Rise of the….mini-movie ads?

Ogilvy, an international advertising firm based in Manhattan and founded nearly 60 years ago, has created a new type of advertisement: a short, 15-second clip that encompasses the entirety of a novel, specifically by Ernest Hemingway. The company created a mini-movie each for his most famous novels: “The Old Man and the Sea,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “A Farewell to Arms.”

These ads, which are clay-animated, are very short in length and attempt to shorten Hemingway’s epic tales into tiny clips in a humorous way. By bringing to life Hemingway’s characters in a modern way, these ads introduce the ground-breaking stories of past to contemporary people who may have overlooked and/or never heard of them.

Here is an example of one of them:

http://instagram.com/p/vZO8KWrI4s/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=video&modal=true

This new type of advertisement may find success if people attempt to recreate them with other awesome fictional tales that can be compacted. For example, movies and books such as Star Wars and Harry Potter could see the same treatment, or other old school stories such as the works of Edgar Allen Poe.

So my questions are: do you think these quirky kinds of ads devalue the true meaning of the stories, or are they a good way of modernizing stories that people may or may not have the time to read? And do you think they have any sort of beneficial use for major advertisers in the future?

SOURCE:

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-ogilvy-fits-entire-hemingway-novels-15-second-instagrams-161581