Archive for the ‘YouTube’ Category

Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance‘ is now the most watched YouTube video of all time, with 180 million views, overtaking the home video phenomenon “Charlie bit my finger.”

Last month Gaga became the first artist to break a billion views on Vevo/YouTube with the combined views of three hits -’Poker Face’, ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Bad Romance’.

Lady Gaga  has become the first artist to break a billion views on Vevo/YouTube reports Mashable, the combined views of three hits -“Poker Face” (374,606,128), “Just Dance” (272,941,674) and “Bad Romance” (360,020,327).

Her latest release, “Telephone” a 9 minute epic co-starring Beyonce is already up to 23 million views on Vevo. I find it strangely compelling, not so much the music as the visual imagery – the police tape bikini is a bit special..

Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced on Twitter on Saturday that ‘hell has indeed frozen over’ and that Google would run its first TV ad during the Super Bowl last night, called Parisian Love

“We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search,” Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in a blog posting yesterday. “Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.”

Google’s decision is being seen as the latest move in their strategy to attract more commercial advertisers and programme makers from TV to YouTube.

Bridgestone has stolen a march on its Super Bowl advertising rivals with a viral teaser nearing one million views, putting it at number three in this week’s viral chart, behind Evian’s Roller Babies and Walmart’s Clown.

Though it was down to one million views this week, Evian’s viral has now clocked up 18 million views since it was released seven months ago, begging the question, if it costs $3 million for a 30 second Super Bowl ad slot reaching 100m TV viewers and $0 for a 60 second viral reaching 18m online, will more marketers do a Pepsi and abandon their Super Bowl slots in the future?

Here’s the Bridgestone teaser:

Two weeks after Toyota announced the recall of an estimated 8 million vehicles worldwide due to a sticky accelerator problem, some rear guard PR work has surfaced in the form a video apology from the company’s US President & COO, Jim Lenz.

Two versions have been created, one on a recall  website page, accompanying a formal letter of apology and a longer, stranger version on YouTube that includes promotional clips of Toyota models, zooming photos of the USA HQ and cars being made in the factory, presumably cut from an old corporate video.

Watching Jim Lenz explain that he wouldn’t put his family and friends in a Toyota if they weren’t safe is reminiscent of MP John Gummer feeding that beefburger to his 4 year old daughter at the height of the UK BSE crisis in 1990.

In the US, Toyota’s reaction to the crisis has also been criticised for being too late and too centralised, not allowing local dealers to communicate quickly with their customers or enabling a dialogue online. Toyota’s general Facebook page, which has 70,000 fans, presumably mostly customers, directs enquiries to their static website recall page. Read the rest of this entry »

So now there’s a Hitler parody ranting at all the other Hitler parodies on YouTube, this meme craze must surely have eaten itself now, unless someone creates a parody of a parody of a parody, but that would be ridiculous..

YouTube has announced it’s going into the movie rental business, starting with five films from the Sundance Film Festival, available from January 31st.

YouTube says it is reacting to movie maker requests for a finance model online that doesn’t rely on advertising – which doesn’t always fit their distribution and monetisation needs.

The Google Inc. owned company indicated that this is the beginning of an expansive plan to offer movie makers a new way of managing the distribution of their films.

“These are early days and in the coming weeks we’ll also invite a small group of partners across other industries, in addition to independent film, to participate in this new option”, YouTube said on their blog.

Google, which has struggled to make a profitable business out of YouTube after buying it in 2006 for $1.65 billion, may see pay-per-view as its best bet to grow revenues. Read the rest of this entry »

Converging unusually with my tech pr orbit today is a beauty sector online pr campaign for Lash Allure MD who offered amateur vloggers a prize of $100,000. Competitors had to say what they would do with the money if they won it with the winner selected by public vote.

The winner has just been announced as 19 year old New Yorker Meekakitty, a rising YouTube comedy star, with 135K subscribers to her channel and close to 2 million views of her posts. Here’s the winning entry:

If there was an award for best PR campaign by a disgruntled consumer 2009, it would have to go to Dave Carroll, the musician who, frustrated by United Airlines’s refusal to compensate him for a broken guitar, wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube. Two weeks and 3 million views later he was on Oprah.

Two good, one bad as Adrian Chiles might say on a Sunday, Campaign’s top rated viral of 2009 – T-Mobile Dance by Saatchi & Saatchi, followed by Mumbrella’s Australian top rated – ‘The best job in the world’ (7th on Campaign’s top ten) and lastly, Mumbrella’s Turkey of the year? Chrysler Jeep Spring Break – it’s a bit of a shocker.