• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 13, 2013

I bristle at the notion of watching commercials for fun, but I bristle at a lot of things I do. The fact is, there are commercials I like and increasingly, a lot of interesting ones are now online.

Marketers who don’t believe commercials made-for-streaming don’t have special value are missing a good opportunity to increase awareness and sales without spending a fortune to do it. What’s more, they get “distributed” for free by users who share them with friends and colleagues.

I’ve now sent a Samsung commercial shot outdoors in snowy wilderness out to several friends, and I know they’ve sent it out to others. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t ruin it for you, except to say that, as a particularly observant YouTube viewer noted, that’s not a real bear.

The current Dove self-image ad, in three minute and six minute versions has become a sensation. “The latest commercial for Dove seems to have gone beyond the skin and touched a nerve,” wrote The New York Times.

An online spot that is getting lots of buzz, and so far about 8.5 million views on YouTube since last summer, is from McDonald’s Canada that answers the question of why food in a McDonald’s commercial looks better than it does in real life, showing food stylists putting just the right touches on a quarter pounder with cheese.

It’s pretty fascinating: the ketchup is applied to the side of the burger with a little syringe; chopped onions are placed just-so to peek into the camera’s view. The burger is the real deal, though, one YouTube viewer said, not fully cooked so its water weight kept it plumper. The takeaway is that the ad doesn’t add anything to the sandwich that isn’t there. Its distortion is, in a way, as honorable (or dishonest) as one of those commercials showing a car maneuvering a curvy mountain road, with the small print underneath explaining you’d better not try this yourself.

Narrated by Hope Bagozzi, the marketing director, the McDonald’s ad was cited by YouTube’s content chief Rob Kyncl two weeks ago at its NewFronts presentation, which was the first time I had heard of it. That means I missed it being reported on Chicago’s CBS outlet, in the Toronto Sun, the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, the Business Insider, NPR and ABC News, to mention the ones I’ve seen searching Google.

“I admire the transparency and honesty of McDonald's here,” says a highlighted YouTube response from a viewer, which is, as they say, the kind of advertising you can’t buy. (Some of the other responses that reference the way a quarter-pounder is “made”  back to the slaughterhourse,  are, I’m sure, the kind of word-of-mouthiness McDonald’s could do without. But also, I think McDonald’s is kind of used to it, too.)  

AllThingsD mentioned wrote about the commercial, prompting a reader there to shrug and note that Domino’s did a tricks-of-the-food-ad-biz ad about three years ago that, quarter-pound for quarter-pound, did the same thing McDonald’s did.

It got everything but noticed, at least not to the extent the McDonald’s one did. You have to think part of the reason for that is that three years ago, online video sites, even YouTube, were not hardly the destination points they are today.

pj@mediapost.com