If you're a long time reader of PostAdvertising.com, then you know that one of the things we advocate is eschewing traditional television advertising and creating/owning media. One of the great ways to do this—and one that we often advocate—is through YouTube, which is basically a big, long tube shaped like a "u," for those of you who don't already know.

But, sometimes, brands think that it would be beneficial for them just to stick (pun, intention unclear) any old thing up on the Tube to be hep to what's going down. This assertion simply isn't true. Take this thinly veiled product demonstration, for instance:

(Get the "stick" pun now? Whatever.)

See what LG did there? It made a clever video for the new Cookie phone and put it up on YouTube and, voilà!, over 1,000 views! This is, of course, on the official LG/Cookie YouTube channel, whereas over at mcmikhedoff's page, the video has gotten over 40,000 views. The practice of seeding videos on YouTube and other video aggregation sites to ensure a certain audience is widespread in the ad industry. There are companies that do this specifically, just like the company that did it in this case for LG, SocialMedia8.

I have no problem at all with seeding. The web is a big place and lots of great content is buried in it, much never to gain the popularity it deserves. So how do you ensure that your content, potentially great content, gets a fair viewing in the town square? You put it there, and with force. But no amount of seeding is going to get this video the recognition the people at LG want for it.

My problem here is with the content. Everything is on—the medium, the strategy—except the content. And that's a shame, because someone at LG obviously sees the trajectory that media and advertising are taking and realizes that they are on a collision course. But, at the same time, they and/or their ad agency are spectacularly uncreative. This so-called content is about as interesting to someone who did not have a hand in designing/marketing/selling the phone as your kid's Bar Mitzvah photos are to anyone but you. How this notable lack of creativity could exist in a project with such savvy understanding of the new order of the post-advertising age completely baffles me.