MEDIABLITZ

Looking on YouTube though I noticed that if you go into the community section , many of the featured Groups are advertisers. I wonder if they pay for that. Today they have Rocawear " I Will Not Lose " campaign. Vids with celebrities like Ciarra, Three Six Mafia, and other's "A" list Hip Hop / R&B artists talking about not losing and perservering without obstacles. Which is cool, do gooder advertising. They also have Listerine FreshBurst man on the street interviews which are not very entertaining and unabashedly self-serving. YouTube offers deep opportunities for testing advertising production. These days it seems like online is partnering more and more with direct street teams, a mesh of the international and local.

In the past few days there has been a bunch of buzz surrounding online video advertising because Google's mega-mammoth brand in the space, YouTube, (which they bought 10 months ago for $1.65 billion) initiated "semi-transparent overlay ads". With room for variation it's a banner that appears at the bottom of the video screen and offers the option of linking to the advertiser's web site. YouTube calls them "In Video" Above is a screenshot of an ad for the movie "Hairspray" on a Ford Models TV video. Hairspray, hairdresser, young women, that's targeting. Unfortunately the screenshot is one that appeared in the New York Times because I couldn't find an example of an ad on the YouTube site. Personally I think the web site for Hairspray the movie a much bigger brand than Ford Models TV but that's beside the point. FordModels.tv is one of about 1,000 large and small media partners that have licensed their videos to YouTube and w...