The days of the viral video universe as marketing free-for-all may be numbered.
The Federal Trade Commission has scheduled a November 6, 2006, hearing, titled “Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade,” to look at issues of online privacy. Consumer advocates argue that videos on sites such as YouTube, Collegehumor, and Heavy.com are not identified as commercial speech and that it is often difficult to establish who is behind them. They argue that such broadband productions should be labeled as commercials so consumers understand that they are being marketed to.
By going viral, marketers are not only bypassing the public’s inclination to tune out ads, but also their own executives whose job it is to make sure all corporate marketing adheres to certain corporate policies. Also, marketers can post international or archived commercials and largely avoid the headache of rights fees. YouTube founder Chad Hurley told Fortune, “We’re seeing situations where we have the marketing side of the company posting clips to our site and then we’re getting notifications from the legal side asking us to take it down.”
The anonymous nature and ambiguous content of viral videos has been the cause of some embarrassing incidents. In August, a video produced by the income tax preparation Web site TaxBrain aired on local news broadcasts in 125 markets across the country. The video showed a man trying to make off with the TaxBrain race car before being stopped and shoved to the ground by security at the racetrack. The company had placed the video on various Web sites that mistakenly got picked up by news media as being actual footage from the event.
Significance: With the upcoming FTC hearing and consumer watchdogs on the alert, it seems as if it is only a matter of time before the Wild West of viral video marketing is tamed. But how long that will take is anyone’s guess—marketers, advocates, and regulators are still at odds over the use of product placements in TV shows and movies, a practice that has been around much longer than viral videos.