Keep an eye on those little ads that blend into the bottom of many Youtube videos. This is prime advertising territory, which costs quite a bit to occupy.

One ad has recently caught my attention and I decided to give it a *click* , something I rarely do. The copy read “Who’s Johnny X” and it looked like it might be a Memento-style video ad maybe even an ARG like DELETED:the game, so I thought, “what the hell” and clicked through.

After being directed to a super slick website I got into the show, of which there are currently 5 episodes live out of 9. It’s very nicely produced and obviously cost Sony Ericson a bundle to  make (not to mention market).

But for all its visual appeal (the actors seem to be all models, the settings are exotic and even the cell-phone XPERIA that they are hawking looks pretty cool) it’s very thin on story (at the beginning) and the characters are flat…which inevitably means, had I jumped on the show in the first episode or two, I’d never be back to find out what happens – (Coma, anyone?).

Luckily there are 5 up, so I jumped very quickly into later episodes to get some more of the story.

the story:

Sam’s been roughed-up and left for dead on the streets of Bangkok where he wakes up with a bloody head and no recollection about who he is. After checking into a low-rent hotel, where the receptionist signs him in a “Johnny-X” he starts to slowly get bits and pieces of his memory back.

These short recollections drive him to purchase a Sony Ericson phone…yes, this truly is corny…which he uses to do all sorts of things like: organize his memories, record videos of himself asking for help, take pictures of himself to have printed up on signs – “do you know me” and, of course to receive calls from people who might know him.

does it work?

I hate to be a dick, but -  no -  I don’t think that the series is very effective as a marketing vehicle. Here’s a few reason why:

• the online market for video is flooded. I like to call it a “crawlspace” but the fact is that this year alone has seen an infusion of money and content unlike any other. In essence, its hard to get your voice heard here…and I don’t think that the big-money, ads on Youtube was the best way to get themselves noticed…
• Instead of building a buzz or flying under the radar with this thriller series, they just made a cool film, split in into 9 parts and plopped down the big money to get the in-your-face advertising. I bet it would have been much more effective if they would have made it more interactive, included the tech scene bloggers and maybe some of the already established indie online video producers.
• Marketing assets like films and cool web-sites this tend to be looked on with pride by the companies that invested in them an this ego stroking (look we made our own movie!) tends to get in the way of the bottom line. What is the success metric of this kind of thing?
• the content is just not engaging enough. That’s a hard thing to say, when obviously loads of money was dropped on this project and lots of people were obviously involved. Had the production been more less visually cool and more interesting in terms of characters I think it would go over better.

So what are ya gonna do? Hell, I’m pleased that the big boys in grey suits are funnelling in some more money into the meadium. I’m just not sure if this particular one was really all that well-excuted. But then again, they’ve got 4 more episodes to prove me wrong.