The Underbelly of Viral Seeding Revealed

Bob Garfield, writing in his MediaPost Garfield at Large column, recounts his experience attempting to determine whether "expensively produced video ads fare better or worse online than unbranded user-generated videos harvested from the Internet and simply shared by brands." User-generated videos did, in fact, perform best but that's only a small piece of what Bob uncovered.

Working with a video-seeding consultant who, after a bidding process, selected Giant Media to seed 600,000 video views for Sovereign | Santander, Bob discovered some supposedly industry-standard practices he found a bit seedier than expected.

Granted, just about every segment of online marketing is rife with a certain percentage of less-than-altruistic business practices but when it is laid to bare like Bob has done here, it's not so easy to turn a blind eye as we in this space often do.

Give his column a read. Is this just business as usual or are there nefarious practices that need to be brought to light and, ultimately, squashed?