YouTube & NBC

It's no secret that major media networks and brand marketers are rushing to figure out how to take advantage of consumer generated media to promote television programming, movies, other products and services. Mike Kingdon has compiled a hefty list of brands that have used MySpace for promotional activities, from X Men 3, American Idol and the MTV Music Awards to VW, Motorola and Nike.  Leslie Jump also calls out a number of major brands lining up to recruit prosumers to develop homegrown advertising for distribution on the Current.tv, such as Sony Electronics, Toyota and L’Oreal Paris. The lists go on and on.

For the most part, brand marketers have looked at destination sites, like MySpace, as audience aggregators in a media environment characterized by fragmentation. It's where the eyeballs are. Speaking at Cannes last week, Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at Leo Burnett explained (via Financial Times):

“On sites like YouTube, advertising can be an acceptable part of the landscape, sitting alongside music or films. People may not be interested in advertising but they are interested in brands. Provided you offer them something entertaining and useful, allow them to interact and reward them for their interest, they will accept you.”

But instead of advertising "sitting alongside music or films," some brand marketers working with Current.tv have recruited prosumer evangelists and brand contest participants to produce video content that is the advertising. These homegrown adverts seem to work best when the brands - such as Vespa - give consumers free reign over brand images, assets and media in the production of consumer generated media. Turning the brand over to consumer evangelists to re-articulate the core value propositions and make tangible and personal, is a key component of successful campaigns that live at the intersection of brand marketing, advertising and consumer generated media. 

The NBC and YouTube deal follows a similar pattern. NBC has launched a contest on YouTube for fans of The Office and has even provided them music and photo imagery that can be used in the context of viewer generated video content. But there is also a prohibition against using real content, remixing and mashing up actual scenes from The Office. It looks like NBC is still stopping short of fully embracing or trusting fans of hit shows to evangelize their programming. It will be interesting to see if they do what they did back in last March when lawyers went after CGM sites for the distribution of copyrighted SNL clips.

Regardless of official contest rules, we will most likely see CGM bubble up that contains copyrighted content, mashed up and shared broadly across peer networks. NBC would be well advised to ride the wave, instead of punting like they did earlier this year.

Tags: marketing youtube nbc the office