Influence.
  • Matthew Yeomans runs Custom Communication

Comments

  • 1 Total
  • • Pending Comments 0
  • Login or register to post comments

Crazy Spec

Check out this viral ad we produced for my site, AdBakery.com. It's been viewed almost 6,000,000 on YouTube now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aikg6OP3jwU

Hit me at sean(at)adbakery.com with questions

Read more comments

Recent YouTube BrandWatch Posts