• by Catharine P. Taylor , May 20, 2008

If you're going to post your commercial to YouTube, why make the "embedding disabled by request"? When you've hit upon a saucy idea for your campaign, let it run wild on the Web. A savvy agency wouldn't miss this chance - it wouldn't cut out viral distribution before it even starts. It's like heading to the Bahamas but then deciding to stay inside because you might get a sunburn. Case in point: the recent Menopauseland commercial for menopause supplement Estroven from Amerifit Brands.

Forget spring break in Florida - Menopauseland is where it's at. "I've done a lot of traveling in my life, but none as liberating as here," says a woman's voice-over. She's shown receiving a shoulder rub from a hunky young 'un sporting an admirable six-pack. A happy ending is all but assumed.

As it's one of several commercials I've seen recently that depict what I call "menopausal sexpots," I posted something about this trend to my blog, adverganza.com, only to find that this provocative commercial wasn't embeddable - according to the client, the policy of its agency, BrandBuzz, is not to make the videos on its YouTube channel available for further distribution. BrandBuzz didn't return a request for comment. But in fairness, maybe it didn't allow embedding because as an agency, it doesn't own the content it's posting.

When I asked the client why the commercial wasn't embeddable, they explained that the Web site supporting the campaign wasn't fully operational yet. Nonetheless, they got an embeddable version up on YouTube within 24 hours of our conversation. In the meantime, however, Estroven might have missed out on its moment of buzz. Estroven's fortunes don't rise and fall on a blog that gets an average of 350 visits a day, like mine, but my post was picked up by Gawker Media's jezebel.com, which gets in excess of 250,000 unique visitors a month. However, even as my traffic skyrocketed (for me) to 400 people in an hour and almost 1,750 the day that Jezebel linked to my site, it didn't do much for the commercial that started it at all. It remained stalled on YouTube at a little more than 500 views.