How a Single Web Video Made An Entire City Mad

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Right now cities around the world are making a bid for the 2016 Summer OlympicsChicago is in the running.  And so is Rio de Janeiro.

But a one minute and 12 second web video…featuring around a dozen people…has the city of Chicago mad enough to spit.  Why?  Because in the video, these people (all from Chicago) say on camera that they don’t want the Olympics to come to Chicago…they want it to go to Rio de Janeiro instead.

The video is on a one page web site called ChicagoansForRio.com.

And it’s made the city so mad they their Olympic bid committee instructed Fox News in Chicago to not report on the site.  In fact, it was believed that the site was put up by an underground Rio de Janeiro group in an attempt to hurt Chicago’s chances for the 2016 Summer Olympics.  Or as a founder of an Olympic related site put it, “To produce this video is quite a feat..that makes me think there’s something to this. There’s money behind it becasuse they produced that video”.

Turns out the short video and one-page web site weren’t produced by a well-financed, underground Rio de Janeiro group.  They were made by a 43 year-old ad copywriter from Chicago.  He didn’t like the idea of the Olympics coming to Chicago, so he spent an afternoon shooting a video and put up the web site.

The lesson here is how powerful web video can be…especially for the little guy.  It can instantly turn things into David vs. David instead of David vs. Goliath.

To read the full story on how a one minute and 12 second web video sparked what some are calling an “international incident”, click here.