Heinz Opens Sauce And Discovers Free Speech

Heinz is running a user-gen campaign over at YouTube which the NYT has used to highlight that amateur ads are - wait for it - not like professional ads!  And what's worse, they're not even free! "Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention."  Imagine!  It's all turning into a fascinating example of a brand testing its own control threshold but clearly Heinz needs to re-read their open source cookbooks.  Firstly, as any Linux programmer will tell you, it's only free if you don't put any value on your time.  So yes, "inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves".  And secondly, it's free as in free speech not free beer.  So yes, "some contestants say in interviews that they prefer mustard or mayonnaise".  The cheek!  Really, why bother?  Well hard as it is to believe, some crazy folk actually like this free speech stuff.  Weird, eh?