Video is a primary tool for advertisers, political campaigns, and other brand messengers. “The challenge is to achieve maximum exposure… we control the message. We control the positioning,” writes marketer Jean Huy over at Lost in Dots. But as video tools fall into the hands of more people, brand messengers will have to plan on ceding some control. “If you think that it’s already a challenge to moderate your message board, follow your tweets, and to keep some consistency across your social media initiatives, be prepared to the real challenge,” he warns.

Videos are the last all-sharable frontier. With minimal knowledge and tools, it’s easy today to copy, alter and post text and images from about anywhere to about everywhere. Right click on a jpeg picture and you’re done copying it from the web. Double click on the copy and it will open the picture in your favorite free photo editing application, enabling you to modify the image, add text and save it as a new picture, ready to post on the Internet. But that’s not the case with videos. Videos are coded in tens of proprietary formats, causing insurmountable barriers for the average user willing to edit part of the content. And worse, popular so-called ‘video sharing’ sites like YouTube simply make it impossible to download the original video file without [special] software.

As we reach a certain level of video standardization and the tools become universal, it will become much easier for everyday users to play with video content. You can expect to see this unfold in interesting and unexpected ways. Users of products and services will begin to talk back.

The results won’t always be pretty. Perhaps the commercial for a particular product or service will be altered by a scorned customer, becoming a vehicle for that customer’s dissatisfaction. The altered video might end up becoming more popular than the originals. This potential for this has existed for years, but we’re only now starting to imagine it on a mass scale.

Of course, remixes and other alterations of commercial content aren’t always motivated by a personal or political agenda. In 2006, one artist reimagined a garish TV commercial for household cleaning product Cillit Bang as a grinding techno dance track, just for fun:

The creators of the original commercial could not possibly know what it would spawn. But the dance remix was a runaway viral hit, amplifying the brand visibility of Cillit Bang. This kind of wild appropriation is becoming increasingly common, with uneven results. Sometimes user participation is a blessing; other times it’s a curse.

What’s clear, though, is that brand messengers will need to abandon the pretense of one-way communication. As soon as a video is subject to remix and critique, the original message may be skewed. Context can disappear. Control can be altogether lost.

There’s no better illustration of this than in the work of artist Santeri Ojala, aka “StSanders.” StSanders briefly became an internet phenomenon after he posted overdubbed videos of famous guitarists shredding to his own awful guitar solos. The videos became hugely popular—until they were taken down and StSanders was banned from YouTube.

Here’s one (of my favorites) starring the band Iron Maiden (via Wired):

Though some artists laughed off the videos, others were horrified by the potential for damage to their musical prestige (hence the takedowns). Though Ojala stands by the claim that his works are transformative and fall under Fair Use, hijacking someone’s likeness in this way likely runs afoul of statutes protecting personality rights. But that doesn’t mean creative mischief like this won’t continue on a large scale.

Millions of images float through the ether of the web, undergoing constant alteration along the way. Sometimes the source of the image, and the message it was meant to contain, are lost. As video-editing tools become easier to use and standardization continues, we’ll see a similar phenomenon with video. In fact, many viral videos today are impossible to trace back to the source, but continue to cycle through social media as people share them for creative and critical purposes. With the distinction between content creator and consumer slowly fading, marketers will have to rethink how they engage with audiences.

…be prepared to the real challenge of open video combined with social media: the ultimate consumer-empowering tool about to rise. How are marketers going to deal with it remains an open question. I personally like to think that it might help us go back to the essence of communication: building promises that make sense to consumers and that can be kept. If you’re scared about angry customers spoiling your viral ‘open video’ campaigns, a good start should be to understand why they’re angry and improve their experience of your products before building any kind of social campaign.

In other words, a participatory audience isn’t something marketers should fear—but it will require new modes of engagement.

Open Video: The Next Challenge for E-Marketers