I was relaxing at home by watching football on NBC when an ad for BMW aired. It showed a little boy going ballistic with joy after opening a Christmas gift.  The ad’s grainy footage suggests a homemade video, but the kid’s unbridled enthusiasm is unmistakably real – no acting coach could inspire such a performance from anyone, let alone such a young child.  The scene is at once heartwarming, hilarious…and familiar.  I had already seen this online.  This was “N64 Kid” (aka Brandon Kuzma), a garden-variety YouTube phenomenon, one of dozens if not hundreds of unwitting stars that continually help to bolster YouTube and other online video viewing websites.  The online video space, it seems, is making strides towards a mainstream commercial purpose.  

We regularly discuss great ideas at creative sessions for ICMediaDirect.com’s online video ad network team.  We examine strategies for relevant video creation, targeted video ads, ads specifically designed for pre & post roll viewing, and yet the notion of simply snatching virally popular online video and making them into television commercials is not one I’ve taken seriously, until now. 

This past year has shown that consumers have an almost endless appetite for online video and this has not gone unnoticed by big media.  In June NBC, appropriately enough, struck a joint-marketing deal with YouTube.  At the time YouTube was a phenomenon that had not yet been bought by Google and NBC was just another media outlet bent on getting involved in online advertising.  As a matter of fact, prior to this deal, NBC and YouTube had an adversarial relationship.  The network had been threatening to become litigious over the matter of YouTube dispersing content without any licensing. 

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and the two entities, a well-established name and a powerful newcomer, agreed to a joint partnership.  The agreement sparked some speculation as to how they would work together – were they even a fit?  Most attention was paid to how commercial content, like popular Saturday Night Live skits from NBC, could be used by YouTube for free distribution on a profitable basis.  How little we thought the possibility of NBC (or any commercial television entity) using YouTube’s content from the Internet!  Yet here we see a BMW commercial. In addition, NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno aired N64 Kid as well as other YouTube videos for audience laughs.

Television is, after all, a stage where carefully crafted content is produced for viewers, while the Internet is where spontaneity reigns. The N64 Kid clip was simply a parent filming a child opening his Nintendo 64 about ten years ago.  Naturally, the television commercial for BMW deletes all references to Nintendo 64.  It bears mentioning that the person who can figure out how to corral, or better yet, conceive and create viral appeal on the Internet will quickly become an interactive tycoon of the first order.

We will see a continued blurring of the parameters that define television and the Internet.  A more important trend, though, is the unmistakable star making capability that Internet viewers exercise over content deemed popular or yawn-worthy.  Television producers need look no further than the measurable successes found on the Internet for better chances of creating television that people will respond to.  In other words, the Internet can be a formidable testing ground for video advertisements.  And there’s no better example than the N64 Kid, a dad filming for family keepsakes eventually sparked a television commercial, several television appearances, millions of online views and a website.  All of this, yet it would never have made it to YouTube or anywhere unless the current girlfriend of that screaming boy in 1998, suggested he upload it to YouTube in March, 2006.