• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 21, 2006

"Lazy Sunday," an online spoof rap video created by "Saturday Night Live" players Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, is hilarious and brilliant. The dweeby duo nail the genre's absurd conventions, from the giant puffy coat to the menacing glares and crazed gesticulations, while relating the most benign activities: buying cupcakes, debating the merits of Yahoo Maps versus MapQuest and picking up Mr. Pibb and Red Vines at a convenience store. The juxtaposition of mundane leisure and hard-core hip-hop is side-splittingly hilarious.

All those brand names make the online video compelling from a marketing perspective, too -- it's delicious viral content. The rap video sendup presented a huge opportunity for media folks savvy enough to get it, but unfortunately some don't, as NBC demonstrated.

In February, NBC's lawyers fired off a letter of warning to YouTube, the Internet video sharing site that posted "Lazy Sunday," demanding the copyrighted material be removed. Apparently, NBC intended to use the Web's viral dynamic to spread the video, but only through the network's proprietary Web site.

In March, NBC again went after YouTube for posting an "SNL" spoof rap video starring Natalie Portman.

What NBC failed to realize is that it's impossible to stop viral promotion once it begins. NBC succeeded in forcing YouTube to remove the videos, but at press time, they were still available on at least a dozen other sites, including Google Video. And a Google search of NBC's link was ranked well below some of the other sites. NBC seems to have negated the clip's value as a viral promotion for "SNL."

The network's strange response indicates a lack of marketing imagination; it might have partnered with YouTube, for example. Julie Supan, senior director of marketing at YouTube, says the company approached NBC in late December about partnering, but didn't hear back until the legal warning in February.

Supan says YouTube sees a lot of opportunities to partner with content creators. YouTube serves as a promotional platform for music videos and sharing various forms of content. "Record companies are the most progressive right now, but we're also getting calls from movie studios and cable companies. All the ad agencies are calling us, especially the interactive agencies," Supan says. Warner Bros. Records, Matador Records, Virgin/EMI, and VH1 have all approached YouTube, and "we [still] think that there are huge promotional opportunities for [NBC]. We can air short-form promotional content to fire people up about some of the new series."

NBC could have extracted additional value from "Lazy Sunday," given all its brand and celebrity references. It's not hard to imagine a corporate barter deal for all that product placement. But, as attorney Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation explains, "NBC wasn't ready to have an online solution for this... instead they rolled out the lawyers, and when the smoke cleared, the users had moved on to other file-sharing sites."