The Mike Abundo Effect

The 2008 US Presidential election will be the YouTube election. Parody is always hot on YouTube. That’s why this Obama campaign ad, poignantly parodying Budweiser’s classic Wassup ad from eight years ago, is a stroke of pure genius.

This hilarious yet heartwarming spoof has racked up over two million views in its first five days. Fully leveraging the shortform nature of viral video, the ad concisely strikes at multiple hot button issues in a span of just two minutes.

If Obama can run his country as cluefully as he runs his campaign, perhaps America can relax enough to watch a game and have a Bud again. Read the rest of this entry »

The cost of distributing offline video once restricted trailers to movies and TV shows. Distributing an online video, on the other hand, costs nothing. That’s why now, even non-video media can have video trailers.

Daisy Whitney shows us a rising new trend on YouTube: book trailers. They’re so easy to distribute, authors aren’t even relying on publishers to promote them.

We used to imagine book characters in our heads before they showed up on the big screen. Now they show up on the small screen before the book even comes out. So which non-video form of entertainment will get video trailers next? Read the rest of this entry »