I was watching TV last night when the Berocca ad came onto the box.

It’s an ‘homage’ to the ‘Ok Go’ YouTube video (below) and involves some boring-looking generic ’suits’ going all oddball on some gym equipment that’s (inexplicably) been left in the street in response to someone nearby preparing a super-dose of the orange fizzy stuff. It’s a pale imitation of the original and caused me to reflect on how much ad creative is already effectively sourced (in terms of inspiration) from community and media sharing sites. Some traditional ad creatives you meet (by no means all of them) can be a little snooty about the wisdom of the crowds. However, just like the journalists who you sometimes hear slagging off social news and blogging sites only to find they routinely start a new assignment with a visit to Wikipedia, it seems that many are taking inspiration from folk-media.

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I find it hard to imagine a scenario when it would be appropriate - other than in a totally ironic way - to use any of the templates provided at Template Central.

Honestly, the site is hilarious. There’s at least 20 7 minutes of laughter to be had.

Here are some choice examples:

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We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

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Adweek published a great article this week by Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group. It it, he challenges the ad industry to stop being scared, embarrassed and confused by “Web 2.0″ and to start exploiting crowd-sourced creativity from within as well as radically new ways of working together. He urges both advertising creative and television commissioning people to learn from the way ideas are generated and developed in a Web 2.0 world.

Web 2.0 is more than just user-generated content. It is, in short, rich media applications (AJAX), folksonomies (like tags), new development approaches (”fail fast, fail cheap” and agile development), interoperability (RSS) and, yes, user-generated content. And since this is also the world of publishing 2.0, you should totally look up those terms on Wikipedia.

It’s definitely our experience over the past 18 months that there are two types of web project:

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Phew…

(the logo on the left is cooler…)

Everyone’s going on about the Semantic Web. It’s tipped to be the big thing in 2008. It’s all you can hear in the cafes and bars. Semantic this… NLP-that… It’s hard to get a word in edge-ways, and don’t even bother going out if all you want to talk about is simple keyword extraction. Keywords don’t tell you sh*t. (thanks Mark)

Until now, all the talk about a new age of context and meaning has been largely that, just talk. And unless you could afford big technology and million dollar license fees this stuff was way out of reach for the little guy. The arrival of two interesting new services indicates that this may now be changing quite rapidly. People are excited. They talk about it at dinner parties. It’s palpable.

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