Doing the funky chicken

We've posted extensively on the growth of online video, with Google-owned You Tube now being "the biggest TV station on the planet."

However, an article from the New York Post says that the volume of videos uploaded on the site hasn't translated into ad revenues in a way that Google might have hoped:

"YouTube's numbers for 2008 don't look pretty: while 3 billion videos are viewed every month, revenues could total an anemic sub-$200 million this year - a reflection that less than a third of the videos generate income from ads, according to various Wall Street estimates.

""Call YouTube the most under-leveraged acquisition in Google's history," Forrester analyst James McQuivey told The Post."

According to the FutureLab, it's part of the larger problem where brands and agencies still haven't figured out how to spend money reaching consumers via social media. When it comes to YouTube, the format of most of the stuff up there means it simply doesn't work to put an ad in the middle and hope for the best.

And what about when you attach yourself to someone else's content, or do your own virals that mimic the style of the most popular YouTube clips?

"It's like when parents try to speak in the vernacular of their children. While occasionally it works, most times it sounds dumb and not authentic."

In other words, as brand and brand agencies we're still veering from being 'Dad on the dancefloor' on one hand, to a slightly intrusive door to door salesperson on the other.

That's because we've taken our traditional marketing template and transplanted it wholesale to social media:

"We're still hung up on trying to use our methods with new technologies and we're still for the most part missing the mark. Not that this is anything new.

"It took us a while to stop just taking radio content and moving it to TV. And it will continue to take us some time to adjust to the new tools we have today. What we need is more experimentation and less trying what's been done before. And we may just find that somethings just won't really work for advertising in the way we hoped. "

"Sometimes, things just are and the best thing we can do is support them in new ways. To let them do what they do and stop trying to figure out how we can use them for advertising."

Photo - Zippy Monster