• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 10, 2010

Serialized viral video campaigns run the risk of overstaying their Web welcome. There is a tendency to drive a good idea into the ground when distribution and media costs are negligible. This is the down side of digital media technology no one wants to talk about. It is the home video effect. Digital video and photographic tools drop the barriers to entry and offer low/no-cost production and distribution to everyone. The result has been the end of editing and home video clips and personal slide shows that can go on till dawn. At least when film cost an arm and a leg to buy and process, there were some kinds of natural limits. I will leave it to some smarter cultural analyst to figure this one out. But it seems to me that we are at the moment when the technology and the culture share a common set of tendencies: uninhibited self-expression.

This was starting to happen with the Toyota one-joke Swagger Wagon "world's best parent" conceit from Saatchi & Saatchi. These delusional suburbanites started promisingly enough in an initial spot on TV and online. We see them referring to themselves ostentatiously as "givers" and self-important great parents. They cannot accept their own blandness and comically believe they are hipper, more progressive and more altruistic than they really are. They are, of course, the model family driving the Toyota Sienna mini-van.

The basic concept is a funny, off-beat stab at a brand making fun of its own target audience. Ironically, in order for the joke to work, the target audience actually has to be enough like this pair to disbelieve that it in anyway resembles these goofs. I am trying desperately not to use the word post-modern here.

The first video works because the couple's core self-absorption that they can't see in themselves is hinted at by small bits of back story. The problem with the remaining videos in the series is that the theme that should remain subtle but ever-present becomes the main theme. In "Mommy Like Rest" the wife appreciates the lounger-like comfort of the back seats of her Sienna because it turns out this is where she sends her snoring husband at night. "Daddy Like Bonding Time" is really about Dad treating his three-year-old like a servant. In form, the Toyota series is a smart use of viral video in that it actually iterates characters over time. Unfortunately, the single joke gets tiresome and way overdone, as if the makers are a little too afraid that their target audience actually is as un-self-realized as this pair and needs to be bludgeoned with the joke.

While the first video in the series has garnered 350,000 view, the rest are in the more modest 80,000 view range...and deservedly so.

And then along comes Swagger Wagon, a hip hop music video starring the "Sienna Family" that thoroughly refreshes the series. Brimming with the detritus of suburban parenting, from plastic keys to piles of diapers, costumed tea parties to dice on a backgammon board, and set to mild hip hop, it finally gets the tone just right. It not only sends up the visual conventions of music video but lets us envision this couple making fun of themselves acting cool and knowing they really aren't pulling it off. Isn't that pretty much where most of us are?

There have been over 827,000 views in the week it hit the Web.