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.

Content is still king, but it rules increasingly by committee. The biggest web content provider is now the vast array of users themselves. Whereas once it took resources and expertise to disseminate information online, friendly formats like blogs, social networks, and tools like Twitter now make it possible for anyone to be a broadcaster. What makes any particular content valuable, however, is the degree to which it is embraced and shared.

Providing sharable content is already a new fundamental for online marketing. It starts with the notion that branding is as much about expertise as it is about image and message. Ideas and information comprise expertise, and can be offered in a range of formats — text, image, video, and even games, widgets and apps — and through a variety of delivery systems. It’s no surprise, then, when even the likes of Microsoft gets in on content sharing. And though it’s an all-too common hobby to bash them, particularly when it comes to their inattention to detail, here is yet another good idea that went bad in the hands of Microsoft.

In this accelerated world of ever-evolving modes of marketing communications, some traditional principles still apply. “It’s all in the execution,” and “the devil is in the details,” for example. Embracing new paradigms is not enough. Smart strategy is useless without tight tactics.

Here, Microsoft runs a banner ad on Wired, and right inside the banner is the offer of what appears to be a useful article. So far so good: Create expert content, share expert content. And from the looks of things, they are apparently making it very easy to get — my initial expectation is that I can download it right from the banner.

Except that I can’t.

These days, any banner requiring a click with the expectation that it will take me away from my intended location to where the advertiser wants me (which is not where I want me) is an enormous and, in most cases, unnecessary hurdle. This is naturally the reason that click-through rates are so low — not because people aren’t interested in what brands have to offer, but because a banner click means a redirect away from where a user wants to be. Inexplicably, this remains the behavior of a vast majority of banners, despite the fact that today’s technologies allow for virtually every type of interactive feature a web site could offer right inside the banner itself.

By this point I am intrigued enough to see how Microsoft’s advertisers are managing things, so I persevere. They haven’t quite gotten around to putting the download right inside the banner, okay. My next expectation is that I will be linked directly to the article that has caught my interest.

Foiled again.

Now, at this point, as a user, once I realize I am not being given what I was promised on that click (after already being disappointed that it didn’t come right from the banner in the first place), I’m out of there. I don’t hang around long enough to give the advertiser the benefit of my attention to try and figure out how to get what I was promised in the first place. As an online marketing professional, however, I am now rather amused at how transparently self-serving and cynical their approach is, and so I persevere yet again.

Amusing turns to laughable when after a good 20 seconds or so, I still can’t find the article.

Microsoft’s online advertising concern may very well be reporting impressive click-through rates on that banner. But I suspect the “brand impression rate” of bait-and-switch is just as high.