Though this is an old ad but I really can't stop associating it with the recent thing that happened to Carl Jr.'s Paris Hilton Ad.

This ad for Apple's Ipod was created by George Masters, a California school teacher, and, in my opinion, is pretty nice. This 60-second animated advertisement features flying iPods, pulsing hearts and swirling '70s psychedelia.

The ad was watched more than 37,000 times when it was picked by various blogs and the original author of the ad had been forced to take the ad off his own website (he links to other sited where you can still see it).

Two things that I find really interesting about the whole thing are -

1. The ad was not created by the company but it was a loyal customer of the company who took the time and put in so much effort to create the ad.

If only all companies could get sneezers like these.

2. Soo many people went to see the ad themselves, end to end.

Had this ad been shown on TV most people might have ignored it and we people would have kept discussing what apple could have done to grab more eyeballs.

Online, however, more people saw this ad than the creator of the ad could afford to show it to.

I saw this kind of thing happening to the sites hosting Honda's Cog Ad sometime ago. Also, more recently, Carl Jr's Paris Hilton ad crashed the official server and that of Media Post.

Lesson to be learnt -> Permission Marketing works much better than Interruption marketing.