Google Slam

There are rare times when I read my industry updates with my morning coffee and say "wow, that's amazing". Google's Demo Slam is definitely one of those moments. Contests are not new to marketing. However contests where a brand's audience, or ideally their fans, celebrate the product and elevate it's usage to others - that is not common in our current environment of splintered consumer media attention and brand loyalty. Demo Slam is experiential in how it engages fans in the many existing and emerging Google products, and reinforces Google as a branded house, not a house of brands.

The idea is eloquent in its simplicity. Upload your own video of how you use a Google product, and your idea will face off with another video to be voted on and ranked. Current champs include "The Logo Bandits" featuring Google's Change Background Theme, and "Rushmore by Slam Force One, featuring Google Goggles for mobile. This week's contenders are battling it out over Gmail Video Chat, and my pick for this week - Google Real Time Search, (which is different from next week's slam on Google Instant Search which can save 2-5 seconds per search), where two guys compose a song on the fly using real-time search results for "babe" - video below.