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ad report card: Advertising deconstructed.

Look Who's LaughingGiggling babies have taken over YouTube. Next stop: Madison Avenue.

By Janelle Nanos
Posted Monday, Dec. 31, 2007, at 7:40 AM ET

The Spot: We see a home video of a mom sitting on her couch with a baby on her lap. The mom blows into a glass, creating a low, hollow sound that launches her infant into a fit of giggles. She blows a few more times. The baby keeps cracking up. Then, on the right-hand side of the screen, a "+8" appears, and a soothing female voice says, "Laughter can add eight years to your life. So live longer, retire stronger. Never outlive your money." The AIG logo floats on-screen. (Click here to watch the clip.)

There is something entrancing about this spot, which presents a quiet moment of serenity and joy—not what advertising is generally known for. But there's also something familiar about it, and no wonder: The footage was not filmed in a studio with a professional actor-tot, but found on YouTube, where watching clips of babies laughing has become a new national pastime.

The AIG campaign is just one of many current advertising efforts to incorporate video found on YouTube—or at least video that looks like it was found on YouTube. At first glance, the YouTube-to-television transition seems to make sense for advertisers. Web crawlers don't go to the site to watch all 12 hours of Roots; the short snippets of video found there are easily spliced into a 30- or 60-second ad. And being able to see the number of YouTube "views" each video gets is useful for creatives desperate to peer into the public psyche and determine what we're actually going out of our way to watch. Plus, home-video footage is subconsciously eye-catching out of context—when we see clips on television that aren't professionally lit, scripted, and edited, we expect something juicy enough to warrant the compromised production values, whether it's Zapruder footage or a snippet of some starlet's sex tape.

But turning found video into good advertising is harder than it looks. The danger of using YouTube footage in a television ad is that if the spot isn't well-executed, viewers feel shortchanged, since they know they can see the same spot online without a corporate logo tacked onto the end of it.

Consider, for example, last winter's BMW ad, which featured the classic YouTube video of two kids waking up on Christmas morning and freaking out as they rip open their new Nintendo 64. Although the pairing was an odd one (shouldn't Nintendo have snagged the clip?), BMW did manage to equate the crazed look in the kids' eyes with the excitement of getting behind the wheel of one of their cars.

At first glimpse, I loved the ad for breaking away from holiday automotive ad tropes (no keys as stocking-stuffers or cars with bows on them here). But it soon created a backlash. The company was late to the game—the original clip had catapulted up YouTube's most-viewed list and appeared on both VH1 and Jay Leno before BMW bought the rights—and after the kids went on Good Morning America and Inside Edition, viewers began complaining about the family selling out. Those who weren't questioning the ad's authenticity were appalled by it: "It sounds like torture victims," one online commenter wrote. But in the end, what undermined the ad was the fact that the clip was already such a prominent brand that the commercial couldn't override it. Despite the marketing team's best efforts, the spot is still most commonly referred to as the "N64 kids commercial," not a BMW ad.

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Janelle Nanos is an editor at National Geographic Traveler, where she edits the Intelligent Travel blog. She lives and writes in Washington, D.C.
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