Hasta La Ideas

Published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency last month, Kendra Eash‘s satirical poem This is a Generic Brand Video has now been made into an actual video by a stock footage company…

In an interesting take on Eash’s subject matter, stock footage providers Dissolve looked to their own database for every single cliché she describes in her poetic tribute to the ‘brand video’.

Aping the kinds of signifiers which fill brand videos for all manner of companies, her poem opens: “We think first / Of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.”

On their website Dissolve explain that “the minute we saw Kendra Eash’s brilliant ‘This Is a Generic Brand Video’ on McSweeney’s, we knew it was our moral imperative to make that generic brand video so. No surprise, we had all the footage.”

They then found the right music – emotive piano – and, in Dallas McClain, a familiar sounding narrator for the video.

On Twitter, Eash has said she’s delighted with the results, though one can’t help feeling this is a bit of a bizarre self-promotional move from a company whose product is essentially the fuel for the satire – though the brands themselves are of course the acual target.

We’ve seen stock imagery providers as the target of jokes before – Women Laughing Alone With Salad being a highpoint – but never the providers themselves sending up how their visuals are routinely used and abused.

All the clips featured in the film are from dissolve.com.

Kendra Eash’s original piece is published on McSweeney’s (see more of her writing here), while Dissolve’s film is on Vimeo here.