This is either brilliant or moronic. Hey, maybe it's both. It's definitely weird. Mind-trippingly weird.
If there's one thing that could bring together forces as disparate as Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), GM (NYSE:GM), and Tommy Lee (Ticker: EEEW), it's the smell of money. And if you want see the freaky, commerce-driven head trip I'm talking about, just skip on over to Yahoo!'s music pages and look for the video game-inspired "Artist Mod" videos.
To quote one wag at Fool HQ (OK, it was me), watching this might make you certain that someone spiked your lunchtime Fresca with a double helping of horse tranquilizers.
At first, I thought this was just a scheme to try to lower the bandwidth required to pipe videos across the Internet by sending vector/rendering data instead of the usual video files. But after sitting through Tommy Lee's "Good Times" (which sounds a bit like a Jack Johnson ripoff but is so obviously lifted straight from "Lullaby" that I swear I can hear Shawn Mullins' lawyer's dialing the phone), the reality becomes clear. This is an entirely different video, and it's a way for Yahoo! and Tommy to pimp GM's ride -- well, Chevy's ride, to be precise.
Not only is the Chevy HHR -- a late-coming, watered-down DaimlerChrylser (NYSE:DCX) PT Cruiser, for those who haven't seen it -- listed as the sponsor in a banner ad and featured in a pre-video commercial, but it also appears continually in the new and improved game-engine video that is the main event. In fact, the video's "director," if it's fair to use such a term, seems to have as much love for the car as the digital divas who pepper the clip.
Between shots of computer-rendered girls in bikinis jumping up and down -- yes, girls in swimsuits jumping up and down -- there are continual shots of the car, none-too-subtle close-ups of a Chevy HHR nameplate, and Tommy cruising his Hollywood 'hoods with an HHR loaded chock-fulla bikini girls and Westernized Mary-Anns in digital hot-pants and gingham tube tops. Granted, this is a bit less disturbing than the gratuitous upskirt shots that are a main between-scene punctuation in the live-action version of the video, but it's still odd.
Odd, but genius. Maybe. After all, moving the medium to digital renderings makes it pretty easy for the powers that be to stuff any kind of product they want into the show next to the jiggling computer girls. Sell an ad to Folgers? Drop a mug into the cupholder. Kitty litter execs come calling for a little music-demo exposure? Have the Tommy 'toon load a bag of Oil-Dri's (NYSE:ODC) finest into the Chevy's trunk for trouble-free winter driving.
And while this might just seem like a new form of creeping, creepy, overly obvious commercials, it could conceivably drive a real change in the online music subscription model currently dominated by Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iTunes. What if Yahoo! could persuade three or four big spenders to subsidize free or low-cost downloads of specially made, blatantly commercial video tunes designed for the iPod or another video-enabled mobile device from Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) or others? Who wouldn't go for that?
We're talking about America, after all, where a town in historical, hidebound Texas recently sold its own soul to change its name to Dish in order to score a decade's worth of townwide free satellite TV from EchoStarCommunications (NASDAQ:DISH). For free entertainment, I think people would put up with videos even odder than Tommy's turn for Chevy.
For related Foolishness:
- Hey, at least it's better than the Red Tag sale.
- Foolish new-waver Rick Munarriz has some thoughts on the new music distro models.
- Investing in the future, even when it sounds weird, is one way to find the ultimate growth stock.
Seth Jayson still thinks someone slugged his Fresca with "special K." At the time of publication, he had positions in no company mentioned here. View his stock holdings and Fool profile here. Fool rules are here.
