Sleeping With The Enemy Or Savvy Marketing Strategy? YouTube And NBC

There was a lot of coverage this week about the YouTube NBC deal, not least of which was a segment on the NBC Nightly News broadcast of June 28^th. The deal is being approached with skepticism by bloggers and marketers alike. While I borrowed from the MediaShift blog for the title of this post, I’d have to agree that AdRant’s takes the cake. 

All of that aside, this is a very interesting deal to watch. It bears some similarity to NewsCorp’s acquisition of MySpace. In both cases big media companies recognize that something exciting and powerful is happening with consumer generated media and they’re wading in to test the waters.  (It’s a very big test, in NewsCorp’s case.)  The great irony with this deal of course is that it came from the very network that slapped YouTube on the wrist for distributing the SNL skit “Lazy Sunday”. Josh Hawkins had a particularly salient observation about this “do as I say, not as I do” policy, wondering whether the legal eagles at NBC would continue to enforce these restrictions while simultaneously leveraging YouTube as a promotional vehicle. 

I would also question the validity of advertising pre-roll on consumer generated media. I for one am convinced that one of the reasons consumers are flocking to CGM is sheer exhaustion with mass media marketing tactics. 

But this deal certainly put some more energy behind the CGM momentum and may have introduced it to new groups of consumers. (I suspect that Brian William’s Nightly News audience demographics are considerably different from those of the average YouTuber.)

Indeed, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Must See TV”.

 
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CGM, Marketing, NBC, Web 2.0, YouTube