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Thanks to our clients at HBO, and our friends at FunnyOrDie.com, we were all able to pull together and make this happen.

Enjoy!

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

Pizza Hut, What The Heck Were You Thinking?

AdAge points us to a new 'viral' that Pizza Hut uploaded to YouTube, and now has a couple of hundred thousand views.

Note: I replaced the video, per Pizza Hut's request (what?!?!) with this lovely clip of Gary Busey.

Wow. This may be the most insensitive, untimely, poorly-thought-out initiative I've seen in a long time. If Pizza Hut were a person, I'd say it was a jerk.

Lets see...anger mom & pop pizza places (yes, in this economy), and bring in the mass-produced bastardization of their bread and butter to rub in their face. Yeah. That makes me feel better about Pizza Hut. It's one thing to call out your competition if they are another chain. It's another to insult small businesses.

My advice? Next time, stop trying to make a 'viral' with the goal of getting views, and instead, focus on creating content that actually builds your brand -- or at least makes it look good.

This video deserves to get - er - panned.

A Brief Dissection of the Nike/LeBron 'Chalk' TV Spot.

By popular demand, I've decided to post an analysis of Nike's LeBron James 'Chalk' TV Spot (tip o' the hat to Michael Miraflor for pitching in).

In case you missed the spot, which was in heavy rotation through Thanksgiving weekend, here it is:

So what does it all mean?

LeBron james has a pre-game ritual of reaching into the chalk/talc basket near the scorer's table, rubbing it on his hands, then throwing it into the air. It's electrifying, and the crowd usually goes wild. It looks like this:

The track in the spot is 'Candyman' from Cornershop (they also scored a charting hit in 1997 with 'Brimful of Asha') which I believe may have gotten a little remix from Lil' Wayne. And that track is several years old, but a hip-hop masterpiece.

The song title, 'Candyman' is usually used to reference drug pushers.

Lil' Wayne made his first few bucks by selling cocaine.

Lil' Wayne is in the stands in the spot.

Lil' Wayne also brushes the chalk off his feet - possibly an allusion to his rise from the streets to fame -- and giving up on cocaine.

The chalk is also featured in a donut/coffee shop and a barber shop. The former representing the blue-collar everyman, and the latter is one of the primary meeting places in urban culture. It's where all the issues of the day are discussed.

This spot is phenomenal because it does the following:

1) It shows that Nike gets LeBron.

2) It shows that Nike gets basketball.

3) It shows that Nike gets the intersection of basketball, hip hop, and street culture.

4) It shows that Nike gets music.

5) And if you're savvy enough to understand all the finer points of the spot, Nike understands you.

Sheer brilliance. Yes. TV spots can still be great at telling stories -- but the web is a great place for continuing their discussion.

**UPDATE**

Another reason this spot is great? Director, Mark Romanek, director of some of the best music videos of our time (I highly recommend his DVD).

Here are the credits for the spot:

Client: Nike
Title: The Chalk
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy, Portland
Creative Directors: Alberto Ponte, Tyler Whisnand, Jeff Williams
Copywriter: Caleb Jensen
Art Director: Taylor Twist
Executive Creative Directors: Mark Fitzloff, Susan Hoffman
Agency Producer: Erika Madison
Production Company: Anonymous Content, Los Angeles
Director: Mark Romanek
Executive Producer: Dave Morrison
Producer: Aris McGarry
Head of Production: Sue Ellen Clair
Director of Photography: Adam Kimmel
Editor: Robert Duffy
Post-Production: Spot Welders
Post Producer: Carolina Wallace
Assistant Editor: Patrick Murphree
Audio Post-Production: Lime
Mixer: Loren Silber
Colorist: Siggy Ferstl @ Riot
Effects: Digital Domain
VFX Supervisors: Brad Parker, Vernon Wilbert
VFX EP: Karen Anderson
VFX Producer: Melanie LaRue
Senior Flame Artists: Chris De Cristo, Andrew Eksner, Jonny Hicks, Pilon Lectez
Talent: LeBron James, Anderson Varejao, JJ Hickson, Daniel Gibson, Greg Oden, Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, Lil Wayne, Jamie Nared
Music: “Candyman” by Cornershop

Have We Run Out Of Viral Video Ideas? Or Just Directors?

