Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A puppet of a cockroach lies on its back, flailing its arms wildly. A mouse cursor hesitates over an order on the website “Poison Depot” before changing it from one bottle to eleven. A gleeful Victorian marriage proposal goes awry when lightning strikes a nearby tree.

Each story is told in just six seconds of video. And there are more than a dozen such short recreations of classic books from the Western canon, all promoting YouTube’s new brief pre-roll ad format.

Those three vignettes, of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (famous for its protagonist waking up one morning as an insect), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (spoiler alert: everybody dies) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (with its romantic symbolism around a split chestnut tree), join similar takes on George Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and more....