I Can't Believe it's Not Advertising

One of the most interesting aspects about YouTube's rise and ensuing attempts to become a legitimate service has been the way individuals and institutions have incorporated the site into their marketing plans.

Independent bands looking for ways to get the word out have turned to the site as a place to publish music videos. Although The Arcade Fire probably doesn't need much more publicity these days, it is significant that they used YouTube to share the first sounds from Neon Bible. The clip is a tongue in cheek anti-ad, but it's an ad nonetheless. The band knew the low-budget clip would be worth the price they paid for it versus anything they could have sent to Much Music.

Then there's the not-so-independent bands that are trying their best to look independent. YouTube is the ultimate venue to show off an amateur aesthetic, despite how many professionals may be behind the scenes. I was sent this video by email. Like most videos I receive, it came with little context. "Check this out, it is awesome." It is an impressive and seemingly spontaneous subway station performance of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight". A bit of digging, however, shows that the band , Naturally Seven, is a SonyBMG artist and that the video is part of a massive multimedia campaign to launch the single and the band's debut album. The video's credibility rests on the assumption of spontaneity. On YouTube, it appears as any other user video would appear, bringing even further assumptions about it (i.e. that this is something someone captured in the Paris metro station, though it was cool and uploaded it).

Perhaps the best example of what I am getting at here is the bride freak out video that garnered millions of views before the hoax was up. It turns out the video was what advertisers call a "net seed", the precursor for a shampoo ad campaign. The problem with these types of clips is not that they are intentionally deceptive. It's that they destroy the credibility of the social networks on which they depend. Advertisers want to be where the viewers are, but trying to sneak in through back doors does more damage than good. MySpace users are now inundated with friend requests from Fox TV show characters.

As marketers invent new ways to reach their target through social networks, their biggest challenge will be not to destroy the very environments they hope to tap. Otherwise, they'll end up like TV or Radio, media that users are increasingly leaving out of frustration. It might be good if marketers heeded the honest simplicity of Montgomery's Flea Market. Unless of course I've been duped and this is actually the first single of this guy's new album.