YouTube names top 10 brand videos of 2010

Google has crunched the numbers and come up with its list of the top 10 brand videos of the year. It's no surprise that the Old Spice guy seduced his way to the top, with "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" garnering 24.2 million global views. (His number would be even higher if YouTube counted all the views his reply videos got.) Wieden + Kennedy took the top two slots, taking home silver for Nike's epic "Write the Future" spot, viewed 21.2 million times (but which, weirdly, appears to be private and non-viewable on YouTube now). The bronze is a little more obscure—DC Shoes' "Ken Block's Gymkhana THREE, Part 2," which earned 19 million views. After the jump, check out the full top 10.

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Weezer storms YouTube to promote 'Hurley'

Weezer's eighth album, Hurley, drops today, and the band is marking the occasion (with help from marketing firm DashGo) by jumping into a bevy of other people's YouTube channels, including: AutoTune The News, Cyr1216, DaveDays, Fred, Hot For Words, Keep The Heat, MagicHugs, Mystery Guitar Man, Onision, Ray William Johnson, Real Annoying Orange, StSanders aka Kiss Shreds, Tay Zonday, The Key of Awesome (below) and UsofAnderson. YouTube is apparently Weezer's advertising medium of choice now. Fans will recall Weezer's 2008 "Pork and Beans" video for their last album. If you're not a fan, it started a bunch of YouTube sensations. In 2009, they had another YouTube hit hawking their own Snuggie with their album Raditude. Over at Mashable, lead singer Rivers Cuomo reflects on what it's like to bring a band that existed before the Internet into the digital world. Cuomo says they're basically just experimenting and that "it feels like it's not really clear to anyone in the music business how to succeed. Or what that success looks like." To me, it looks like rock 'n' roll success is no longer all about excess.

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Subservient hunter hawks Tipp-Ex white-out

Leave it to a brand of ink-correction fluid to create the most entertaining YouTube campaign since the Old Spice response videos. The clip below, for Tipp-Ex, with a hunter who encounters a bear at his campsite, sets in motion a whole interactive choose-your-own-adventure game where you decide what the hunter should do to the bear by typing directions into a field above the video. (The hunter uses Tipp-Ex to erase the word "shoots" and asks you for replacements.) It's basically Subservient Chicken all over again, but with a YouTube spin. Here are some suggestions for commands, offered up by the peanut gallery: dances with, sings with, talks to, hugs, draws, fights, doesn't shoot, is shot by, loves, kisses, fucks, pisses with, sleeps with, eats, watches TV with, swims with, plays with, shakes hand with, buys, takes a photo of, fishes with, drinks with, rides, plays football with, spanks, farts, is cooked by, breakdances with, cuts, does nothing with, high fives, smokes with, moonwalks with, washes, jumps with, tickles, shows his ass to, seduces. Done by a French agency called Buzzman, according to Adverblog. Via Copyranter.

Filed under Buzzman, Nudd, Tipp-Ex, YouTube
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Social-media sites get vintage ad treatment

You've gotta love these vintage-style ads for social-media sites, such as "Twitter: The sublime, mighty community with just 140 letters!" Check out four full-size executions here. While it might look like the results of a clever Photoshop contest, this is actually a campaign from Brazilian agency Moma to promote Maximedia Seminars. The tagline on the second page of each spread is: "Everything changes fast. Update." While some of the English is a bit rough, the São Paolo shop deserves credit for capturing the aw-shucks enthusiasm of golden-age American advertising, with lines like the description of YouTube as a place to "send and watch splendid and captivating films." The real proof these ads aren't actually vintage? There's not a single woman getting spanked or male lust tarp in sight. Thanks to my friend Bill for pointing me to this on Laughing Squid.

Filed under Brazil, Facebook, Griner, Parody, Skype, Twitter, Vintage, YouTube
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Probably your only chance to get to Cannes

Cannes is an especially tough ticket to cadge nowadays. But there are plenty of side doors. If the Ogilvy contest was too salesy for your creative sensibilities, there's always the YouTube-Cannes Young Lions 48 Hour Ad Contest. The idea is this: You get 48 hours over the weekend of May 15-16 to write, shoot and edit a video, and then upload it to the Cannes Lions channel. (It's open to those 18-28, no olds allowed.) There, you'll probably be subjected to ritual abuse from other creative types who didn't even bother to enter. Still. You'll also get a shot at a trip for two to the Riviera to rub elbows with the ad elite and trudge through broken glass at the Gutter Bar. The brief goes up at midnight GMT on May 14.

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

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How would you like your YouTube ads, sir?

Realizing its current ad-window setup sucks, YouTube has decided to give viewers a choice: ads before a video starts, or ads as it plays. Decisions, decisions. This is all part of the process of "constantly testing a wide range of options to find the right advertising format for the right content," and YouTube feels that "giving users a say in the process helps our efforts." If they had normal users, I would agree. Soliciting feedback and even original content from the proles is all part of good marketing these days, and YouTube owes its existence to the videos people upload there. A fun exercise would be to entertain suggestions written in the style of people who comment on YouTube videos. Perhaps being called a "faget" several hundred times would inspire them to come up with some more options.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

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