Sticky plastic-hooks brand Velcro has taken to the airwaves of the world with a rather brilliant Don’t Say Velcro song-and-dance TVC that aims to protect its patent and reclaim its product from copycats and jokesters.
“Our Velcro legal team decided to clear a few things up about using the VELCRO® trademark correctly,” said Boston-based Velcro ceo Fraser Cameron.
“When you use ‘velcro’ as a noun or a verb – like ‘velcro shoes’ – you diminish the importance of our brand and our lawyers lose their ‘insert fastening sound’.”
“We are taking an unconventional approach to draw attention to an important issue and to encourage people to understand our heritage and future,” Cameron said.
“The fasteners we invented are part of everyday life and widely imitated by other producers, and some people mistakenly call them ‘Velcro’ or use the term to explain the fastening mechanism.
“The goal was to make a ridiculous 1980s-style video in the vein of We are the World.”
“While it’s likely unrealistic to expect everyone, everywhere to cease referring to the hook-and-loop fasteners as ‘Velcro’ on every reference, even a little consideration would be helpful to the company as it looks to leverage the Velcro brand into other categories.
“As the range of our products becomes broader and broader, the value of our trademark becomes more and more important.”
The video has launched on Youtube and will include some paid digital advertising. The big push will come through Twitter, as the brand pushes out the message in conversation where Velcro is being used generically.
“We’re trying to intervene in that conversation,” Cameron says. “But we’re trying to do it with the fun spirit of the company that we are.”
Creative consultant Penn Holderness, who wrote and directed the video for the Walk West ad agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, said the goal was to make a ridiculous 1980s-style video in the vein of We are the World.
“Creatively, we wanted to come up with something that looked and felt melodramatic and serious, but also clearly admitting, as Velcro was willing to do, that this is a bizarre problem that a lot of people don’t know about,” said Holderness, who’s known for viral music videos featuring his family.
Share this Post
