My view is YouTube is not some magic panacea, but it certainly has a role to play in propagating great advertising.

It’s the worlds video library and it’s open 24/7 with your local branch fully stocked and generally only as far away as your laptop or 3G mobile phone.

As word-of-mouth becomes word-of-mouse it’s now often easier to show or send somebody the great idea you’ve seen, rather than explain it.

It’s not about YouTube itself, it’s all about people connecting with ideas and then sharing them with each other. The delineation of commercial and non-commercial blurs in comparison to the issue of relevance. When it was new I used to search the top 10 of all time and the top 10 of the day – on the scout for interesting things; however as the comedian doing dance moves has been displaced by music videos and manga movies I kind of lost interest.

The top 10 then become merely the most memorable, “stuff” I’ve seen.
I do remember Big Ad. I also remember Borat singing, “throw the Jew down the well”. Within the mix is the legend of Old Gregg and some Chuck “the Iceman” Liddell bouts.
For brands there was some nifty Durex balloon animals and an awesome Adobe house of cards…but the lines have blurred. Then there was that Matt Dances video which was huge (even made it to Sunrise) which was sponsored after-the-fact, but by who? I’m not quite sure. I don’t know whether this stuff was sent to me on You Tube or not. I do remember it was sent to me online and YouTube is just my top-of-mind online video brand.

There are propagation strategies like trying to crowd source mimics (as I believe “flight of the conchords” http://flightlipdub.com/ have achieved) or more cast based methods like sponsored videos and TubeMogul. Channels are popular if you’ve got installments and opt-in loyalty. I guess my point is YouTube isn’t a communications idea, it’s just another of the 573 different contact points which we can put our message up on. Saying, “I’m going to have a great youtube viral campaign” is like saying, “I’m going to write a best seller”- J.K.Rolling stated with an idea about a boy wizard, not with her OBE acceptance speech.

To my mind it might be valid but before you act the test remains: will you get noticed? Is what you are trying to say clear? Is it relevant (to consumers and your business goal)?
The two main targets on YouTube appear to be everyone or really niche. You probably need to take a cold, hard a look at your own segmentation before embarking on the quest for the holy viral. We still remember Outpost.com, but the business died long ago.

My only dilemma now is whether to publish this to my little -read blog at www.StepChangeCommunications.com or the relative obscurity of my podcast channel on YouTube www.youtube.com/DOWNtoBIS