Ok. So I'll admit. I never really saw the beauty (well, maybe 'cuteness') of the Ray Ban viral video done by Cutwater.

It lost its charm after one view, and lets not forget that it got 1.6 million views in a week, and a year later only has 1.7 million more. Doesn't say much for any kind of staying power, and a rather inefficient use of money (even though I have no idea how much Ray Ban paid for this).

Well, here's a new video by the same director, this time for Levi's.

Look familiar? Well this clip has 3 million views already, but to me, is even less impactful. And unlike the Ray Ban video (which uses Wayfarers that are iconic Ray Ban style) there's really nothing calling attention to the fact that these are Levi's jeans. Not even in the title (in which I would have used the word Levi's instead of 'jeans'.) This clip has the same director, 'Benzo', and it leaves me wondering how this was sold into the client...

(Tip o'the hat to Adverganza for pointing me in this direction.)

Improv Everywhere Turns Little League into the Big Leagues.

Improv Everywhere, the group behind the Grand Central Station and Best Buy stunts have just launched a new one: turning a Little League baseball game into a major league-style event.

Somebody get these guys some damn online sponsorships.

The Mets Get RickRolled.

Earlier, I discussed the campaign to get Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up played at Shea Stadium.

Well, it happened. The song got over five million votes.

I caught it on my mobile phone at the game. The fan reaction was pretty harsh. Watch it here:

Here's what it looked like on TV:

South Park on Distributing and Making Money Through Online Video.

Nothing is important until it gets the South Park treatment.

South Park knows this all too well after billions of un-monetized views of their content online. Recently, that changed with the launch of the new SouthParkStudios.com, home of shareable, linkable, and most importantly, embeddable South Park content. What's also on display -- but not embeddable -- includes full episodes.

One of the best things about the site though, is the intelligence behind making individual clips of the episodes available. That's often what people want to share. They may consume full episodes on their own time, but they want to share only portions of it with others.

Here's an example, featuring many of your favorite 'viral video' stars:

And here's the FULL EPISODE.

Trey & Matt (and of course, the brilliant minds at Comedy Central [full disclosure: clients, but we were not involved with this initiative]) built a destination that didn't just give them a reason to sue YouTube, but a way to do it better than YouTube, and custom-built for their content. And in a way that allows them to make money showing the highest-quality content, immediately after airing on TV. Consumers will get used to going there first for the content.

That doesn't weaken YouTube, but it goes to show you that it's a phenomenon that's not impossible to recreate yourself if you're the rights-holder on great content. The easy part is the technology. The tough part is doing enough to make your site a better centralized distribution point and user experience then the alternatives.

There's not many doing it as well as SouthParkStudios.com. Take note.

More ‘ Raining McCain ’ ?

My sources tell me that this weekend we will see a premiere of a follow-up to the now legendary 'It's Raining McCain" video (see BoingBoing's coverage here).

Check back here for the next release...

I told you I had someone on the inside.

In case you can't remember the original, here it is:

Recognizing Memeoganda.

The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.

No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don't even have to respect the anchorperson's request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.

When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become 'the news'. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more 'true' it feels. Fact-checked or not.

I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it's not a news source. Just an 'interesting content' recommendation engine.

But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They're out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as 'memes'. Wikipedia defines a 'meme' as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.

While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn't necessarily get us anywhere -- eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That's when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.

What used to be called 'trend pieces' are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.

When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I've seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the 'death of ad networks' to 'facebook's demise' to 'google click volume' to 'the death of the music industry' to even the state of the economy/recession.

These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of 'also-ran' stories.

I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what's hot.

You know, maybe it's just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism's woes.

The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don't fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.

We Are On The Wrong Side of The Political Support Video Curve.

Watch this and you'll understand. It's like watching a car crash, or the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview. You want to turn away, but you can't. And once you see it, you'll wish you could unsee it. But you can't. So you just watch it over and over again.

And I swear to you, I think I went to grade school with the girl in the black outfit. I'm not kidding. Jamie, is that you?

(Via Boing Boing.)