Click the image to view a movie capture of the ad interaction.

Kodak may have been late to the digital game on the product front, but its marketing is clearly seeking a leadership position in digital, spearheaded by its ever-increasing YouTube presence. After a well-publicized launch of its ForMom channel just a month ago, Kodak ups the ante with a mosaic-inspired wrap-up to its True Colors: Video Portrait Challenge contest.

The mosaic idea deserves major props as a smart visual enticement for user interaction (I simply had to try it — the true test), but as so often seems the case, the concept starts to fall apart in the execution. And because users are (properly) invited to comment, what may have seemed like minor compromises in the face of deadlines and budgets become characterized as epic fail through the very social media tools Kodak wants to leverage for brand benevolence.

The most obvious compromise also seems like the most unnecessary: The video clips used in the mosaic — even in the truncated ad banner version — are repeated. It only took a few clicks to discover the same content in two different locations (you can see this in the brief video clip I made of the ad banner interaction). The second compromise is to my mind less egregious, but seemed to be a favorite fail point on the part of the user commentary: that the image of the man which appeared to be formed by the mosaic of video screens was in fact a mock, a ruse; simply an opacity percentage overlay instead of a true photo mosaic like this. Brands need to realize that users like to point out pretense even more than they don’t like to be duped, even by seemingly trivial things.

The big miss for me, though, was the absence of any sharing enablement on the interactive ad banner itself. I still see far too much of this, even on fully-enabled rich media ad units where sharing capability is easy. As a user, I may not have had the time or the inclination to click over to the full campaign page (located within the YouTube site, by the way, at www.youtube.com/kodaktube), but I may well have wanted to show the ad to someone else, or save it for a time when I could explore it further.

Conclusion: Kudos to Kodak for risking backlash on some executional compromises because, in the end, the brand benefits from the courage displayed in engaging user commentary in the first place, over and above any specific negative sentiment. In today’s user-enabled media, the true epic fail is assuming you can do anything to stop negative sentiment other than being a better brand citizen.