The Search Engine Journal points to an ad campaign that Wendy is deploying on YouTube. No, this isn’t the typical viral marketing where fans are given the task of creating home-made commercials for cash prizes. Rather, these videos have been purposefully placed by Wendy’s on YouTube.

The response from users vary from outrage to delight to confusion. One user commented

I dont get it, do you guys work for Wendys. its wierd

I don’t have a problem with these videos being on YouTube–if the videos are entertaining, then people will want to watch them just like any other video on YouTube. If, on the other hand, they become spammy and uninteresting, no one will watch them. I still have faith that in the social media space good videos will rise to the top, while the crap will fall to the bottom.

Certainly, companies like Wendy’s will want to penetrate the social media advertising space, since it’s dirt cheap and easy to deploy. Digg and del.icio.us have already gotten their fair share of dealing with spam. In fact, BuzzShout’s site submission has been targeted by many spammers (luckily, we hand moderate everything, which keeps the spammers at a minimum).

The bigger question is whether what Wendy’s is doing is considered gaming YouTube. Well, you might say yes if you believe that YouTube should be purely about user generated homemade content. But, of course, this isn’t true by a long shot, given the large number of copyrighted professional media that exists on the service. In fact, YouTube’s community guidelines say nothing about spam or promotional videos.

Some users have clamored for a “mark as spam” flag. But, if the so-called “spam” is highly entertaining, why wouldn’t YouTube and its users want to showcase it? If Wendy’s goes through the trouble to make a popular viral video based on its content, I don’t think it should be penalized just because a corporation is behind it. As long as Wendy’s isn’t somehow hacking the pageviews on their videos, they’re in the clear.

That being said, it takes a careful balance of promotional and entertaining elements in a commercial for it to be popular on YouTube, and still effective for Wendy’s purposes. Because, as we all know, it can be highly unpredictable what will make it big on YouTube, and what won’t. On a side note, does anyone else think that Wendy’s is trying too hard to be weird in the video above? It’s as if they think viral videos will never take off if there’s not a combination of weird sounding voices, shoddy camera work, and a penchant for alien masks.

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Categories - Advertising, Videos |