connecting*the*dots

Dear Forward-Thinking Suits,

Thanks so much for pulling all of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips off of YouTube. You’ve now rendered a good number of my posts useless — posts that were marketing your shows for free. That’s right, you had thousands of fans, like me, pointing to and contextualizing clips from their blogs, generating millions of page views and legions of new viewers and you killed it because they weren’t your page views.

So dumb.

Let me ask you people a simple question: How much money do you pump into your marketing department annually? I mean, what’s your budget for marketing executives, their minions and external network marketing? Can’t you recognize that whatever percentage you had set aside for TDS and TCS brand awareness (not specific show promos, just awareness campaigns) was becoming a waste of money with the YouTube fans doing our thing? We were doing your jobs for free and doing it better than you ever could have done it yourself!

Come to think of it, maybe you did understand that angle before acting…

See, the way that I view this is that from an organizational standpoint, this type of viral marketing is a perfect opportunity to cut back on traditional marketing budgets and let the web do what the web does. But then again, organizations are made up of people and people need to provide value in order to get paid by the organization.

V.P. Johnson can’t keep that corner office if he has legions of fans doing his work for him at a price that puts him out on the street. So build that wall! Keep them out of our stuff! Send them back to Mexico… er… hm.

Congratulations, again, Comedy Central executives. You’ve proven yourself to be no more forward-thinking than this administration that your talent rails on each week. Someday, your network bosses will understand what this move did to your fan-base, but probably not until a competitor network — one that won’t collude with the rest of the big boys — embraces the web and the people that put food on your plates.

Colbert and Stewart are still my boys, but my passion for your product has dropped immeasurably.

And that’s The Word.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser (MediaShift) updated his open letter to Stephen Colbert with a report that lawyers from Comedy Central are cherry-picking the clips they want taken down from YouTube, possibly in a hardball negotiating move to tweak Google and their new acquisition.

So not all clips have come down. That’s good news. How Comedy Central decides to proceed from here, though, is key.

If they want to negotiate the creation of a channel on YouTube for CC distributed shows and all discrete segments of shows, that move will serve the desires of many CC fans, especially bloggers. The amount of ad revenue they’ll make on viral replays at this point in time pales in comparison to advertising revenue from the TV broadcast itself, but tacking on an ad to the end of a video (as Revver has done with zeFrank) works well for all parties involved.

This could work out for everyone if CC doesn’t get greedy and:

• attempt to add commercials within segments and shows, which are essentially already commercials (running across YouTube and the decentralized web) for their regularly scheduled programs on TV
• police people who upload their own segment edits, instead of chalking up the “lost revenue” as a marketing expenditure.

If Comedy Central can avoid those old media trappings, they just might come out of this as new media players.

Vernon’s made a new buddy-in-hate, good ol’ boy Rush Limbaugh… and he’s bubbling over with joy. Hmm.. let me try to recreate the vibe of Vern’s email newsletter for you:

RUSH: You’ve gotta hear this campaign commercial. There’s a man running for office as a Republican, running for Congress in … North Carolina. His name is Vernon Robinson. The audio is what we have here, obviously. The video to his commercial is … on his website. (Laughing.) I don’t even want to characterize it. Just listen to this commercial.

RUSH: Goes out with Leave It To Beaver music. I should point out Vernon Robinson is black, and when he mentions Sharpton and Jackson — have you seen the spot? When he gets to Jackson, he found a mug shot of Jesse Jackson and that’s what he runs and he found a picture of Sharpton with an Afro from years and years ago. (Laughing.) This is a national campaign. I mean, he’s talking about national issues. They all have impact locally, but I thought it was the Democrats that were going to nationalize the election this year! I thought Democrats were going to do that. That is Vernon Robinson who is running for Congress … He’s getting grief like you can’t believe. This is one of the best political ads in a long, long time, and can I ask you: When you heard that, folks, when you heard that, weren’t you going, “Yeah! Okay, yeah, yeah,” and, “Why don’t more Republicans talk like this? Why don’t more of them say these are the problems that we face?” And here’s Vernon Robinson in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, saying: I’m a pioneer, and I will take the arrows.
…

RUSH: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina - this is Jean. Welcome to the program.

JEAN: Well hello, mega dittos. … I wanted to say Vernon is a man.

RUSH: Do you know Vernon Robinson?

JEAN: No. I don’t know him personally. I just love his ah what can you say. He stands for something, regardless.

RUSH: Yes he does.

JEAN: I love a man. That’s my man.

RUSH: He stands for a lot of things.

JEAN: Yes. Besides yourself, that’s one I wouldn’t mind marrying.

RUSH: (Laughing) … I’ll tell you what’s do. She’s calling about an ad. Vernon Robinson is running for Congress as a Republican in … North Carolina. He has one of the best television ads out there in a long time. We have the audio to it. We are going to link to this at rushlimbaugh.com, link to his website because the video of this ad will start playing automatically once you log on to his website. … We mention Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in this ad. And the picture of the Reverend Jackson in this ad is his mugshot. … The picture of the Reverend Sharpton is back in the big jewelry, big hair, heavier days. I think he’s got a medallion on. He’s wearing a cleric’s collar …

RUSH: And of course it concludes with Leave it to Beaver type music. That is just a great, great ad. And by the way, again we were told the Democrats are going to be running a national campaign in their House races this year. Sounds to me like Vernon Robinson, who is black by the way, and he is a target now, they are targeting this guy like - he’s going to be targeted not to the extent Clarence Thomas was — but maybe Michael Steele, Ken Blackwell, Lynn Swann. This is, I mean pardon the French here, this is off the plantation. He has escaped and wandered off the liberal Democrat plantation. This is not allowed. This is not permitted. If they could, they’d grab this guy and send him to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and let Hillary as Nurse Ratchet try to get his mind right. Either that or send him to the warden in Cool Hand Luke and put him in the box. I can’t tell you folks. This wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago. You wouldn’t have had a black … congressional candidate in North Carolina running a spot like this. And mocking the Reverend Jackson and Al Sharpton. But it’s a new day out there. Vernon Robinson, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
…

RUSH: Folks, don’t panic out there. Vernon Robinson’s website is not broken. The link is not broken. We’ve just shut down their server. We’ve overloaded the server at the Vernon Robinson campaign site where we’ve got the link posted to see his great TV ad. Just be patient. And as people get in and get out of there, the traffic will subside and you will be able to get in. But the site’s working fine. We’ve sent more people than their server can handle and this happens, we shut down servers routinely on this program.

Without your immediate financial support, Vernon cannot create new ads and put them on TV and radio! Please help Vernon make more ads that Rush Limbaugh says every Republican should be using.

Limbaugh played the Robinson ad twice. It was almost as if he was thinking, “Yeehaw! Someone else can hate more than me!” Remember kids, free speech is a beautiful thing, as it can help us find the bigots amongst us!

This live action remake of the opening sequence to The Simpsons is great, but for enthusiasts of the web, even better is the fact that the producers recognized the value in uploading it directly to YouTube and Google Video — foregoing a traditional, centralized media buy — knowing full well the community benefits of viral media.

If the content is engaging, funny, newsworthy, etc. it’ll always rise to the top.

Wake up NBC.