Not really, I'm just reading into this statement by the Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of one of the world's largest advertising agencies (Mark Tutssel of Leo Burnett)....
YouTube, which publishes video clips and has greater US reach than MTV
This was part of a financial times article titled YouTube bigger than MTV' for advertisers, sorry for the repetition, but you get the point. The Ad Men are proclaiming they "get it."
Successful future campaigns would need to imitate viral content - so-called because of its rapid spread online - by being easy to consume repeatedly and to forward on, said Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at Leo Burnett.
Marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over their brand.... Once consumers have interacted with brands they will not go back to being shouted at by marketers.
Word on that point.
YouTube may be the part of the story here, but it is co-creation that is at the heart of this. IMHO YouTube's days are numbered once the content creators move over to revver, revver is a competing service that pays content creators for the amount of times there content has been watched. So what i'm saying is, what if you created 30 second spot that was so good that people sent it around to their friends, and you got paid every time someone watched it. Huh? an ad supported ad... Hell yeah, at least then they'd put some effort into the creative, the humor and the story. Advertising is not the problem in my opinion, shit advertising is the problem. Advertisng that aims to give me misinformation, and treats me like "the great unwashed", that has no soul, no authenticity, no humor.
In the end advertisers have to be careful, glomming onto YouTube, MySpace or even Second Life because they are a collection of eyeballs is going mean more disconnection, disillusionment and suspicion just in an interactive environment. The question is how do you move the conversation forward, how do you empower your customers, how do you connect with your customers creativity, how are you going to LISTEN.
YouTube hailed as advertising medium of the future
Update: Richard writes how YouTube's traffic doubled in may to 12.6 million unique visitors. David writes how an AOL customer recorded his conversation with AOL when trying to cancel his account, and his interview with Matt Lauer is on is on YouTube.