• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, September 27, 2006

Touchy YouTube aficionados don't like NBC's official promo activities with the hot video Web site. There's anger, resentment, and, surprisingly, negative amortization.

Out of thousands of examples where advertising is considered the new content, YouTube and NBC, now official partners, have offered up a too-hip-for-the-room TV sarcastic promo called "Bill The Promo Guy."  

Bill, an NBC promo executive, is concerned over negative comments about NBC promos on YouTube. Then he tells a sad tale of just trying to do his job in getting people to watch "The Office" and "My Name is Earl.".

Why? Well, he has to buy his daughter a horse, which costs more than a small house, as well as paying for his son's prep school.

This somewhat funny bit is part of the new way to do business--offering up what amounts to an anti-TV bit of advertising as an entertaining, quirky video-blog. In other words, content. The promo is like a leftover "Saturday Night Live" or "Conan O'Brien" sketch.

"It's not for NBC," says Bill, in his efforts to tout NBC's Emmy-Award-winning comedies. "It's for me."

True advertising as content is where viewers seek somewhat deeper connection beyond traditional commercials. That connection can yield negative responses as well.

One fuming woman's video blog offered: "I don't like NBC, and I don't like to see NBC on YouTube. I don't like you [Bill]. I don't like your video. I don't like your wiggy little self-depreciating little sketch advertising [telling us] how cool NBC is."

That's what I call an engaged viewer!

NBC should be thrilled, and more impressed that she called the promo depreciating.  My father would say that calls for a tax lecture. She meant deprecating.

Still, depreciating does work on some level.  NBC's TV promo depreciated in actual numbers versus its traditional approach, as the NBC promo on YouTube currently has some 300,000 views. That's not a lot -- about what NBC would get for running it on a small cable network. It's nowhere near the typical 10 million to 12 million views NBC might get running the promo on its own airwaves.

By comparison, the woman's video rant got 1,571 views. That's depreciation of some 96 percent off of NBC's promo.  But any engaged--even angry--viewers are hard to come by these days.  NBC will take everything it can get.