Product Placement Creeps Into Amateurs\' YouTube Offerings

Tag : Chocolate Material

But maybe you know Harding already. If you've already seen hislatest online video, you'd remember it. In it, the 31-year-old doeshis jig with crowds of locals in exotic spots around the globe. The4 1/2 -minute clip, featuring brief glimpses of 42 locales fromArgentina to Zambia, is a smash hit on YouTube , where it is closing in on 6 million views.
Making these videos is what Harding has been doing for a living fora few years now, thanks to corporate sponsorship from a gum companyand thanks to an era in which an online video clip made as a goofcan grab more attention than a prime-time TV show commercial. Thisis Harding's third video and the second sponsored by Stride gum.
Product placement and corporate sponsorships have been seeping intonew, user-generated turf lately. Last year, Dr Pepper sponsored production of a music video by YouTube star Tay Zonday,who is Web famous for his song "Chocolate Rain." Thisyear, Sprint Nextel is offering a few bucks to people who incorporate a new Samsungphone into a home video and post the results to YouTube. The first1,000 videos to incorporate the Instinct phone get $20 apiece, andone grand prize-winning entry will win $10,000.
"There are lots of people making a pretty good living off ofbeing Internet famous," said Tim Hwang, organizer of a recentconference in Cambridge, Mass., dedicated to semi-seriousdiscussions about Web culture. "Matt's a notable examplebecause he's been able to do it for so long."
Internet culture, Hwang said, has spent most of its existence inits own in-jokey world, but that's changing quickly. And asdeep-pocketed corporate entities turn to user-generated channelslooking for attention, there's no telling how things will play out.
"It's still an open question whether big business is going to playInternet culture's game, or if Internet culture is going to playthe big business game," Hwang said.
It's easy to understand why sites like YouTube are attractive toadvertisers and corporate sponsors. Getting a 30-second commercialon the air in front of a prime-time audience costs hundreds ofthousands of dollars; uploading a video to YouTube costs nothing.Big-name entities from Revlon to Coldplay have recently sponsored contests on the video site.
Greg Sterling, analyst at marketing research firm Sterling MarketIntelligence, said that it's sometimes tough to determine whetherpopular phenomena like Harding's dancing videos result in actualsales. The California Raisins commercials were a hit in the '80s,for example, but the Claymation marketing campaign did little forthe sale of actual California raisins.
In terms of brand recognition, though, Stride's sponsorship wouldhave to be considered a success, he said. After all, we're talkingabout it. "I'd never heard of Stride gum before; had you?" he asks.(I had not.)
Among the thousands of comments posted on the sites discussingHarding's video, a few say they're now going to buy Stride gumbecause of the company's support for the project. But most log onto declare their affection for the video. "I'm pretty sure that isthe best thing I've ever seen on the internet," writes oneanonymous viewer, in one of thousands of similar reactions postedto the Web. "How can something that goofy be that moving?"
One funny thing about Harding's video, which compresses 14 monthsof travel into a few quick minutes, is that it's possible to watchit without realizing that this is anything but a self-fundedproject. Harding doesn't wear a Stride T-shirt in the video; hedoesn't even appear to chew gum. Stride is thanked in a two- tothree-second spot at the end of the video.