JK Wedding Entrance Might Save Chris Brown’s Career

If you listen to groups like the RIAA, they will tell you that people using songs in their videos with express written consent and a high license fee will be the death of music.  RIAA and labels like Universal Music have gone out of their way to police sites like YouTube and block or ban anything using a copyrighted song they can claim to own.

Of course, this sort of behavior actually results in endless negative impacts including pissed off fans and even pissed off artists who actually like to see their music used and shared and recognize the huge potential upside of not behaving like a law-suit junkie.

The most recent proof of this comes thanks to the biggest web meme of the month, the JK Wedding Entrance (below) featuring, without permission, Chris Brown’s song, “Forever.”

Instead of doing what, say, Universal Music does, which is to force YouTube to mute the music track, it appears that Chris Brown and his label, Zomba (a part of Jive Records) has instead embraced the video and created a direct link to the buying of the song on iTunes.

The result?

The wedding video now has a direct link to buy “Forever,” which, despite being released last year, is now in the iTunes top 10. Brown’s own attempt at a viral video, a recently released apology video for the Rihanna “incident” which he calls “inexcusable,” has been viewed more than 2 million times. As BlogPulse shows, July buzz about Brown and “Forever” reach almost as high as blog discussion that occurred around the time of the assault.        LINK

Activision Viral Video Outed

This sort of thing just tickles me: A video was posted to YouTube containing a (pretty obviously fake) news report showing a failed assassination attempt on a Russian scientist. While obviously an attempt at a “viral” video, it was not immediately clear who was behind the scenes.

Well, if they were hoping to remain hidden they’ve failed.  What I love is how one dogged blogger found them:

I attempted to discover who is hosting the site, but all I was able to uncover was that it is hosted by mediatemple (great hosting service, but this tells me nothing). I then did several searches for content from the site: MIR 12, Nikolai  Demichev, etc and was once again unable to turn up anything.

I moved on to MIR 12’s twitter account, and finally got somewhere. The first twitter followers were all from LA. After a few minutes looking at their profiles, and doing a few linkedin, and facebook searches, I realized that the followers were comprised of employees of the LA office of ad agency DDB, and viral video seeding company Feed Co. A quick look at DDB’s site reveals Activision as a client – the most likely client to approve this type of work. Also, Feed Co has collaborated with Activision in the past, and worked on the recent Bike Hero viral, which I covered in an earlier post.

It all lead very cleanly right back to Activision, who is hoping this viral campaign will build buzz for their upcoming game.  The question is whether or not knowing who is behind the video matters in terms of marketing potential.

Oh, here’s the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FGsvOzB1Hk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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Yahoo and Time’s Top 10 Viral Videos – Now Can We Kill the Term Viral?

I am hard-pressed to think of a more overused, misrepresented and misunderstood concept than “viral vidoes.”

A quick look at either Yahoo’s or Time’s 2008 “Top 10″ lists makes it pretty clear that there is no real definition of what makes a video viral other than it was seen on the internet, that it was relatively short and that it was seen by a lot of people.

In fact, Yahoo lists the now-famous Shiba Inu Puppy Cam as a “viral video” even though it was a live-streaming event, not a standalone video at all.

In addition, it doesn’t seem to matter who made the video or even whether it was made for the internet originally or not. That’s how clips of Sarah Palin being humiliated by Katie Couric somehow become on par with Joss Whedon’s elaborate internet series “Doctor Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog.”

We all know that this is the time of year for lists, and that we all love lists, but it would be nice to see everyone drop that “viral video” tag and just list your ten favorites.  That’s what it looks like you’re doing anyhow.  Now just admit it.

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