• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 14, 2010

Some of you youngsters may be too young to recall a time when there wasn't cable TV around to program against broadcast cycles. Somewhere around mid-June each year the big nets would fall back to rerunning some of the year's episodes. TV viewing tanked and some truly bizarre programming would crop up as summer replacement series. I am pretty sure summer hatched "The Sonny and Cher Show." For TV addicts like me (I had TV Guide memorized) this was the only way to catch up on the second tier shows you hadn't watched. Long before DVRs, VCRs, DVD collections and hulu, summer reruns were our primitive form of time-shifted TV. And no, smart ass, the black and white Zeniths were not coal-powered.

It strikes me that viral video may be slipping into a summer rerun season. My regular tours of the Visible Measures top marketing video charts shows a lot of same old same old. Not surprising, really. Why release anything new and novel into the wild when much of your audience is floating in and out of vacation? But like the summer months decades ago, this is a good time to catch up on some viral trends that are being recycled this month. It makes you wonder about replay value.

A lot of old jokes and familiar fixtures sit atop the charts this week. The Gillette "Perfect Length" ad uses up the double entendre joke in one sitting. Women discussing their men's "length" until the last second reveal (beards, of course) is worth about one pass around the office. The Nike epic "Write the Future" is really a short subject that requires some investment, but it piles on so many rapid fire edits that replays are built into the aesthetic of the ad. Which is preferable I think to the same agency's (Weiden + Kennedy) approach to Old Spice, where they essentially recycled the great "Man Your Man Could Smell Like." This time, however, it feels like a retread that tracks the original too closely to be engaging. The guy you wish to be is still smug and smooth but there is so little re-thinking of the concept here (just new fantasy scenarios and effects) that some viral video law of diminishing returns kicks in. And talk about rerunning an idea, DDB's Volkswagen "Driven By Fun" short installs a slide beside an escalator and records people choosing the fast fun way. It iterates a bit on The Fun Theory ad that captured a Cannes award, but not by much.

And yet summer reruns still offer the opportunity to revisit or appreciate the content you may have overlooked or undervalued the first time around. Apologies in advance for my gullibility, but I think the hip hop hamsters for Kia Soul are a brilliant execution. The characters map perfectly against the goofy charm of the product itself, and the comic creative projects the right sensibility onto the car. The series endures in its several iterations because the effect is in the little details, the small hip gestures played by cuddly hamsters. There are enough of the little animals throughout the scenes to require re-viewings in order to capture the pitch-perfect music video stylings. And dare I say it is as much a send up of the thoroughly commoditized and bland state of hip hop music as it a good-natured goof on a boxy looking car.