• by Shankar Gupta , November 4, 2005

Broadband video site Heavy.com Thursday announced that fast food giant Burger King is sponsoring a set of comedic shorts that can be downloaded and played on the new video iPod.

The move shows how quickly marketers have taken to iPod video--which Apple unveiled mid-October--as an ad medium. Last week, a group of users of print and online publishing software maker Adobe Systems' Photoshop software launched what might have been the first iPod infomercial, a half-hour guided tour of Adobe's Photoshop dubbed "Photoshop TV."

The Burger King sponsorship entails a branded page for video files specially encoded for video iPods. Some of the downloadable videos hosted on the page are user-created Halloween shorts that feature masks of infamous Burger King spokescritters: the costumed "King" that appears in current television spots, and the net-famous Subservient Chicken.

The first of the spots, which went live Thursday, features a Heavy.com user driving up to a McDonald's drive-through window dressed as the King, with a royal robe and the plastic mask, and demanding a Whopper. Other user-created spots will be hosted starting today.

To get the videos, Heavy.com sent out masks of the King and the Subservient Chicken to a group of their especially active users who submit content on a fairly regular basis. "They [Burger King] came to us and said: 'We've got these masks, can we do something with your users?'" Heavy.com co-CEO Simon Assaad said: "We just sent about 20 masks out, and people just started turning up at our front door with videos."

Assaad said that in the future, Heavy.com hopes to incorporate more user-created content into sponsorship deals. "We're thinking we're going to do it every month if we can--it was a great idea," he said. "We got a lot of really good content out of it."